Conservative women who cheered this year that they finally had a Supreme Court on their side had better pack away the party favors.

Unless, of course, they think equal pay for equal work – their pay for their work – is just so much hooey.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even if a woman suffered pay discrimination, she was out of luck if she didn’t discover it and sue within six months after it began. Otherwise, employers would never be able to sleep, what with all that worrying over whether they’d get caught for years and years of discrimination.

Oddly enough, the court’s conservative majority cut no exception for those women celebrating their appointments to the court and their recent ruling on abortion rights. Some gratitude.

Maybe Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was right when she blasted the court’s abortion decision for reflecting “ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution.”

Actually, there’s no maybe about it. Feels like we’re on our way to making soap out of bacon grease again for the menfolk.

This latest case involved plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Alabama. After 19 years, she was making $6,500 a year less than the lowest paid male supervisor at the plant. In 1998, she retired – and then she sued.

A jury sided with Ledbetter, but an appeals court ruled that she had waited too long. Ledbetter argued that it’s hard to claim discrimination when you’re (a) the new chick in the flock and (b) don’t realize right away that the males are clipping your wings.

One of the supervisors, she said, retaliated against her because she rejected his sexual advances. Ah, but he’s dead now, the court noted, which was just the beginning of Ledbetter’s problems.

“The passage of time,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito, “may seriously diminish the ability of the parties and the fact-finder to reconstruct what actually happened.”

Men die. Their memories get fuzzy, too.

Ginsburg, the sole female on the court, read the dissent from the bench – an unusual practice but one she has employed twice in the last six weeks to attack majority opinions that undermine women’s rights.

“In our view,” read Ginsburg, “the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

In other words, employers don’t tend to post their plans to discriminate on the company bulletin board.

The first time Ginsburg dissented from the bench was after the same five justices upheld a ban on a rare late-term abortion procedure that did not provide an exception for the woman’s health.

That “alarming” ruling could not be interpreted “as anything other than an effort to chip away a right declared again and again by this court, and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives,” she said.

We should have seen this coming, but many of us who opposed these court appointees watched with hooded eyes. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Alito and John Roberts, there was a lot of clamoring by advocates for abortion rights and gays and lesbians, but few of us saw the big picture.

Veteran Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick says that, had we looked closer at how Alito and Roberts viewed workers’ rights, we would have been losing sleep long before this nightmare jolted us out of our slumber.

“We knew from their memos where they were coming from, that they historically turned away workers’ claims,” said Lithwick, a lawyer and senior editor at Slate Magazine who has covered the court for the last eight years.

“We knew back then that they thought there were too many bellyaching women and minorities. … Focusing on abortion, gay marriage and capital punishment for juveniles distracted everyone from their day-to-day work of the court.”

Well, we’re not distracted any more, and the view ahead is mighty grim. And any woman worth more than a boss’s bad memory can see that the party was over long before it ever began.