I thought this was a pretty amazing story. I love the way Gail covers it. Please check it out.
As originally appeared in the New York Times and written by author Gail Collins on March 20, 2015
A Woman’s Place Is on the $20
The
only woman who has ever shown up on American paper currency — not
counting Lady Liberty — is Martha Washington, who starred on an 1886
silver certificate. The fact that it was Martha adds insult to injury.
She was an excellent first lady, but her exceptional fame is tied to the
ancient idea that the greatest women were simply the ones married to
the greatest men. (An alternative theory was that the greatest women
were the mothers of the greatest men, and George Washington’s mother was
equally celebrated, even though her son found her extremely
irritating.)
Now, a website called “Women on 20s”
has posted biographies of 15 notable women in American history and
invited visitors to vote for a female face to put in Jackson’s place.
The goal is to get the job done by the anniversary of women’s suffrage
in 2020.
“Oh,
my gosh! We’re just going crazy here,” said Susan Ades Stone, who has
been running the project along with Barbara Ortiz Howard, a New York
businesswoman. Things do sound satisfyingly hectic. The vote total
recently passed 100,000; the overstressed website has gotten balky; and
Stone, a journalist, has been on the phone so incessantly her husband
has temporarily left home.
Amazing this idea hasn’t come up sooner. “Australians have a man on one side of each note and a woman on the other,” said Matthew Wittmann of the American Numismatic Society. “It’s pretty remarkable we can’t find a woman for any denomination.”
The
U.S. Treasury hasn’t changed the faces on the bills since 1929, when
Andrew Jackson elbowed out Grover Cleveland on the $20. Why, you may be
asking yourself, did they pick Jackson? And why was Grover Cleveland there to begin with? Nobody seems to know.
Among
the bills that are circulating now, the featured faces are all founding
fathers (Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin) plus Jackson,
Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, who graces the $50 bill. “Women on 20s”
picked Jackson to depose mainly because of his horrific history with
Native Americans, although there’s also the rather blissful note that
Jackson disapproved of paper currency.
The
nominees for replacements were chosen from a list of 100 women by
jurists who were asked to consider both achievement and obstacles
overcome. That tends to weigh the choices toward political warriors —
like Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger — rather than
artists or athletes.
Recently The Times’s Room for Debate let experts name their favorites.
Gloria Steinem picked Sojourner Truth, the escaped slave turned
abolitionist orator. “I’m not sure Sojourner Truth would want to be on
the $20 bill, but I would like her to be better known — by any means
necessary,” she said.
Actually,
I’d sort of love to see Gloria Steinem on a $20 bill, but you aren’t
eligible to star on American currency until you’re dead. Also, she has
mixed feelings about how much of an honor it is to appear on money. “For
a while I thought we should just put the Koch brothers on and be done
with it,” she said over the phone Friday.
But
this isn’t the New Hampshire primary. It’s more like a national
post-graduate course in women’s history. One of the best parts about the
“Women on 20s” process is that it gives you a chance to complain about
people who aren’t in the final 15. Matthew Wittmann thinks Amelia
Earhart might be a good contender. Steinem wanted a Native American, or
in her words, “a woman who was here before all those bonkers,
hierarchical, monotheistic, Europeans arrived.”
The
Native American issue looms large when it comes to replacing Jackson,
who sent the Cherokee Nation on the Trail of Tears. Lately, Stone said,
she and Howard have decided that when they announce their three top
vote-getters and ask people to pick a winner, they’re going to add a
fourth option: Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee
Nation. (“People felt it would be poetic justice.”)
If
I could add a nominee it might be Angelina Grimke, the great
abolitionist orator. Or Sybil Ludington, who rode through New York one
night in 1777 warning her countrymen the British were coming. (Just like
Paul Revere, except Sybil was 16, and rode twice as far.) Or Margaret
Brent, who used her business acumen to save the colony of Maryland from
being destroyed by mercenary soldiers in 1647.
Or
maybe Elizabeth Jennings, the black New Yorker who sued the trolley
company that tossed her off a whites-only car in 1854 — a court action
that led to the desegregation of mass transit in the city 100 years
before Rosa Parks.
But then, of course, you don’t want to pass up Rosa Parks. There are thousands of possibilities. Nominate among yourselves.
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