Not only do American women earn 78 cents on the dollar of what a man earns, but they’re also vastly underrepresented on U.S. currency.
A group of women launched a campaign to change that, with the goal of putting a woman’s face on U.S. dollar bills by 2020, the centennial of women’s suffrage. Yes, technically Susan B. Anthony (my namesake) is pictured on the $1 coin, but fewer than 800 million of those coins were minted before it fell out of favor. The Women on 20s campaign hopes to replace Andrew Jackson (who helped pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830) from the $20 bill in favor of an influential woman.
Women on 20s conducted several rounds of voting online, and more than a quarter million people voted to narrow the field to these four finalists: Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Wilma Mankiller (first elected female chief of a native nation in modern times). Earlier this month, Harriet Tubman was announced as the winner with over 100,000 votes. (As one blogger pointed out, though, Harriet Tubman didn’t fight for capitalism or free markets.) Now that voting has ended, Women on 20s is urging Americans to use the hashtag #DearMrPresident to show their support for the campaign and is delivering a formal written petition to the White House.
But at a time when many Americans favor credit cards or mobile payments over cold, hard cash — 40 percent of Americans carry less than $20 cash in their wallet, found a 2014 Bankrate survey — do the faces on paper currency still have relevance? Will future generations even notice which historical figures appear on our money?
Yes, insists Susan Ades Stone, executive director of the Women on 20s campaign. “Most people do still carry some [paper money], and probably will for some time to come,” she says. “And, since the shrinking amounts they carry are probably a mix of the smaller denominations, all the more reason to put a woman on one of those bills — like the $20.”
Stone compares paper bills to monuments in our pockets — honoring notable people from America’s history. “Why in this day and age should we ignore the important contributions women have made in shaping the country we are today?” she asks. “Money 1.0 may become less important in the future, but until Washington shuts down the presses, our paper money is going to continue to be a symbol out there in the world of what we value as a society, and it seems we should want that symbol to say we value women and their contributions.”
Lori Brown, professor of sociology at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, echoes that sentiment. “It is less about the event of putting a woman’s face on this and more about it quietly being there,” she explains. “It is the institutionalization of this process that matters, and although many people don’t use cash much anymore, when they occasionally get that money for a birthday or some other event, the face they glance down to see will sometimes be a woman. Boys and girls need to grow up with this given and someday it won’t even rank as a news story.”