It’s Official: A Woman Will Appear on the $10 Bill
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday that the $10 bill will be redesigned in 2020—and the new bill will feature a woman! (Don’t cry too much for Alexander Hamilton, though—he’ll still appear on the redesigned bill in some fashion.)
Lew said that the Treasury hasn’t yet decided which woman will get the honors; that will happen in the next few months, after they’ve had time to get public input on the issue. Over at Rolling Stone, they’ve got a pretty good list of suggested candidates, except for maybe that last one. (Beyoncé is wonderful and undoubtedly deserving, but you need to be dead to appear on our money.)
Many people are pretty excited that a woman will appear on U.S. paper currency for the first time since 1896, but one group is less thrilled than you’d think: Women on 20s, the organization that earlier this year orchestrated a highly visible campaign to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with a woman. Writing on their website, they called the choice of the $10 bill over the $20 bill “frankly…a surprise to us,” and explained that they would much rather see Jackson, who has an ugly track record of marginalizing Native Americans and supporting slavery, get the boot over the “exemplary” Hamilton. They also pointed out that the $20 bill is used more frequently than the $10 bill.
For its part, the Treasury claims that it chose the $10 bill largely because of logistical constraints: that bill was already next on the schedule to be redesigned. If we wanted to wait for a $20 redesign to see a woman on our bills, we’d be waiting a much longer time.
We think Women on 20s has some valid points, but this is another issue where we’re going to say: a win is a win! A woman will be honored on our paper money in time for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment—isn’t that fantastic? And when the $20 bill finally does get a makeover, what’s to stop us from putting a woman on it then? If both Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt are on our bills in the year 2030, we will have zero complaints.
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