This month, rolls of shiny new quarters began making their way across the United States, minted with historic new imagery: renowned writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou with her arms uplifted before a rising sun and a bird in flight — a design inspired by her soaring poetry and symbolic of the way she lived, according to the U.S. Mint.
Angelou is the first woman the agency is recognizing as part of its American Women Quarters Program, a series that will issue up to five quarters annually through 2025 to recognize pioneering American women and their contributions to history.
Other honorees whose likenesses will be circulated on quarters this year are Sally Ride, a physicist and astronaut; Wilma Mankiller, the first female Cherokee Nation chief; Nina Otero-Warren, a suffrage movement leader; and Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese American actress.
As required by law, the new quarters will keep George Washington’s likeness on the obverse, or heads side, of the coins. However, they will feature an updated and right-facing depiction of the first U.S. president, designed by Laura Gardin Fraser, one of the most prolific female sculptors of the early 20th century.
News of the program, which makes Angelou the first Black woman to be featured on a quarter-dollar, was met with both cheers and criticism on social media. Some, including Hillary Clinton and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), praised the initiative as long overdue recognition.
For others, it reignited calls for the country to fulfill previous promises to update U.S. paper currency. And in a tweet that resonated with thousands of users, Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper said change was needed elsewhere, particularly in efforts to advance reproductive and civil rights.
Also I wrote about this months ago, so I’m not in the both/and camp. I don’t think putting Black women on money is fitting. I’m not arguing the point. If y’all want that, you can have it. I do not want it. I want reproductive and civil rights. Now.
— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) January 11, 2022
For Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who sponsored the legislation that paved the way for the new quarters, the coins are part of an ongoing effort to address “a country that has not really lifted up women, in terms of who they are and what they have done.”
“There’s so much that women have done in this country that people don’t even know about, don’t even recognize,” Lee said. “We have to get these stories out about these women by any means necessary … I mean [on] coins, currency, by statues, by memorials.”
Lee’s words echo a long enduring call to update the nation’s imagery and honor the contributions of women on U.S. currency — a change Americans have been requesting for more than 100 years, said Ruth Anne Robbins, a distinguished clinical professor at Rutgers Law School.
In a paper arguing for a citizens committee in future currency design, Robbins and her co-author, Genevieve Tung, referenced letters the Treasury Department received from people calling for more representation on U.S. bank notes.
“There are lots and lots of letters asking for women,” she said. “And lots and lots of letters asking for people of color.”
Across decades, these calls have ramped up, particularly during moments of historic achievements for women, said Robbins. “So it hasn’t really stopped.”
Today, the movement has launched petitions, congressional bills and a grass-roots nonprofit organization, Women on 20s, which led a massive campaign in 2015 and generated hundreds of thousands of votes nominating a woman for the $20 bill.
“People have been asking for a woman on bank notes for many, many years,” said the group’s founder, Barbara Ortiz Howard, “and there’s been a resistance to it.”
According to a 2016 Vox study, only 48 countries circulate currency with women printed on paper currency. But it’s been more than a century since a woman appeared on paper money in America, and efforts to change this have stalled.
A plan announced in 2015 to replace Founding Father Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill was reversed a year later, due in part to the massive success of Broadway musical “Hamilton.” Instead, the Treasury Department announced that a vignette of suffrage movement leaders would appear on the back of the currency — a redesign that will not enter circulation until 2026.
Another effort under the Obama administration to replace Andrew Jackson, the president responsible for the 1830 Indian Removal Act, with abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was shelved by the Trump Administration.
After taking office last year, President Biden pledged to revive the plan and “speed up” the process, but Tubman is still not set to appear on the bill by the end of Biden’s first term, or a potential second term, The Washington Post reported.
Production for new paper currency faces major holdups, driven by a need for new anti-counterfeiting features and court injunctions calling for bills to include “meaningful access” for people who are blind or visually impaired. Coins, on the other hand, have seen frequent redesigns — and ones more reflective of the country’s diversity and history, according to Robbins.
“Coins and stamps, those have citizen committees filled with experts in those fields and also historians, and they take input from outsiders and the citizenry can all participate,” Robbins said.
In selecting the 2022 honorees for the American Women Quarters Program, the U.S. Mint consulted with the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Initiative, the congressional bipartisan Women’s Caucus and the National Women’s History Museum, which opened an online submission portal and received more than 11,000 recommendations from the public. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen made the final call in selecting the women to honor, which were first announced last June.
“Each time we redesign our currency, we have the chance to say something about our country — what we value, and how we’ve progressed as a society,” Yellen said in a statement this week about the program.
Howard said it’s “really significant, I think, that she’s saying that.” The Women on 20s founder added that she viewed Yellen’s comments as a signal of more progress to come in the effort to reflect women’s achievements and contributions in U.S. symbolism.
Lee agreed. “The big picture is we’ve got to do everything we can do to expand this, to expand the histories and the legacies of women,” she said. “The larger movement is extremely important, this is just the beginning.”
