For decades, Barbara Ortiz Howard has owned an exterior-restoration business in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx; she is used to being the only woman among men. Several years ago, she began to think about another male-dominated part of her life, to which she had previously paid little attention: the portraits on U.S. banknotes. Each of the eleven denominations in circulation, from the one-dollar bill to the ten-thousand-dollar bill, depicts a man. They include eight Presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, and James Madison), two Treasury Secretaries (Alexander Hamilton and Salmon Chase), and the unclassifiable Benjamin Franklin. The people featured on the banknotes haven’t changed since 1929.
Howard, who is sixty-two years old, told me, “I grew up in the sixties and had strong feelings about women’s rights, and everyone’s rights. We marched against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and women’s rights back then.” Then she started a family and opened her business; she hasn’t been involved serious activism for some time, other than canvassing for Hillary Clinton in 2008. In the summer of 2012, she began toying with the idea of trying to get a woman on a banknote, but she didn’t quite know where to start. She e-mailed some friends (“HI SISTERS!” her message began) to ask them which women they would put on bills if it were up to them.
Among the e-mail’s recipients was an old friend of Howard’s, Susan Ades Stone. Stone is a journalist, and she saw the potential for a serious campaign. Together, Howard and Stone decided to mount an organized effort to put a woman on a bill by 2020, the centennial of women’s suffrage. They settled on the twenty-dollar note, not only because of its resonance with the anniversary year but because they thought that Andrew Jackson was the best candidate for removal from U.S. currency. “George Washington and Abe Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton, who invented the Federal Reserve System”—technically, he created a predecessor to the system—“and Ben Franklin—they have a legacy that we’ve been honoring that would make them hard to remove,” Howard said. “But Andrew Jackson?” Jackson had strongly opposed the notion of central banking. Plus, he sought—and signed—the Indian Removal Act, which led to the expulsion of Native Americans from their homes.
Howard and Stone registered their nonprofit, called Women on 20s, and recruited others, including a co-founder of the National Women’s History Project, to join the campaign. Over several months, they built a Web site, and started a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. On Sunday, Women on 20s began inviting people to visit the site and vote for their favorite candidates to replace Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill; the choices include Alice Paul, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Sojourner Truth, Rachel Carson, Rosa Parks, Barbara Jordan, Margaret Sanger, Patsy Mink, Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman, Frances Perkins, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The women were selected from a longer list of a hundred names based on their societal impact and the difficulties they faced in pursuing their goals.
It wouldn’t require a vote in Congress or Presidential approval to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill. The Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for the designs that appear on paper notes, including the portraits. Nor do the people depicted on bills have to meet particularly stringent standards; according to U.S. law, they just have to be dead. Even so, the appearance of U.S. banknotes was hardly modified during the twentieth century; according to historians, this was partly to keep the bills recognizable and partly due to the American public’s resistance to change. “I think the choices of people on those bills, at this point, is more a tradition than it is a matter of consciously choosing these individuals,” Mark Tomasko, an expert on the history of currency, told me. He couldn’t recall any past campaigns to put a woman on a bill. Some Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have tried—and failed—to put Ronald Reagan on the fifty-dollar bill, replacing Ulysses S. Grant.
Stone and Howard are already facing some controversy, and they haven’t even brought their idea to the government yet. It turns out that settling on fifteen finalists, let alone choosing a winner, is easier said than done. The list includes several black women and an Asian-American woman; some people have expressed disappointment that more minority groups aren’t represented. “We would have liked a more diverse list that would have included Native-American women and Latino women, but we weren’t going to just put people in to be representative,” Howard said. “They had to meet the criteria.” Stone added, “We’ve had a few people comment that if we were kicking Andrew Jackson off the bill, he should be replaced by a Native American.”
Howard and Stone hope to present the winning candidate to President Obama some time in the next several months, with the hope that he might help persuade the Treasury Secretary to sign off on a new twenty-dollar-bill design. (A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the campaign.) This might seem like a bit of a circuitous route, but Stone believes that it will make for better P.R. She said, “We could approach the Treasury Secretary, but it’s much more compelling for the public to know that their wishes are being delivered to the President, and, if he wants it done, it’s within his power.” (Stone and Howard have a feeling that Obama might be open to their suggestions, in part because of an offhanded comment he made in a speech last year about a young girl who had written to him asking why there aren’t any women on U.S. currency and offering a list of possible candidates. Obama said at the time that he thought this “was a pretty good idea.”)
I asked Matthew Wittmann, a curator at the American Numismatic Society, which is dedicated to studying currency, what he thought of the campaign’s chances. He told me, “2020 seems doable, and Jackson seems like the low-hanging fruit as Presidents on the currency goes, so I think they probably have a shot.” (He also pointed out that, in the nineteenth century, before paper bills became prevalent, most of the money in circulation were coins that did picture a woman: Lady Liberty. There have also been coins featuring Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea, though they haven’t gotten much use.) When I spoke with Howard and Stone on Tuesday, they were still waiting for their campaign to go viral; it had received some press coverage online—Vox and Buzzfeed had written about it—but hadn’t yet gained the traction they were hoping for. Howard brought up a dashboard that tracked many people had cast votes on the site; the number had reached eight thousand five hundred and fifty-two. I asked how many total votes they had hoped for when they began the campaign; Stone said, “We thought five million.” Howard pointed out that it was early—it hadn’t been seventy hours since the voting had opened. The suffragettes’ campaign, it’s worth noting, took seventy years.