For the first time in the last 100 years, a woman's portrait will again appear on an American banknote
In five years, the United States of America will celebrate the centennial of women's suffrage. For the anniversary of this socially significant event, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew plans to introduce a new «ten-dollar bill».
The question of whose – but in any case, a woman's – face will appear on the commemorative bill will be decided in dialogue with the citizens of the country. The U.S. Treasury Department is preparing a survey to find out from Americans which prominent female figure, in their opinion, has most significantly influenced the country's history – to such an extent that this public figure should be immortalized on the dollar.
As likely candidates for the new ten-dollar bill, Jacob Lew's department is considering publicist, writer, and human rights activist Eleanor Roosevelt – wife of the 32nd U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt; political activist Rosa Parks – the founder of the fight for the rights of black people, whom the U.S. Congress awarded the epithet "mother of the modern civil rights movement"; or Harriet Tubman – an abolitionist who successfully fought for social reforms throughout the second half of the 19th century.
"Faces on American banknotes are a way to declare to the whole world who we are, what values we uphold, and what we strive for," U.S. Treasury Secretary believes. So far, the last woman to appear on U.S. Treasury banknotes was Martha Washington, wife of the first president of the United States George Washington, who disappeared from dollars at the end of the 19th century. Earlier, in the middle of the same century, the twenty-dollar bill for several years bore the image of the legendary Indian princess Pocahontas – also a kind of public figure, whose marriage to a white settler, tobacco planter John Rolfe, guaranteed peaceful coexistence between Indians and colonists in what is now the state of Virginia in the early 17th century.
Since 1929, the ten-dollar bill of the Federal Reserve System – the central bank of the United States – has featured a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, one of the "Founding Fathers" – a group of American political figures who played key roles in the founding of the state, the achievement of independence, and the creation of the principles of the new political system.
In 1784, Hamilton founded the First Bank of the United States, laying the foundations of modern American monetary policy: his memory, as the current Treasury Secretary Lew believes, should still be commemorated in one way or another.