A woman will be featured on a newly redesigned $10 bill, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday.
The new bill will feature a woman representative of the United States’ tradition of “inclusive democracy,” Lew said, explaining that portraying historical figures on currency has “long been a way for us to honor our past and express our values.”
Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary whose image is now on the note, will remain on the bill one way or another.
Decisions about which woman to include, the design of the note, and how Hamilton will be included will be up to Lew, but the Treasury will solicit ideas from the public over the summer.
The Treasury has created a site for that purpose: thenew10.treasury.gov. The Treasury staff also will monitor comments submitted on social media using the hashtag #TheNew10, and Treasury officials will hold town halls and public events on the bill in the months to come.
The bill won’t be printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing until 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
The $10 bill decision comes after several large-scale grassroots efforts to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 with a woman.
One contest this year identified a leading candidate for the woman to be featured: Harriet Tubman. The nonprofit group Women on 20s held an online competition to determine a replacement for Jackson on the $20 bill, and the escaped slave and abolitionist Tubman finished with nearly 120,000 votes out of more than 600,000 cast in the contest, which ended in May. The runner-up was Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Civil rights activist Rosa Parks finished third.
The timing of the announcement soon after that and other campaigns was a “happy coincidence,” Lew said.
It will be the $10, not the $20, that is revamped because the Treasury and Bureau of Engraving and Printing have been planning an overhaul of the $10 for security purposes for years. Lew said Wednesday that the timeline for making changes to currency is lengthy to accommodate the research and design needed to protect against counterfeiting, and that he was already under pressure to accelerate the decision.
On a press call Wednesday evening, Lew said he was “open to many ideas,” including Tubman. He did not rule out the possibility of the note featuring more than one woman or that there could be multiple bills each bearing the image of a different woman. Anybody depicted, however, must be deceased.
Just how Hamilton’s image will stay on the $10 is one of the details to be determined. Lew suggested that he could be depicted on each bill in some way, or in an another design of the bill that would be introduced into circulation alongside the one that has a woman on it.
Women have been portrayed on U.S. paper currency before, but not in the last 100 years. Martha Washington was featured on a $1 silver certificate in the late 19th century, and Pocahontas appeared as part of a group in an illustration on several pieces of currency in the 19th century. Women have also been on U.S. coins, including the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin and the Sacagawea gold dollar.
GOP Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas used the occasion to criticize the Obama administration’s economic agenda. By allowing the debt to rise to $18 trillion, Hensarling said in a statement,”the administration’s spending policies put these dollars at risk of being worth less no matter whose face is on them.”
