Of course a woman’s face should grace U.S. currency

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opinions

April 3, 2015 - 12:00 AM

By the time a female is selected to grace a U.S. $20 bill, paper currency likely will be extinct.
A campaign called “Women on 20s” seeks to replace Andrew Jackson’s mug on the $20 bill with a woman’s. The goal is to convince the U.S. Treasury to do so by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote.
White men first cast their votes for a U.S. president 131 years earlier with the 1789 election of George Washington.
Because U.S. currency primarily features U.S. Presidents — Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton are the exceptions — it would appear women are handicapped from the outset.
But if the criteria regard women who have changed the course of history there’s no shortage of qualified candidates.
The “Women on 20s” campaign lists the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a champion of workers’ rights, the poet Rachel Carson known for her treatise on environmentalism, “Silent Spring,” Civil War nurse Clara Barton, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, Margaret Sanger, a nurse who championed birth control, and Shirley Chisholm, first African-American woman elected to Congress.
I would add Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the story of a slave family and their efforts to secure freedom. Published in 1852, sales of the book rivaled those of the Bible and quickly inflamed anti-slavery sentiment. Stowe was credited as the “little woman” who helped break the chains of slavery in the United States.

TECHNOLOGY, however, is fast rendering the discussion of a new figure on U.S. currency moot.
More and more, people don’t carry cash. Soon, the need for a debit or credit card will be unnecessary.
Already, an application downloaded onto a Smartphone is all that is necessary to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Walmart is one of several chains working on a program in which customers can deduct purchases from their checking accounts by using their Smartphones.
On the horizon is where sensors at a store’s exit will scan price tags, automatically charging the item onto the purchaser’s Smartphone account. Not only would that be a savings to shoppers in terms of convenience, but also to merchants’ efforts to combat shoplifting.

AS THE accompanying graphic shows, a majority of Americans don’t think a woman warrants gracing U.S. currency.
Increasingly, the term feminism strikes a raw chord. Perhaps today’s young women perceive it as unnecessarily strident. Of course it’s because of the efforts of their ancestors, some very recent, that women today are afforded these rights.
So if the purpose of placing an American’s mug on a bill is to recognize their contributions, then surely a woman has earned that privilege — and quick.
 

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