Michael Fuchs University of Oldenb A Contested Space Women on U.S. Coins and Currency Heinz Tschachler The year 2020 saw any number of events to commemorate the ratification of the 19 th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Exhibits about women’s suffrage and related topics were being staged in numerous museums. The U.S. Mint issued a 2020 Women’s Suffrage Centennial Silver Dollar and, to complete the set, a matching silver Medal. The national currency likewise was to take notice of the anniversary of women’s suffrage. From 2014 onwards, there had been plans to print faces of women on federal paper money, including Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, there to replace Andrew Jackson. This would not be unusual, as pictures of women have appeared on U.S. coins and currency quite frequently, representing various ideals long before women achieved equal rights. Women or, more generally, female figures have traditionally symbolized fertility and thus became the perfect embodiment of the very qualities the issuers wanted to suggest—financial stability and wealth. Yet during the entire Trump presidency, all indications were that Harriet Tubman would not become the face on the $20 bill until after Donald Trump left office. What this shows is that the space on the nation’s money is a contested one, one that women will occupy only after a long and bitter struggle. The year 2020 saw any number of events to commemorate the ratification of the 19 th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This landmark event in American history guarantees all American women the right to vote, ending almost a century of agitation and protest. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see the final victory in 1920. A hundred years later, the vital role of women in American history was being AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-00010 Heinz Tschachler 100 celebrated nationwide. In March 2020, known as Women’s History Month since 1987, exhibits about women’s suffrage and related topics were staged in numerous museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, National Archives, National Gallery of Art, and National Park Service. 1 A month later, the American Numismatic Association (ANA) celebrated their National Coin Week under the theme “Remarkable Women: Catalysts of Change.” 2 Women in Numismatics (WIN), a nonprofit organization founded in 1991 to help gain recognition for women in the hobby, was celebrated the centennial with special presentations. Last but not least, the ANA’s Edward C. Rochette Money Museum honored the women who have served as Mint directors since the 1930s, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Eva Adams, Mary Brooks, Stella Hackel Sims, Donna Pope, and Henrietta Fore. Each has been honored on U.S. Mint medals (Dickes 2020: 62-63). On June 4, 2019, the U.S. Senate passed the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemorative Coin Act, which mandates the production of $1 silver coins that are “emblematic of the women who played a vital role in rallying support for the 19 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” (Dickes 2020: 62). In compliance with the Act, the U.S. Mint issued a 2020 Women’s Suffrage Centennial Silver Dollar and, to complete the set, a matching silver Medal. The $1 coin features on its obverse three women, each wearing a different type of hat, representing the long and difficult struggle for voting equality. The reverse shows a ballot box rendered in Art Deco style. The medal’s obverse features a heavy stone held aloft by the hands of women and children, symbolizing the different generations and countless people who helped women achieve suffrage. The reverse presents lines from the 19 th Amendment superimposed upon the U.S. flag. Proceeds from the sale of the sets (only 10,000 will be produced) will benefit the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative. 3 The national currency likewise was to take notice of the anniversary of women’s suffrage. In July 2014 President Barack Obama announced that the time had come to print faces of women on federal paper money (Siegel 2014). The president’s words must have rung sweetly in the ears of “Women on 20s.” “Women on 20s” is an advocacy group incorporated in January 2014, whose agenda is, primarily, to lobby the administration for a redesign of the $20 bill to bear the portrait of a woman, to be released by 2020. 4 As the organization explains on its website, “keeping an Andrew Jackson bill in wide circulation means we celebrate and elevate historic figures who used and condoned violence against personal enemies and populations of marginalized people” (Women on 20s n.d.). A petition was sent 1 To learn more, visit http: / / womenshistorymonth.gov/ . 2 To learn more, visit http: / / nationalcoinweek.org/ . 3 To learn more, visit http: / / usmint.gov/ . 4 Women on 20s, http: / / www.womenon20s.org/ ; postal address: Women on $20s, Inc., PO Box 2353, Mount Vernon, NY 10550, U.S.A. A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 101 out in May 2015, calling upon President Obama to order the Treasury Secretary to redesign the current $20 bill—taking off Andrew Jackson’s portrait and ensuring that the new bill reflects “the remarkable accomplishments of an exemplary American woman who has helped shape our nation” (Women on 20s 2015b). The “exemplary American woman” who was finally selected as the face for the new $20 bill is Harriet Tubman (c.1822-1913). 5 Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman escaped to the North and became a conductor in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to escape to freedom. During the Civil War, she was active in the Union cause, serving as a nurse, a cook, and a scout, gathering intelligence. The Treasury Department, too, decided that the contributions of women to the nation’s progress ought to be acknowledged on the currency. On June 18, 2015, Treasury Secretary Jacob L. Lew announced plans to redesign the $10 bill by 2020, the anniversary year, to bear the portrait of a woman. There is, however, no evidence that Secretary Lew had taken any action beyond the conceptual design by the time he handed the keys over to his successor, Steven T. Mnuchin, in January 2017. At the time it also was not yet known how the Trump administration would approach the currency redesign, though there was considerable concern about a rollback. Yet during the entire Trump presidency, all indications were that Harriet Tubman would not become the face on the $20 bill until after Donald Trump left office (Tschachler 2020: 140-41). Plans to unveil the Tubman in 2020 were postponed until at least 2026, and the bill itself is not likely to be in circulation until 2028. The delay was the decision of Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin, who appears to have been concerned that the president might create an uproar by canceling the new bill altogether (Tschachler 2020: 141-42). Identity politics was never one of President Trump’s political priorities. On the contrary, when the planned redesign of the $20 bill was officially announced in April 2016, Trump said in response that bumping Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill was “pure political correctness,” and suggested that Harriet Tubman be put on the $2 bill instead. For Trump, Jackson “had a great history” and so, he added, it would be “very rough” to take him off the bill (Frizell 2016). 6 5 Harriet Tubman received some 30 percent of a total of more than 350,000 votes cast in the final round on April 5, 2015. Runners-up were Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Wilma Mankiller (Women on 20s 2015a). For a conceptual design of a new $20 note produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 2016, see Rappeport (2019). 6 One wonders how (if at all) Donald Trump would have responded to Harriet, a Focus Features biopic released in November 2019. The film, which stars Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman, follows Tubman’s daring escape from the slave South to Philadelphia and her subsequent return trips to the South where she rescued her family and other slaves on what came to be known as the Underground Railroad. It also shows her involvement in the early days of the Civil War as a member of the Union Army. According to Newsweek, the film was getting early Oscar buzz months ahead of its release (Scott 2019). Heinz Tschachler 102 America’s 45 th president seems a great admirer of Jackson, the first populist politician in American history, calling him, through a spokesman, “an amazing figure in American history—very unique in many ways” (Greenwood 2017) and, on the occasion of a visit to Jackson’s plantation home, “the people’s president,” whose victory “shook the establishment like an earthquake” (Trump 2017). It is also a matter of record that right after his inauguration President Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, as “inspiration” (Haberman 2017). Remarks of this kind reveal the extent to which selection of portraits for the currency is influenced by politics. Take, for instance, the $10 bill, which features, on its obverse, a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. The fact that Hamilton was also an immigrant from the West Indies does not appear to have played a role in selecting his portrait, not just for the current $10 bill but also for a variety of earlier bank and government notes. At the very least, Hamilton is never marked as an immigrant. The point is that Hamilton was part of the monetary economy represented by the notes. By contrast, women (as well as Native Americans and African Americans) generally were not. Women had what John Adams called the “masculine system”—though if we are to believe Abigail Adams, they rather had “tyrants.” 7 Abigail Adams was painfully aware of the fact that she was living in a time and culture that accepted unequal standards and conditions as a matter of course, and then chose exceptions to its rules, but only on its own terms. Thus, women would make payments with notes bearing pictures of themselves. Notes bearing pictures of women have appeared on the currency quite frequently, representing various ideals long before women achieved equal rights. Women or, more generally, female figures have traditionally symbolized fertility and thus became the perfect embodiment of the very qualities the issuers of notes wanted to suggest—financial stability and wealth. However, most of the female figures are not representations of actual persons but represent an idealized beauty; in Virginia Hewitt’s memorable words, they constitute “soft images to give hard currency a good name” (1995: 156). Allegorical or idealized women at the same time conceal and enshrine real women’s exclusion from the material world of markets and capital. For the same reason, use of women as money icons becomes problematic when attempts are made to supplant the position occupied by the allegorical woman for the real, from Martha Washington to Susan B. Anthony to Sacagawea to Harriet Tubman. Nevertheless, “real,” that is, historical women have appeared on the currency with a certain degree of regularity. 8 Most of the women chosen had better-known husbands or were connected with more famous men. If 7 Qtd. in Ferguson (1997: 156, 158). 8 Fred Reed has trotted out the names of altogether seventeen, possibly even eighteen, actual women who appeared on U.S. paper money (Reed 2007: 50). A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 103 this was a criterion for their inclusion on the currency, it underlines the gendered nature of monetary practices, for it was not for their deeds that women were honored but for their association with revered men. Martha Washington fell into this category, and a dignified portrait of her was put on the back of the $1 Silver Certificate, Series 1886 and 1891. The identical portrait was used for the $1 Silver Certificate of 1896, alongside George Washington. The note’s rhetoric conveys Washingtonian refinement and knowing one’s place. The design is, therefore, a good example of the way elite society appropriated Washington for the purpose of increasing its legitimacy, but the notes also set the stage for society’s highest strata to crown the Father of the Country the father of their own good taste, with Martha as a sidekick, a founding mother to go with the founding father. As the Indiana Democrat wrote on February 20, 1901: “Persons fortunate enough to possess a one-dollar Silver Certificate have an excellent picture of Martha Washington, the wife of the Father of His Country.” 9 What the newspaper did not say was that on this note the many truly dissolve into one—E pluribus Unum—, though in a cruelly ironic reworking of a passage from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage [...] incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french, a feme-covert.” 10 Pocahontas, whose baptism was depicted on $20 National Bank notes as of 1863, and who appeared in a number of guises on other notes, may also qualify as a “real” woman. However, the mode of her representation is never far from the mythic and allegorical. Safer bets for realism are Rachel Jackson, Catherine “Bonnie Kate” Sevier, Dolly Madison, Maria Knox Innes Todd Crittenden, the “Belle of Kentucky,” and Lucy Holcombe Pickens. Rachel Jackson and Dolly Madison both were wives of presidents, respectively of Andrew Jackson and James Madison. Catherine Sevier was the wife of John Sevier, Revolutionary War hero, Indian fighter, and governor of Tennessee. Mrs. Pickens likewise was the wife of a governor, John Jordan Crittenden, governor of South Carolina. Her portrait was chosen for several Confederate notes, as she purportedly personified the very essence of the best Southern qualities—magnanimity, honor, chivalry, courtesy, and hospitality; also, significantly, she graced more paper bills than any other woman in American history did (Doty 2004: 74). As regards Maria Crittenden, she too was the wife of a governor. John J. Crittenden, governor of Kentucky, later served as attorney general under President Millard Fillmore. Mrs. Crittenden’s portrait appeared on $5 notes issued in the 1850s by the Farmers Bank of Kentucky, Frankfort, the Rockingham Bank, 9 Qtd. in Tschachler (2020: 117). For an illustration of the note, see ibid. 10 Qtd. in Ferguson (1997: 160). Heinz Tschachler 104 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well as the Planters Bank of Fairfield, Winnsboro, South Carolina (Tschachler 2010: 78-79). Of the few females who arrived on the notes by their own merit, the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (actually Johanna Maria Lind) was one. Others were Henriette Sontag, a German-born opera singer who made the first of several American tours in 1852 and was immortalized on a Connecticut note not long thereafter, as well as Florence Nightingale, the English reformer and founder of modern nursing, whose portrait appeared on notes from banks in Virginia and in Georgia in 1861 (Doty 2004: 77-78). One can only speculate why portraits of these foreigners were chosen. Was it because of the women’s celebrity status? Two of them were opera singers, irresistible to music lovers both for the ear-splitting sounds they were emitting and the heroic roles they were inhabiting. (Opera singers also allowed the audience to enter otherwise forbidden territory.) And Florence Nightingale’s fame at the very latest had reached the U.S. following her no less heroic (and real-life) engagement in the Crimean War. All three were European celebrities who, unlike their modern counterparts, could not yet make the rounds at talk shows and so were made to circulate as curios on bank notes. Or, as so often happened, they may have arrived on the notes because engraved portraits of them were readily available from various print media, which would save banknote producers considerable expenses. Be that as it may, that was it for real women on American paper money. For, most “real” women depicted on the currency enjoyed a subordinate reality, and they were placed there to represent an activity, from milking cows to factory work to motherhood, or else to point out a moral, like the Pilgrim women who appeared on vignettes respectively called Embarkation (after Robert Weir’s painting) and Landing (in an engraving by the Scottishborn artist Charles Burt, better known for his 1869 portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which remained on the currency until 2000). The earliest depictions of female figures on American paper money had been as small black-and-white engravings, rendered in a neo-classical style, of goddesses of European extraction, Juno, Diana, Moneta, Liberty (usually in a state of clothing approaching the pornographic, and occasionally dressed as Columbia), or Justice (with her scales, fittingly blind). Private commercial banks might feel that by choosing a female figure representing Plenty or Agriculture they could successfully advertise the prosperity of local trade and, of course, of the bank itself. What probably also influenced the decision was that bankers and their engravers knew that female figures were not supposed to be fully clothed. Not only was semior total nudity part of the story. Images of such figures on bank notes also served as anticounterfeiting measures. It was widely believed that people’s attention was directly proportionate to the amount of bare skin visible on the notes (Tschachler 2010: 79). Occasionally, the nation’s first president too is seen in the company of sparsely clad females. On $10 notes issued by the Windham County Bank, A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 105 Brattleboro, Vermont, in the late 1850s, George Washington’s decidedly Roman bust is surrounded by three scantily clad female allegories. The identical vignette was used for $100 notes from the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, New Orleans in the early 1860s. It is tempting to relate the somewhat pained expression on the first president’s face to the ladies’ sparse clothing (Tschachler 2020: 60). Even as late as 1899, Washington’s portrait was centrally placed on the ornately designed front of the $2 Silver Certificates, Series 1899, between two allegorical figures, Mechanics (male) and Agriculture (a bare-breasted female). 11 By the 1840s, a seemingly more realistic depiction of women set in. Women were shown involved in everyday pursuits, such as child rearing, work on the farm, factory work, or even taking a walk with a special young man. Looking at these notes now makes the realism dwindle and shrink, though, disclosing their hidden agenda of identifying a happy domestic and working life with the solid foundation of a bank in a local community. Farm life is usually depicted as idyllic, harvesting grain, occasionally even tobacco or hop, caring and feeding livestock and fowl, and churning. Nowhere, however, is the need to idealize and romanticize women more forcefully expressed than in images of milkmaids. Based on the testimony of the notes, “milking cows must have been the growth industry of the nineteenth century” (Doty 2004: 75). In fact, these sweet-faced maidens were put on the notes to represent innocence, youthfulness, and purity, qualities that must have had a special appeal to bankers. For one thing, these qualities seemed at risk as the beginning industrialization and modernization began to transform the nation. For another thing, innocence, youthfulness, and purity might have veiled the nefarious practices many banks engaged in, especially the violation of state laws providing for the backing of notes by specie (Tschachler 2013: 50-58). Numerous pictures on pre-Civil War notes depict factory work, though it does not have any of the degrading qualities we have come to associate with the dark, satanic mills of the coming industrialization. On notes issued in the aftermath of the War of 1812, for instance, factory work even has a tinge of patriotic labor, as the war had forced the United States to become more self-reliant for manufactured goods. Women are seen making thread, weaving it into cloth, and even doing piecework at home, along with their men. It should also be noted that depictions of factory work are to be found almost exclusively on notes from northern banks, thus foreshadowing the North’s material and technological superiority that eventually decided the outcome of the Civil War (McPherson 1988: 318). Representations of women engaged in factory work also show that those who so frequently appeared on the country’s currency were at long last beginning to achieve the means of earning and of spending it. At least some of them, for most women in antebellum America were still employed in 11 For an illustration of the note, see Tschachler (2020: 122). Heinz Tschachler 106 that oldest form of female labor, motherhood. Indeed, images of mothers graced a large number of notes, and always engaged in nurturing, protecting, educating—apt symbols of creation, including the creation of wealth. Of course, that was also the manner by which those in power could keep women within safe, traditional bounds. At times, the quality of the imagery was silly, if not insincere, as on a note from Medford, New Jersey, which features a seated woman tenderly cradling her child, Madonna-like, and oblivious to her surroundings. Other images likewise reinforced the status quo and the popular perception of reality in the—unequal—relation between the sexes. According to Richard Doty, a former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection, images that romanticized wives and daughters as delicate flowers needing the protection of their husbands and fathers were especially popular. So were images that portrayed women as temptresses, which lent a kind of pin-up quality to the notes, at the same time as they would allude to the equation of women with untamed nature, or as incipient consumptives for whom male protection might come too late (Doty 1995: 122). The gap between appearance and being, between perceived and photographic reality, did not close with the advent, during the Civil War, of a federal currency. Allegorical images of women in particular continued to be a major visual motif on National Bank as well as Legal Tender notes until the introduction of Federal Reserve notes in 1915. It is as though there was a strong desire to make the Gilded Age more romantic by making abstractions such as Liberty, Victory, Justice, and Peace, take the forms of attractive young women, often clothed in classically inspired gowns. For instance, on a $500 Legal Tender note we have a proudly standing, barebreasted Victory, now in recognizably nineteenth-century dress. That she was to symbolize the outcome of the Civil War is obvious from her sharing the stage with a portrait of Major General Joseph King Mansfield, killed in the battle of Antietam in 1862 (Tschachler 2010: 80). On the $50 Legal Tender notes of 1874, Liberty is dressed as Columbia. On other notes, she is shown wearing a feathered headdress, thus with the Native American attributes she had had before Independence. (This was a grim distortion of history, as female Indians, regardless of tribe, never wore feathers.) Often, Columbia appeared together with the American eagle, wings spread, the flag and other national symbols, such as a liberty cap and pole. These allegorical representations identify her with the most grandiose theme—she was “America,” the “Indian Princess.” At the same time, however, they reveal both the historic (ab-)uses of the woman’s body to image an American national identity and the symbolic appropriation for the national symbolic of an indigenous population that in reality was colonized. 12 12 On the distortions Native Americans were subjected to on the currency, see Tschachler (2010: 81-87) and, for an illustration of the $50 Legal Tender note showing Liberty dressed as Columbia, 81. A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 107 In the course of the nineteenth century, the mass production of paper money became a clear sign of capitalist expansion. As the accumulation of capital expanded, those new forms of money whose value depends less on precious metal backing it than on the promise of growth, the regaining of values, expanded as well. Thus, the ornaments on bank and government notes were not only a way of legitimating capitalism; the notes themselves had to be charged with guardian spirits representing happiness, prosperity, economic health, fertility, and so on. On one hand, these measures not only lent a certain dignity to the newly emerging financial institutions and instruments, whose increase was dramatic—from a few dozen by 1810 to hundreds by 1830, to thousands by 1850, with the value of circulating notes going up from $62 million to $140 million by 1837, and to some $200 million by 1850 (Tschachler 2013: 25). On the other hand, the guardian spirits also served as ways and means to cope with or even conceal economic and social instability. They would help appease white males’ racial anxieties, their fears for their traditional prerogatives as well as their unease over Eastern and Southern European immigration. There is a third aspect. Classical and allegorical images also were reminiscent of representations on coins that had always had such figures placed on them. The notes therefore evoked an era before the widespread circulation of paper money, an era when civic personality was grounded in real property and endowed with classical virtue. A good example is a $5 note from the Bank of East Tennessee, Knoxville, issued in the 1850s, on which an angel extends a hand to Ceres at left and hands an apple to a woman with a sextant at right; however, the three females are placed under the authority and supervision of Liberty and the national bird, who eye them critically, perhaps in order to lend a less risqué appearance to the composition (Tschachler 2010: 76-77). In allegorical depictions of commerce in seventeenth-century paintings, such as Johann Heiss’s The Allegory of Commerce (1690) 13 , grail-like cornucopias were common features. Cornucopias became popular again on antebellum bank notes. On $10 notes issued by the State Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1820s, Ceres, with her cornucopia, together with Liberty, complete with staff and cap, flank a shield showing three plows; above the shield is a horse head. The state seal is centered at the top, while George Washington’s portrait is placed at right (Tschachler 2020: 53). About 1860, a $5 note from the Citizens’ Bank of New Orleans showed a female figure with a staff tipped by a liberty cap and a cornucopia from the tip of which flows a seemingly endless stream of precious coins (Tschachler 2010: 194). The tendency to allegorize women reached a kind of apotheosis with the 1896 issue of three Silver Certificates known as the Educational Series. The notes were crucial in the designing of the national money icon, though 13 To view the painting, which is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, go to https: / / www.mfab.hu/ artworks/ allegory-of-commerce/ . Heinz Tschachler 108 they are also the last notes to date on which any women are depicted. The first note in the Educational Series was the $1 Silver Certificate, series 1896. Its face is known as “History Instructing Youth” (Tschachler 2010: 115). An allegorical figure of History is pointing out to an equally allegorical Youth the principal sights of Washington, DC—the Washington Monument (which had finally been dedicated in 1885) and the Capitol—and presumably telling the narratives behind them, including the story of the United States Constitution, which appears at right. Clearly, the note speaks to a basic social and political problem of the time—how to assimilate a heterogeneous mass of people who were Americans not by birth but by immigration. Americans, Eric Hobsbawm found, “had to be made. The invented traditions […] in this period were primarily designed to achieve this object” (1983: 279). Immigrants were encouraged to accept rituals commemorating the history of the nation—the Revolution and the Founding Fathers (July 4) or the Protestant Anglo-Saxon tradition (Forefathers Day, Thanksgiving Day)—as indeed they did, since these became holidays and occasions for public and private festivity. The educational system too was transformed into a machine for political socialization by such devices as the worship of the flag, which, as a daily ritual in the nation’s schools, spread from the 1880s onwards. An even more effective vehicle of nationalist messages was the currency, which provided a much more frequent reminder to people that they were members of what nationalists considered to be a real community. The mass immersion in the nationalistic iconography on the currency molded people’s identity, perceived their destiny, and expressed commands to them (Tschachler 2010: 116-17). While the allegorical figure of History on the $1 Silver Certificate was uncontroversial, other female figures on the Silver Certificates were not always well liked, such as the $5 entry, which showed an allegorical motif, Electricity Presenting Light to the World. The highly dramatic and decidedly overwrought image caused uproar among several Boston society women, who were scandalized by the uncovered bosoms of certain of the figures in the scene. Although the symbolic association between a woman’s breast and nourishment from a fertile nation should have been clear enough (and had been intended by the note’s designer, Walter Shirlaw, the co-founder of the Chicago Institute of Art), some banks even refused to take the notes. From this originated the idiom “banned in Boston.” 14 Surely less of a stir would have been created by the silver dollar of 1795, on the obverse of which appears a bust of Liberty facing right (the reverse shows the American eagle). The field is taken up by a circle of stars, with the word LIBERTY spelled out at the top, and the year, 1795, at the bottom. The design was continued until 1798, when new reverses were prepared; 14 Tschachler (2010: 81). For an illustration of the $5 Silver Certificate, go to the Bebee Collection of the American Numismatic Association, http: / / www.ana-museum.org/ 1987_126_126.html. A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 109 the obverse, engraved after Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 sketch, now lost, lasted until 1836 (Tschachler 2020: 24). New reverse designs appeared at various intervals through 1836, manifesting all the symptoms of a fledgling nation trying to create a coinage that was to be as dignified as that of the world’s leading powers, England and France. The impact of the Flowing Hair silver dollar, which was struck from bullion deposited by Mint Director David Rittenhouse, is best described by the words from the New Hampshire Gazette of December 1794: “The tout ensemble has a pleasing effect to a connoisseur; but the touches of the graver are too delicate, and there is a want of boldness of execution which is necessary to durability and currency” (qtd. in Vermeule 2007: 29). While the coin lacked artistry, there is a crude vitality, and its role in the creation of an American sense of identity cannot be mistaken. Still, this role was out of proportion to the coin’s commercial success. In the late nineteenth century, the validity of the female form as a symbol of the nation was profoundly questioned. “What is it that we have the ugliest money of all civilized nations? ” Galaxy magazine provocatively asked in June 1876. The contemptuous slur also insinuated that American coins did not even look like money. The reason given was the female figure of Liberty stamped on the silver dollar—a muscular woman in a seated position, with a shield resting at her right side and a cap and pole in her left hand. It would be far better, the article concluded, to place the portraits of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington on the coinage and, as well, on the national currency (Tschachler 2020: 26). The controversy over the Seated Liberty Type coin, which was designed by the Mint’s Chief Engraver Christian Gobrecht and was produced from 1840 to 1873, is a good example of the gendered division between realism and classicism on the nation’s coins and currency: realist iconography then was largely a male domain, whereas allegories were usually female. This should not come as a surprise, as those who were producing, bringing into circulation, and using coins and currency were predominantly males, white males, that is. Consequently, representations of human figures on coins and currency would be filtered through the dominant group’s perception of the “truth.” What the clamor for images of Franklin and Washington therefore reveals is that stylistic “realism” was to enhance a sense of “national subjectivity.” That subjectivity, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg found (1992: 844-48), from the Constitutional Convention forward had been largely the domain of white males, who, although riven along class lines and differentiated by historical crises, were the primary claimants of an American cultural logic that demanded the formulation and performance of national identities. White masculinity thus was linked to civic identity. Looking more closely, however, we see that the referential power of white manhood hinged on the normalization of unequal standards and conditions, that is, on contrasts between white males’ own national sense of self and that of a series of “Others”—Native Americans, African Americans, women, and the poor. Heinz Tschachler 110 Since these groups were considered to be dangerous and polluting, they had to be excluded from the body politic (Nelson 1998: 6-7, 29-59). Ultimately, these strategies of exclusion helped maintain a “racial patriarchy,” meaning a hierarchy based on differences in race, culture, class, and gender (Schloesser 2002: 12-13). Seated Liberty dollar production was halted by the Coinage Act of 1873. However, it took almost another century for the gendered division between realism and classicism on the nation’s coins and currency to disappear. In 1979, a year after Jimmy Carter’s election to the Presidency, a new dollar coin was issued, honoring the noted feminist leader Susan B. Anthony. Ms. Anthony’s portrait was put in place of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s, which had been chosen by the incoming Nixon administration in 1971. Minting of the “Susies” began with tremendous enthusiasm, but despite heroic efforts on the part of the U.S. Mint, the coin was not widely accepted by the public. While it became popular with collectors, I have never seen one. Alternatively, if I have, like most Americans I might have mistaken it for a quarter because of its size. The quarter at least fits the slots of vending machines, in contrast to the Anthony dollar, which does not even look like it was worth a dollar and so ended up in storage. A proposed revision was abandoned by the incoming Reagan Administration and never got beyond the planning stage. 15 In 1999, Congress authorized a new mini dollar. Gold in color and with a smooth edge, there would be no more mistaking it for a quarter. Thanks to then Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who by virtue of his office had the final say in the coin’s design, the obverse shows a portrait of Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian woman who, with her infant son, helped guide Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first national expedition across the North American continent. The introduction of the coin, which has an American eagle on its reverse, coincided with the bicentennial of the expedition. Per the Native American $1 Coin Act of September 20, 2007, new reverses have been introduced. The first coin in the series features a Native American woman planting maize. As of 2009, the Sacagawea reverses have honored Native American tribes through design themes such as the creation of the Cherokee written language, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Olympian Jim Thorpe, even the Pueblo Revolt. 16 The Sacagawea Dollar did not fare much better than its predecessor, despite a massive marketing campaign. The campaign, which cost taxpayers some $67.1 million, did nothing to lift coin usage above about one percent of dollar transactions. People “just aren’t buying the idea,” an article 15 For more, see Sanders (2020: 24-32). For an illustration of the Anthony dollar, see Tschachler (2010: 93). 16 See United States Mint (2014). A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 111 in the Sacramento Bee was headlined. 17 Disappointing news of this kind even reached the upper echelons in the Clinton administration, prompting a General Accounting Office’s recommendation that no more money be spent on marketing the Sacagawea Dollar, even though the Office also said that the government could potentially save up to $500 million annually, mostly on the production and shipping of bank notes, and on account of the greater durability of coins. According to the Federal Reserve, current production costs for the $1 and $2 denomination are at 5.5 cents per note. Notes of higher denomination cost more to produce because of security features. The $100 denomination costs 14.2 cents per note, the $20 note 11.5 cents. 18 And the new $20 note bearing Harriet Tubman’s portrait? That, of course, is still unclear. What is clear is that the space on the nation’s coins and currency is a contested one, one that women will occupy only after a long and bitter struggle. Addendum On October 6, 2021, the United States Mint unveiled the designs for the first batch of coins in the American Women Quarters Program, which was authorized by Congress earlier this year (Public Law 116-330). The coins recognize the achievements of poet Maya Angelou; astronaut Sally Ride; actress Anna May Wong; suffragist and politician Nina Otero-Warren; and Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The front of the coins will feature a portrait of George Washington, created by prolific 20 th -century sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser in honor of his 200 th birthday (it was submitted as a candidate for the 1932 quarter, but ultimately passed over). The new Quarters will be available for sale online starting next year. 19 References Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2018). “How much does it cost to produce currency and coins? ” (27 December). [online] http: / / www.federalreserve.gov/ faqs/ currency_12771.htm [18 December 2018] Bowers, Q. David (2009). Whitman Encyclopedia of U.S. Paper Money. Atlanta, GA: Whitman. ——— (2006). Obsolete Paper Money Issued by Banks in the United States, 1782-1866. Atlanta, GA: Whitman. 17 Lundstrom (2002: 3). For an illustration of the Sacagawea coin, see Tschachler (2010: 92). 18 See United States General Accounting Office (2000, 2002). On production costs, see Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2018). 19 To learn more, visit https: / / www.usmint.gov/ news/ press-releases/ united-statesmint-announces-designs-for-2022-american-women-quarters-program-coins. Heinz Tschachler 112 Dickes, Andy (2020). “Voting Rights at Last.” The Numismatist (March). 62-63. Doty, Richard G. (1995). “Surviving Images, Forgotten People: Native Americans, Women, and African Americans on United States Obsolete Banknotes.” In: Virginia H. Hewitt (Ed.). The Banker’s Art: Studies in Paper Money. London: British Museum Press. 118-31. ——— (2004). Pictures from a Distant Country: Images on 19th-Century U.S. Currency. Raleigh, NC: Boson Books. Ferguson, Robert A. (1997). The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820. Cambridge, MA-London, England: Harvard University Press. Frizell, Sam (2016). “Donald Trump Says Harriet Tubman on the $20-Bill is ‘Political Correctness’.” Time (21 April). [online] http: / / time.com/ 4303332/ donaldtrump-says-harriet-tubman-on-the-20-bill-is-political-correctness/ [16 April 2017] Greenwood, Max (2017). “Trump hangs portrait of Andrew Jackson in Oval Office.” The Hill (25 January). [online] http: / / thehill.com/ homenews/ administration/ 316115-trump-hangs-portrait-of-andrew-jackson-in-oval-office [16 April 2017] Guth, Ron (2015). 100 Greatest Women on Coins. Atlanta, GA: Whitman Publishing. Haberman, Maggie (2017). “A Homebody Finds the Ultimate Home Office.” The New York Times (25 January). [online] https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2017/ 01/ 25/ us/ politics/ president-trump-white-house.html? _r=1 [20 April 2017] Hewitt, Virginia H. (1994). Beauty and the Banknote: Images of Women on Paper Money. London: British Museum Press. ———. (1995). “Soft Images, Hard Currency: the Portrayal of Women on Paper Money.” In: Virginia H. Hewitt (Ed.). The Banker’s Art: Studies in Paper Money. London: British Museum Press. 156-65. Hobsbawm, Eric (1983). “Mass-Producing Traditions, 1870-1914.” In: Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (Eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 263-307. Lundstrom, Marjie (2002). “Sacagawea dollar coin? Californians just aren’t buying the idea.” Sacramento Bee (21 September). 3. McPherson, James M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine. Nelson, Dana D. (1998). National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rappeport, Alan (2019). “See a Design of the Harriet Tubman $20 Bill That Mnuchin Delayed.” The New York Times (14 June). [online] https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2019/ 06/ 14/ us/ politics/ harriet-tubman-bill.html [4 January 2020] Reed, Fred (2007). “Paper Dolls.” The Numismatist (November). 41-50. Sanders, Mitch (2020). “The Demise of the Small Size Dollar Coin.” The Numismatist (March). 24-32. Schloesser, Pauline E. (2002). The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic. New York: New York University Press. Scott, H. Alan (2019). “The Harriet Biopic Is Here and It’s Already Generating Oscar Buzz.” Newsweek (23 July). [online] https: / / www.newsweek.com/ harriet-tubman-biopic-here-its-already-generating-oscar-buzz-1450769 [24 Juli 2019] Siegel, Joel (2014). “President Obama: Put faces of women on U.S. currency.” New York Daily News (30 July). [online] http: / / www.nydailynews.com/ news/ national/ president-obama-put-faces-women-u-s-currency-article-1.1886537 [14 March 2017] A Contested Space: Women on U.S. Coins and Currency 113 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll (1992). “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786-1789.” Journal of American History 79 (December). 841-73. Trump, Donald (2017). “President Donald Trump’s Remarks at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage.” YouTube (15 March). [online] https: / / www.youtube.com/ wat ch? v=thx5_2jfpiU [14 June 2017] Tschachler, Heinz (2020). George Washington on Coins and Currency. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ——— (2013). The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: Banking, Currency and Politics in the Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ——— (2010). The Greenback: Paper Money and American Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. United States General Accounting Office (2002). “New Dollar Coin: Marketing Campaign Raised Public Awareness but Not Widespread Use” (September). [online] http: / / www.gao.gov/ assets/ 240/ 235565.pdf [9 November 2007] ——— (2000). “Financial Impact of Issuing the New $1 Coin” (7 April). [online] http: / / www.gao.gov/ assets/ 90/ 89684.pdf [14 September 2007] United States Mint (2014). “Native American $1 Coins.” [online] http: / / catalog.usmint.gov/ coin-programs/ native-american-dollar-coins/ [20 October 2019] Vermeule, Cornelius C. (2007). Numismatic Art in America: Aesthetics of the United States Coinage. 2 nd ed. Atlanta, GA: Whitman. Women on 20s (n.d.) “$10 vs. $20.” [online] http: / / www.womenon20s.org/ points [12 June 2017] ——— (2015a). “Results” (18 May) [online] http: / / www.womenon20s.org/ results [29 June 2015] ——— (2015b). “The Petition” (11 May). [online] http: / / www.womenon20s.org/ the_petition [29 June 2015] Heinz Tschachler Department of English and American Studies Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt