Women's 'final four' chosen for $20 bill fight

Michael Winter | USA TODAY

The people – 256,659, anyway – have spoken, and the group pushing for a woman to appear on U.S. paper currency has announced its final four to replace Andrew Jackson's face on the $20 bill.

From 15 contenders in a "robust" five-week "primary round" that ended Sunday, voters selected Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, WomenOn20s said. The competition began with 100 candidates.

The final ballot is open. The group has not yet set a cutoff date to voting, which will be decided within the next couple of weeks, said BarbaraOrtiz Howard, founder of WomenOn20s.

"As in the first round we want to be able to capture the major flood of enthusiasm , but do not want to over linger," she wrote in an email to USA TODAY. "We had thought we'd just do the first round for Women's History Month and we kept it going for a bit longer so some schools could be back on line. Alas, everyone's schedule is different, and we wanted to leave April open for the final.

"If the interest is particularly high there is an outside chance we will keep it open past April," Howard said.

More than half of the Internet voters chose Roosevelt, Tubman and Parks as one of their top three, the group said.

Mankiller was added to the final ballot "because of strong sentiment" that a Native American should be a candidate to knock off the seventh U.S. president, a slave-owning military hero of 19th-century America who helped found Tennessee. He signed the notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated several tribes to territory that now comprises Oklahoma, where Mankiller was born and lived until her death in 2010. More than 4,000 Cherokees died during the tribe's forced march by the U.S. Army in what became known as "The Trail of Tears."

"There are so few reminders in our everyday lives of great women who've contributed to the shaping of our nation," Susan Ades Stone, the group's executive director, said in a news release Monday. "It's time to correct that and putting a woman on a $20 is like having a little pocket monument."

The group is aiming to petition the White House to make the change by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote.

Nonetheless, three suffragists who were key to that victory – Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul – did not make it out of the fierce 15, who were chosen from a list of 30 through "a vigorous survey process" involving more than a dozen women's historians and academicians. Anthony's image already appears on American money – the popularly reviled $1 coins that haven't been in circulation since 2012.