When Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced last week that a woman’s portrait will be added to the $10 bill in 2020, there were a few initial grumblings. Wouldn’t it be better to redesign the $20 bill to oust Andrew Jackson, notorious for his appalling record on Native Americans, not to mention his opposition to the central banking system? But everyone seemed to agree that a place on the $10 is a significant honor, and a win for feminism. The debate almost immediately moved on to which woman — Harriet Tubman? Eleanor Roosevelt? — would claim the coveted position.

But a closer look suggests a less triumphant conclusion. If women are getting a seat at the table, it’s the seat by the dishcart. Cash today is less important than at any point in American history. And when it comes to everyday money, statistics show that the $10 is about the slightest gesture you could make.

“Of the most-used notes, it’s the least important,” said Douglass Mudd, curator and museum director of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado Springs. The $20 and the $1 are the small bills Americans really use. The percentage of $10 bills among all circulating currency has declined significantly in the last 20 years, from 8.75% to about 5.3% of total volume.

It’s just the latest episode in a long pattern of women getting the least-valuable placements on American currency. The most recent have been the dollar coins featuring Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony—both of which were unveiled with great fanfare and then barely circulated. The government never bothered to stop printing the $1 note with George Washington’s portrait, so consumers never needed to switch.

This wasn’t always so. American money was once quite a bit more freewheeling, and also less male. As historian Stephen Mihm pointed out a few months ago, there’s a very robust history of women’s images on American currency – though often anonymous women, not actual people. A female figure “emblematic of Liberty” appeared on the very first coin, and female symbols of Justice, America, and other abstract concepts appeared on paper currency before the Civil War. Goddesses includes Venus and Athena appeared on early American cash, too.

But real women appeared on money too. Martha Washington was featured on a $1 bill in the 1880s and 1890s, for example. And privately issued 19th-century currency — real money, though not always reliable — was emblazoned with figures including Pocahantas, opera star Jenny Lind, and the wives and daughters of bankers themselves. These began to vanish after the Civil War, when a new system of national banks meant a new system of national currency. The number of women, real or allegorical, to appear on money declined dramatically. In other words, as cash became more uniform and more official, it also became more masculine.

Surely being featured on money at all is a distinguished honor today? Well, yes and no. “Money is still one of the first impressions you get of a nation,” Mudd said. Dictatorships tend to emblazon their dictators on all forms of cash, for example, while developing countries use currency to tout their economic and cultural resources. “Paper money is a great mirror for the nation, as far as what it believe and what it holds dear.” In that case, the current field of male faces on our bills says something not terribly flattering about modern American values, and the update is long overdue.

But not everyone believes that cash is as culturally significant as other great American symbols. “A filthy banknote is a far cry from the Stars & Stripes,” David Wolman, the author of the 2012 book “The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers — and the Coming Cashless Society,” wrote in an email. Wolman believes that the $10 and the $20 are still quite useful compared to high-denomination bills sitting in vaults and being used for illegal transactions. But in general, “Cash is being pushed toward obsolescence.” This is an era, after all, in which Harvard economists argue for eliminating paper money altogether.

If paper currency, not to mention the neglected $10, isn’t worthy of whatever woman is chosen to grace it, then what would be a better way to honor her? Wolman suggested an accolade that more clearly stands for progress, like, say, naming a new high-speed highway system after her. “Surely that would be better than putting her face on an object that so many people (especially young people who never carry cash) already disdain, that is fast losing its relevance, and that makes you want to wash your hands after every time you handle it,” he wrote.

In the meantime, for enthusiasts of the new coed $10, perhaps that optimism is warranted. After all, what’s true for your wallet is true for women: $10 is still better than nothing.

Ruth Graham is a journalist in New Hampshire; she tweets at @publicroad.



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