Here's a newly minted decision you probably didn't expect: We're getting a woman's face on the $10 bill.
What woman, the Treasury Department isn't sure yet. And you'll have to live at least another five years to see it -- the bill won't be unveiled until 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
But, hey, Americans can take the summer to help choose. The department is asking Americans to submit their ideas on a website, thenew10.treasury.gov, or on Twitter with the hashtag #TheNew10.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who made the announcement Wednesday, told the Wall Street Journal, "It’s very important to be sending the signal of how important it is to recognize the role that women have played in our national life and in our national history for a very long time, really from the beginning.”
You think? You actually think?
The last woman to have her face on an American bill was Martha Washington in the late 19th century. Taking nothing away from the trials of the original first lady, history now offers a considerably wider selection of American women of great accomplishment against all odds.
Treasury says names frequently mentioned include Eleanor Roosevelt, abolitionist Harriet Tubman, civil-rights icon Rosa Parks and Wilma Mankiller, who served as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
But, of course, if you consider the timing -- anniversary of the 19th Amendment -- you might want to throw in suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone or Alice Paul. Heck, I'm voting for my grandmother, Florence Spencer, who led battle-mission-like marches through Hartford and New Haven in the early 1900s.
Susan B. Anthony is unlikely to make the cut. She already hit the jackpot in 1979 when the Treasury Department put her face on a $1 coin. On the other hand, not much of a jackpot: In 1981 the government halted the Anthony minting, so unpopular was the coin. Let's hope the 2020 woman's bill fares better.
Interesting that the face now on the $10 bill, Alexander Hamilton's, is the one chosen to be "diminished." Hamilton was the first secretary of the Treasury. Apparently the department is going to find a way to keep him on the bill, far less obtrusively than he is today, for posterity's sake.
The WSJ says the idea for the new bill was President Obama's -- and he claims it came to him from a girl who wrote him a letter suggesting it. "I thought it was a pretty good idea," the president said.
Gosh. Only 239 years for a president to think of it.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
