Kimberly Emerson

Conversation at lunch goes a lot of  places in my world. Since almost every restaurant I know has a television playing in it now, my co-workers and I frequently discuss whatever’s blasting out at the moment. When footage played from the Republican debates, we heard the moderator ask Jeb Bush to pick a woman to put on our money. He suggested Margaret Thatcher. (Yes, he knew she was British and it couldn’t happen.)

How many units of currency do we have that bear the face of someone not male and white? We could only come up with two: the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar, and the Sacajawea golden dollar, both of them coins. Neither are currently minted. Both failed to grab the heart of the nation, primarily because the size so closely resembled a quarter, rather than something people could easily distinguish as different when rummaging through change in their purse. That’s what happens when you design a coin for the vending machine industry.

My co-worker asked  me who I’d put on the new $10.00 bill. I love conversations like this. It comes down to one thing: who has the best story? And of course, stories are where I live.

If someone feels the need to tell me that we can’t have women on our money because we haven’t had a woman president, I will be obliged to point out that right now the picture on the $10.00 is of Alexander Hamilton, and
he was never a president, either.

My immediate choice: Eleanor Roosevelt. One of my favorites in history, and a genuine crusader for civil rights. She came from privilege, no doubt – she was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece – but I don’t think you could call her life easy. She lost her mother and one of her brothers to diphtheria when she was eight. Her father, an alcoholic confined to a sanitarium, committed suicide two years later while suffering symptoms of withdrawal. She married Franklin Roosevelt and aft
er bearing him six children, discovered he’d been having an affair and thought about leaving her. Yet she made the most of her life. She fought for women’s rights, for children’s rights, for victims of racial prejudice and economic injustice. She made the role of First Lady into something different than ever before. While many people loved her, others despised her and lobbed very personal attacks. She didn’t fit society’s definition of beautiful and her detractors never let her forget it. Eleanor’s response: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Seeing her face on my money would remind me that no matter my bank balance, I had worth.

I asked Deirdre for her pick, and she said Susan B. Anthony. Another worthwhile one. Yes, she had the silver dollar, but I think we could bump her up to something not specifically engineered to feed a parking meter. Anthony taught school for fifteen years before deciding to work for the temperance movement. Raised in the Quaker faith, this spoke to her, but the temperance movement wouldn’t let her speak to anyone else, her being a woman and all. After that, she devoted herself to women’s rights. She campaigned for giving women the right to vote. It didn’t happen in her lifetime, but it never would have happened at all without her. She was opinionated and overbearing at times, by all counts. Maybe you’ll feel a little judgment from her gaze on your $10 bill. Consider, though, that she started in a time when married women couldn’t own property in their own right and often didn’t have the right to their own earnings in the few professions that would hire them. I sometimes allow myself the luxury of forgetting that my right to vote is less than a century old. Seeing her face on my money would remind me that I can vote on election day, and I can vote with my dollars, too.

At this point the TV interrupted us again, as the newscaster asked people who they suggested to be on the $10.00 bill. Someone said Harriet Tubman, and Deirdre and I both said, “Yes!”

This is why it’s important to get lots of opinions on these things. I like to think I would have come up with that suggestion before too long, but you never know. Clearly, I still have to work on getting myself out of the white bubble.

Harriet Tubman was born into a life of slavery and saw three of her sisters sold and sent away to other plantations. She endured whippings and beatings, once getting hit in the head with a two-pound weight for refusing to restrain a fellow slave. She bore scars and suffered headaches and seizures for the rest of her life, but all that didn’t stop her from escaping bondage and making her way to freedom in the north. Had it been me, the story would have ended there. I’d have holed up in relative safety (still getting to deal with a wall of prejudice, but at least no more beatings) for the rest of my days. But Tubman? No. She goes back to the south and leads other people out, now that she’s figured out how to do it, becoming one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. In the beginning she leads them to the northern United States, but in 1850 a group of idiots in Congress enact the Fugitive Slave Act, enabling white owners to claim their runaway slaves even from “free” states. (Obviously not free for everyone.) Does she give up? No, this woman figures out how to lead them all the way to Canada. At any point in this story, she can be arrested. Yet she keeps going, helping hundreds of people escape slavery. When the southern authorities come close to arresting her on a northbound train, she has her group hop one going further south, figuring that no one’s going to look for them on a train going back into slave territory. (Spoiler alert: she’s right. They don’t.) At one point the reward for her capture is up to $40,000 – about $1 million in today’s money. (Another Spoiler alert: she’s never caught, so no one gets the bounty.) Sure, she might have slipped opium to a baby here and there to keep them quiet, but is that really any worse that giving your kid Benadryl before a long flight? (I kid. Unless you’re trying to escape from a tyrant, do not drug your children. OPIUM BAD.) Seeing her on my money will remind me to spend my dollars on things that count, and to use what I have for the benefit of others, as well as myself.

Footnote to the story: Tubman got married before she escaped, and on her third trip came back to take her husband north to freedom. He declined. He’d already remarried by that time. Decades later, after helping scores of people to freedom and serving as a nurse in the Civil War, she marries again, to a man twenty-two years her junior – and outlives him. Seeing her on my money will also remind me that as long as you’re alive, you’re never out of possibilities.

Most any of these would be better than Hamilton. Seeing him on my money reminds me that every duel to the death has to have a loser. I don’t like that message.

I hear people are now plugging to have a woman on the $20.00 bill, too. It’s about time. Sojourner Truth’s got a compelling story. She’d look great on a twenty.

Kimberly would like to see some of the new bills up close. Thousands of them, actually, just before they get deposited in her bank account.

Tags: $10 bill, $20 bill, civil rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, money, opium, slavery, suffrage, Susan B. Anthony, Underground Railroad, women's rights