What The Hell America!

Despite generations of activism, women’s stories remain sidelined in America’s legal and cultural narratives—undermining progress toward true equality.

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “we the people,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only “we the men.” A long line of judges, politicians and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision-making and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

My new book We the Men explores how forgetting women’s ongoing struggles for equality perpetuates injustice and promotes complacency. I argue that remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality.

The following is excerpted from Jill Elaine Hasday’s We the Men.

From the start, women mobilizing for equality have endeavored to enrich and expand America’s dominant stories about itself. But attempts to focus public memory on women have repeatedly faced determined and protracted opposition, for generations and to the present day. 

Consider the opposition to placing Harriet Tubman’s image on the $20 bill.

Only two women have ever appeared on America’s paper currency:

• Martha Washington, the first president’s wife, graced the front of a $1 silver certificate the United States first issued in 1886.
• Pocahontas, a Native American woman who was kidnapped and imprisoned by Jamestown colonists before converting to Christianity and marrying a colonist, knelt for baptism on the back of a $20 bill first issued in 1863.

Many Americans have noticed women’s absence. In 2014, President Barack Obama spoke about receiving a letter from “a young girl” who provided “a long list of possible women” to depict on America’s currency. The next year, a grassroots “Women on 20s” campaign ran online polls proposing women to depict on the front of the $20 bill. The campaign inspired Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who introduced an April 2015 bill spotlighting the issue and followed up with a June 2015 letter to President Obama urging him to place a woman’s image on the 20.

Two weeks after Shaheen’s letter, Obama’s Treasury Department announced forthcoming changes to the design of the $10 bill. Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary, had long appeared alone on the front of the 10. The plan was to redesign the 10 to feature both Hamilton and a woman “who was a champion for our inclusive democracy.” The department solicited the public’s input into which woman Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew should select.

Some Hamilton devotees found this plan unacceptable, and their numbers had swelled since the 2015 premiere of a blockbuster musical about Hamilton’s life. Fans of the musical, and its creator, urged Lew to reconsider. He did.

Lew announced a new plan in April 2016. Hamilton would remain alone on the front of the $10 bill. The redesigned back side would depict the 1913 suffrage parade preceding Wilson’s inauguration, along with five suffragists: Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. However, the Treasury Department would redesign the $20 bill as well, with Harriet Tubman replacing President Andrew Jackson on the front.

Jackson was a slaveholder who removed Native American tribes from their lands. Tubman was an abolitionist and suffragist who freed herself and hundreds of others from bondage before becoming a Union scout, spy and nurse during the Civil War.

The news that the United States government would honor Tubman on the front of the $20 bill sparked immediate opposition. Donald Trump was pursuing the Republican nomination for president in April 2016. 

The day after Lew’s announcement, Trump denounced the decision to place Tubman on the 20 as “pure political correctness.” Trump wanted to keep Jackson on the front of the 20 because “Andrew Jackson had a great history” and has “been on the bill for many, many years and really, you know, represented somebody that really was very important to this country.” Trump declared that “it would be more appropriate” to place Tubman’s image on “another denomination,” suggesting “maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill.” The two is the least used bill: In 2016, more than seven $20 bills circulated for each $2 bill in circulation.

Two months later, Rep. Steve King of Iowa proposed a provision that would have blocked the Treasury Department from redesigning any currency. King’s argument for thwarting change ignored the many people who had advocated for women’s inclusion on U.S. currency. He contended that keeping Jackson on the front of the 20 would be “unifying” and called the plan to put Tubman on the 20 “a divisive proposal on the part of the president.”

After Trump became president in 2017, his Treasury Department announced that the introduction of the new $20 bill would be delayed and spent years repeatedly refusing to indicate whether the redesigned 20 would feature Tubman. Meanwhile, every reference to Tubman appearing on the front of the 20—or other suffragists appearing on the back of the 10—vanished from the Treasury Department’s website after Trump took office and stayed gone throughout Trump’s first term. Trump hung Andrew Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office, visited Jackson’s plantation, and declared himself “a fan.”

One of Trump’s former White House staffers published a tell-all memoir in 2018, in which she recounted Trump’s reaction when she gave him a memo in 2017 about placing Tubman on the 20. Trump reportedly looked at a photograph of Tubman and asked, “You want to put that face on the $20 bill?” The question implied that Tubman did not look like someone who belonged in that place of honor, did not look like someone Trump found physically attractive, or both.

As of this writing, neither the redesigned $20 bill nor the redesigned 10 has appeared. The Biden administration announced in January 2021 that it was committed to placing Tubman’s portrait on the front of the 20. But Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election has made that commemoration uncertain, perhaps unlikely.