“Correcting a History of Exclusion”: Portraits of 20 Women to be Added to U.S. Quarters

By Chabeli Carrazana / The 19th

For an entire school year, the Dr. Sally K. Ride Elementary School turned into Sally Ride Command Central. 

There were Sally Ride coloring books to shade in and Sally Ride books to read and Sally Ride quarters to design. These paper coins would adorn the hallways come April 2022, when representatives of the U.S. Mint arrived in Germantown, Maryland, to celebrate. The first American woman in space was now part of another historic launch: One commemorating women’s achievements on U.S. quarters.

When the Mint’s American Women Quarters program concludes next year, it will have elevated the stories of 20 women from diverse backgrounds whose contributions to U.S. culture have not often been celebrated — or even widely known. Getting women’s portraits onto quarters has been about correcting a history of exclusion, and about making sure their faces are cast next to those of the founding fathers.

“These women just haven’t been seen and their historical moments haven’t been taught,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, the Democrat from California who introduced the legislation that created the program. “Our young people especially will be empowered by their stories.” 

At Sally Ride Elementary, educators seized on the opportunity to not just tell their namesake’s story, but to teach children what is possible. Principal Elise Burgess contacted the Mint ahead of the quarter’s release and was gifted boxes of learning materials for the students, who spent the 2021-2022 school year learning about Ride and the coin engraving process. They went on a virtual tour of the Mint facility in Philadelphia and they each designed their own quarter. 

Ride’s partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, spoke at the school once the Mint’s version of the coin went into circulation: It depicts Ride floating next to a window in a space shuttle, the Earth below her. Ride is gazing up at the stars “with passion and purpose,” O’Shaughnessy told the students. 

“When you hold a Sally Ride quarter in your hand, look at the image and read the words. I hope they inspire you and give you a sense that you, too, can make a difference,” she said.

Ride was the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut, although her 27-year relationship with O’Shaughnessy wasn’t publicly acknowledged until after Ride’s death in 2012. O’Shaughnessy’s talk – and ongoing correspondence with students who write to her – gave the school an opportunity to elevate LGBTQ+ stories “in a really celebratory way,” Burgess said.

At the end of the year, every student got their own Sally Ride quarter, and two years later, the school’s hallways are still adorned with giant versions of it. “Now we’re all about women’s history all the time,” Burgess said. 

This was exactly the kind of shift Lee envisioned in 2017, when she started pushing for her legislation with the help of Rosa Rios, then the treasurer of the United States. The centennial of the 19th Amendment was approaching in 2020, and Lee believed it was important to create a program that centered the women of color who had been omitted by the amendment’s passage. Although White women got the vote in 1920, women of color would not get full access to the ballot until 1965. 

Getting the bill through Congress meant overcoming “major hurdles, like there are major hurdles for women on all fronts,” Lee said. But it finally passed the year of the centennial, with the first quarter to enter circulation honoring poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. “And still we rise,” said Lee, echoing Angelou’s famous poem.

The Mint worked with the National Women’s History Museum and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum to choose the 20 women who would be featured. Jennifer Herrera, the vice president of external affairs at the women’s history museum, said the focus was diversity — in terms of race, geography, age, and work. They let the public nominate women, and more than 11,000 submissions came in. 

Some were big names, Herrera said, but people also nominated the women in their own lives. “There was a general sentiment that, ‘My mother has always been an inspiration to me,’ or, ‘My grandmother raised me,’ or, ‘My aunt is an educator and I love watching her change the world through education,’” Herrera said. “Whenever there is an opportunity for women to lift other women up, they take it.”  

Among those chosen: Hawaiian composer Edith Kanakaʻole, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong, writer Zitkala-Ša and disability rights activist Stacey Park Milbern. 

In designing quarters for the Cuban-American singer Celia Cruz and Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, metallic artist Phebe Hemphill said she tried to capture the essence of each woman. She depicted Cruz in her famous rumba dress to reflect “her greatness and vitality,” and portrayed Walker wearing the Medal of Honor, the highest military honor for valor in the line of duty, which she wore for the rest of her life. Walker was awarded the medal in 1865, but stripped of it 1917 because she was not a commissioned officer, though surgeons who were men did not lose their medals. In 1977, the medal was restored in Edwards’ name and she remains the only woman to have received it.

All of the new quarters feature a portrait of George Washington on the flip side, but it’s not one you’re used to. It’s a design from 1932 that was created by sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser, but not used. (It perhaps goes without saying that for the original quarters, a man’s design was chosen instead.) 

The program has also been an effort to enhance women’s history education across the country. At the Smithsonian, for example, interim director Melanie Adams said the museum has created a new web page with resources to help teachers tailor lessons for different age groups. Herrera said that she’s been approached at events by educators who are excited to have another way to teach women’s history. 

But all of these efforts come at a fraught time in American education, when efforts to ban teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ+ stories have limited what teachers can present to students.

“We are going to have to be creative in the ways that we get this information out,” said Christian F. Nunes, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). “This is American history, but we are having to deal with states that are trying to eliminate American history.” 

Nunes was recently at an event commemorating the newest coin to enter circulation: It honors the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, an LGBTQ+ poet, writer, activist and lawyer who was also the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest and one of the co-founders of NOW. The word “hope” is sculpted across the quarter, with Murray’s face inside the letters. (Murray used he and she pronouns, but was primarily using she pronouns later in life.)

Nunes said as a Black woman, it was very emotional for her to see the coin in real life. “I just never thought I would ever see a Black woman’s face on a quarter,” she said. 

As soon as she got home that day, Nunes showed the coin to her 4-year-old son. “When he grows up,” she said, “he will think nothing else than to expect a Black woman’s face on the quarter.” 

---

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.