Trump’s $20 Problem: What Harriet Tubman’s Absence Tells Us About Power and Prejudice – Ms. Magazine

Politics

Trump’s $20 Problem: What Harriet Tubman’s Absence Tells Us About Power and Prejudice

PUBLISHED 4/22/2025 by Jill Elaine Hasday

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.
A conceptual design of a new $20 note produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing depicts Harriet Tubman in a dark coat with a wide collar and a white scarf.

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.

Read more: Trump’s $20 Problem: What Harriet Tubman’s Absence Tells Us About Power and Prejudice – Ms. MagazineSource Links: Trump’s $20 Problem: What Harriet Tubman’s Absence Tells Us About Power and Prejudice – Ms. Magazine