The U.S. Mint is wrapping up its four-year American Women Quarters Program with new quarters coming out this year depicting historic figures like a tennis star, an astronomer whose work is credited with leading to the discovery of dark matter, and the founder of the Girl Scouts.
Started in 2022, the American Women Quarters Program is an attempt to balance out the faces of U.S. currency, which is dominated by men. With five new quarters released each year since then, coins depicting women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Sally Ride have entered circulation, telling a more complete story about the people who’ve helped shape America. This year is the fourth and final year of the program.
“This program has recognized the remarkable legacies of these extraordinary she-roes,” U.S. Mint Director Ventris C. Gibson said in a statement. “These beautiful American Women quarters will be in circulation for decades to come and continue to educate the American people on our incredible honorees.”
The final class of new quarters includes Ida B. Wells, a Black woman born into slavery in Mississippi during the middle of the Civil War who went on to work in journalism, fight against lynching, champion women’s right to vote, and found the National Association of Colored Women’s Club. Wells’s quarter, sculpted by Mint medallic artist Phebe Hemphill, cites her professions as a journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist.
Juliette Gordon Low founded what would later be known as the Girl Scouts in 1912 after meeting the British founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Robert Baden-Powell. The following year, the organization published its first handbook, How Girls Can Help Their Country. Sculptor Eric David Custer depicts Low in uniform alongside the first Girl Scout Trefoil, which she designed.
When Vera Rubin told her high school teacher she was attending Vassar University, he told her “as long as you stay away from science, you should do okay.” Rubin went on to prove that teacher wrong, making discoveries as an astronomer that expanded our knowledge of the universe. Rubin also published more than 100 scientific papers, according to the National Women’s History Museum. Rubin’s quarter, sculpted by Mint medallic artist John P. McGraw, shows her staring off into the cosmos with a spiral galaxy background.
Born in 1987 with congenital muscular dystrophy, Stacey Park Milbern was a disability rights activist who founded the Disability Justice Culture Club. She was named by then-President Barack Obama to the President’s Committee for People With Intellectual Disabilities in 2014. Milbern was a producer for Netflix’s Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution in 2020. Milbern died that same year at the age of 33. Her coin is sculpted by Craig A. Campbell.
Before Venus, Serena, and Billie Jean King, there was Althea Gibson. A tennis star of the 1950s, Gibson faced segregation and discrimination and went on to become the the first Black woman in history to win the U.S. Nationals, French Championship, and Wimbledon. Gibson was a multi-sport athlete, later becoming a golfer and the first Black woman on a Ladies Professional Golf Association tour. Her quarter, sculpted by Renata Gordon, calls Gibson a “trailblazing champion”.
U.S. currency has come a long way since 1979, when Susan B. Anthony became the first woman to appear on a U.S. circulating coin. With the final installment of the American Women Quarters Program, the faces and stories of 20 new women can now join her.
Fonte Fast Company
