Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Baylor Prof. Offers List of Lesser-Known Women Who Fit the Bill for New 10

flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/ (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Earlier this year an online campaign was started to encourage the placement of a woman on the $20 dollar. Although it’s not the $20, the Treasury Department announced last month that a woman will appear on the redesigned $10 come 2020, which marks the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.  However, exactly which woman it will be remains uncertain. KWBU’s Carlos Morales spoke with Baylor professor KimberlyKellison about some of lesser-known women who fit the bill.

KWBU: Professor Kellison, thanks for joining us today. You were asked to compile a list, in no specific order, of lesser-known women who meet the Treasury Department's requirements for being on the $10. They've said the women selected should be "iconic and have made a significant contribution to, or impact on protecting the freedom on which the country was founded." With that in mind, who's made your list?

Kellison: Number one, and these aren't in a particular order as far as my preference. Number one is Jane Addams. Jane Addams was a social reformer, she co-founded the Hull House, which was a social settlement, or a settlement house. And this was the late 1800s, early 1900s, the progressive period. This a time when the country was urbanizing very rapidly.

And so the idea was to create homes in urban areas where middle-class reformers would live, share skills, would share education with immigrants, people from the working class. Sort of for mutually beneficial, trying to foster mutually beneficial relationships. Jane Adams was also very active in the Pacifist Movement; she established the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. 

KWBU: Number 2 and 3 on your list are related. Can you tell me a little bit more about them and their contributions to the growth of democracy.

Kellison: Two and three are sisters: Angelina and Sarah Grimké. They were born into a slave-holding family in Charleston, South Carolina. Both of them moved North. Sarah was the eldest and Angelina was the youngest of 14 children so there's a huge age barrier between the two. 

They moved to Philadelphia, converted to Quakerism, and became abolitionists. They also became champions of the Women's Rights movement, which was sort of in its bud, or its beginning phase as far its organizational phase. They are really unique in the sense that they came from a slave-holding family in South Carolina. So a number of people in the abolitionist movement hadn't seen slavery first-hand, as far as being born into a family where slavery was practiced so they brought that particular focus into that light. 

KWBU: And number 4 on your list is a woman by the name of Fannie Lou Hamer. What was she most known for?

Kellison: She was a civil rights leader born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi, the youngest of 20 children. She helped organize voter registration drives in Mississippi and Delta Mississippi where there was just entrenched opposition to the right of African-Americans to vote or be treated equally as citizens. 

She organized The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in support of African-American voting rights. 

KWBU: Number 5 on your list is Harriet Jacobs who was an ex-slave. 

Kellison: ​She was born a slave, but then escaped to freedom and became an abolitionist. She wrote "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." She didn't publicize the escape to freedom, per se, because that was part of the underground railroad, she wanted to protect those people who helped her find her freedom, or helped her to freedom, but she wrote about what it was like to be a slave. 

She was in a town called Edenton, which was in coastal North Carolina. She lived seven years in a small attic crawl space in Edenton before escaping to the north, and she stayed there because she was worried about her children who were still enslaved. She escaped to the north and her children subsequently received their freedom. 

KWBU: Marry "Mother Jones" Harris, comes in at number 6 on your list. What are some of her contributions?

Kellison: She sort of nicknamed herself Mother Jones and that really stuck. She was a labor organizer and co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was a labor union in the early 20th century. But she was also very involved with organizing for the Knights of Labor and working particularly to advocate to child labor reform. 

She was an interesting speaker, very colorful. 

Kellison: Jeannette Rankin is number 7. She was the first woman elected to the House of Representative. She was from Montana. She was elected first in the early 1900s and would serve again in the 1940s. She was a pacifist, she voted against American involvement in both World War I and World War II. She has a great quotation which is: "I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won't be the last."

KWBU: And rounding up your list is Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Kellison: She was born a slave in 1862, that's the middle of the Civil War, so she soon became free as did all slaves. She lived in Memphis, Tenn. Initially she was a teacher, but then she got involved with writing for a newspaper. She was actually partner in a newspaper called the Free Speech and Headlight in Memphis. 

She challenged the very dominant nature of lynching as it became really embedded in the 1880s and especially the 1890s and onward into the early 20th century. She had three friends in Memphis that were lynched and she wrote about that pretty forcefully, so much so that she left Memphis, her newspaper office was destroyed. 

She moved to Chicago, but she continued to write about and bring attention to the atrocities of lynching in the south. One other thing about her is she challenged the Jim Crow system that was coming into place in the 1880s. She was on first-class car in Tennessee, it was the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad. She was ordered to leave that car and go to another car that had African-Americans in it, and she refused to. 

The conductor tried to remove her and she bit him, and then two other men helped the conductor forcibly remove her. She sued the railroad company and initially won, but that was reversed in a higher court. 

KWBU: In addition to these women, you've also included a symbolic figure. Who would that be?

Kellison: She wasn't a real person - that we know of. Although her representation was based upon a model. This is "Rosie the Riveter" who has sort of become this icon of women during World War II. Her portrait's made particularly famous by Normal Rockwell, who painted an image of a women taking a lunch break and she had a rivet gun in her lap; her lunch box said 'Rosie' on it. There had been a song before that in 1942 that included the name Rosie and Rosie was a riveter. 

This became very iconic. Even during World War II it was distributed during the Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell put a lot of pictures in. The magazine was loaned to the U.S. Treasury Department for the remainder of the war, it was used for the war bond drives. 

So it became circulated well during the 1940s and sort of rediscovered in the 1980s and onward, and again, a symbol of women during World War II in an inclusive way and then also an exclusive way as far as post-World War II. Because the idea was women's patriotism, women should take their patriotism and move into male-dominated industrial positions because those men were fighting the war. This is how they were fighting the war effort. After World War II ended, women were supposed to move back into more traditional, domestic roles. 
 

KWBU: Out of all the candidates you've listed is there one that pops out to you as a potential front runner for the $10 bill?

Kellison: Honestly, of the list I was asked to make - which was an additional list to the list that the Women on 20's organizers put out on the internet. These are also important women to the cause of democracy. So on that list, I think it's still really up for debate. 

There's some that, again, I just, maybe their personalities pull me to them.  I think the Grimke sisters are very interesting because there were a lot of women in the South, the slaveholding South, who were born into slaveholding families. They're still the minority, most people in the South were not born into slaveholding families. But those in the elite, we have diaries of those women who might question a little about slavery, but who don't move into an anti-slavery focus. The Grimke sisters did

They left the South because of the harsh realities of slavery and because they disagreed with that and so I think they're really unique in that sense. 

Professor Kimberly Kellison is an associate professor and chair of the history department in Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences. The rest of her list – including one symbolic figure – is on our website at KWBU dot org