The U.S. Mint has announced which five influential women will appear on next year's American quarters. This year's rollout honored trailblazers Maya Angelou, Sally Ride, Wilma Mankiller, Adelina Otero-Warren, and Anna May Wong.
The newly announced quarters honor five more U.S. women and their remarkable contributions to the country and will go into circulation in 2023.
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It's part of the U.S. Mint's American Women Quarters program, which will run through 2025. The lineup for next year includes:
- Bessie Coleman, the first Black and first Native American woman pilot
- Jovita Idár, a journalist and activist who advocated for Mexican Americans and faced racism in the early 1900s
- Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady who used her platform to fight for racial justice, disability rights, and women's suffrage
- Edith Kanakaʻole, an indigenous Hawaiian hula teacher who was part of the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s
- Maria Tallchief, a Native American dancer and the first ever American prima ballerina
According to the U.S. Mint, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen selected the new honorees based on input from the National Women's History Museum, the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus.
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The back side of the quarter is not the only change: George Washington, on the obverse side of the quarter, is getting an overhaul as well. He'll be facing right instead of left thanks to the work of a female sculptor, Laura Gardin Fraser. Her design was recommended for the 1932 quarter, but the Treasury secretary chose John Flanagan's now-ubiquitous design instead.
As for paper currency, an effort to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill stalled during the Trump administration. President Joe Biden has said he wants to speed up that process, but it still could take years, the Washington Post reports.
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