Banknotes, again. Now it’s America’s turn to suffer the unintended consequences of an ill-implemented campaign to inject some XX chromosomes into currency.
In June, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that he was knocking founding father Alexander Hamilton, a self-made, illegitimate boy from the West Indies, off the $10 bill. There’s a nationwide hunt for a woman whose image could replace him: in this week’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush suggested Margaret Thatcher. You can even tweet your own suggestions to the Treasury, with the hashtag #TheNew10.
Now, I’m pretty keen on Margaret Thatcher. (If Jeremy Corbyn wants to end the scourge of personal abuse in politics, he could talk to her family, for starters). And I think women’s representation is pretty important. Banknotes stand for what a nation values: still, in most countries, that’s money and men. Currency is, by definition, metaphor made material. Grow up only handling white men on your banknotes, and you’ll get a strong impression women haven’t contributed much to gold reserves they represent.
But I’m hardly a fan of tokenism. If you’re going to kick a bloke off anything to make way for a woman, you had better well pick the right bloke. Hamilton is the definition of the self-made man: scholarships and his precocious intellect got him out of the West Indies, though not before a hardened pubescence working as clerk in the docks. A Jewish headmistress gave him his first education, after his bastard status barred him from the Church of England’s schools; his mother died a decade after giving birth to him; his guardian committed suicide. Hamilton’s first major piece of writing describes a hurricane devastating his town – an experience many of America’s poorest, shanty-town citizens still share – forty years later, he died in a duel, at the hands of the Vice President of the United States.
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