Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Maggie’s great, but can’t the US find an inspiring American woman to go on their banknote?

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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