Mr. Chairman and Honorable Members of the Dollar Coin Advisory Committee, there can be little question that the proper figure to be placed on the new one dollar coin should be Susan B. Anthony. Like the men whose political leadership is honored by portrayal on U.S. coins, Anthony is to be recognized for her own achievements as well as representing those of the innumerable women who have participated in the ongoing fight for women's right to equal protection of the law. Anthony led the campaign to secure constitutional recognition of women's right to vote, the only women's right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The NOW Foundation, the research and education arm of the National Organization for Women, believes that Anthony is the woman most central to our bid for full equality for women in the United States and should have an honored position on a coin in wide and continuous circulation.

With the passage of the United States Dollar Coin Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-124) directing that a new one dollar coin be issued, the Treasury Department has an important opportunity to correct the errors made in the planning and issuance of the first Susan B. Anthony coin. The inadequacies of the first Anthony dollar -- its confusing size not the least among them -- and the deprecating publicity at the time of issuance permanently handicapped that coin's ultimate acceptance for general use. A review of the newspaper accounts which made light of the Anthony figure reflected a persistent and regrettable resistance to accord female political figures the same deference and respect that has has always been accorded male figures.

"Miss Anthony," said A. O. Sulzberger Jr. in a 1979 New York Times report, "is having as rough a time breaking into the pockets and purses of America as she did breaking down its political processes 100 years earlier." (Let it be remembered that the New York Times initially opposed both the Suffrage and Equal Rights amendments.) Just recently, the Washington Post [5/25/98, A25] quipped "Susan B. Anthony may have been a great women's leader, but as a coin she was a bust."

Discussion around the introduction of the coin in 1979 amply demonstrated the need to bring public visibility to the well-concealed fact that, from the founding of this country, women have borne the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship without the entitlement to its privileges that is the birthright of every male citizen, affirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment. It is consistent with press treatment of women's rights since the Seneca Falls meeting in 1848 that news stories on the Anthony dollar often refer to Susan B. Anthony as a "suffragette" rather than a suffragist, the term used by U.S. campaigners for woman suffrage. The Washington Post in announcing this Dollar Coin Advisory Committee meeting showed its poor understanding of women's history by using the wrong term just recently. This disregard for historical fact in favor of a patronizing diminutive is characteristic of press and textbook accounts that have shaped public perception for over a century, teaching that feminism is the preoccupation of malcontents, not a rational and often brave response to relentless sexism.

The record with regard to the U.S. Treasury Department's inability to confront its own biases is illustrative. In 1975, the Department rejected as "too radical" proposals to replace Thomas Jefferson's portrait on the $2 bill with that of a civil rights leader such as Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony [New York Times, 11/4/75, 14.1]. A few years later, the Secretary of the Treasury urged that a Grecian-robed abstraction fondly referred to as "Miss Liberty" would be more appropriate on the coin than a real woman [New York Times, 5/21/78. IV, 20.1]. A letter to the New York Times agreed, asserting that Liberty "is a woman as fully remarkable as Susan B. Anthony" [NYT , 12/26/78. 18/4] -- an absurd proposition, easily recognized as such if a generic togaed male figure were to be proffered to replace images of Washington and Lincoln. These statements reflect men's discomfort with recognizing women as powerful political actors whose actions have influenced -- and continue to do so -- our laws, our history, our economy, and all other important institutions.

Current curricular materials reveal that the historical deficit concerning women's fight for their rights has been never been remedied. We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, a widely praised program of the Center for Civic Education, funded by the Department of Education by act of Congress, correctly informs students that "male anti-slavery leaders refused to extend the vote to women" and instead "specifically included the term ‘male citizen' for the first time in the Constitution" but also speaks of women being "given" the right to vote and blandly explains that "the struggle to gain this right was long and difficult because it challenged strongly held beliefs about women's role in society." Who held these beliefs, who were privileged by denying the vote to women, and how the selective granting of rights affects a democracy goes unexamined. The writers of this curriculum would have been better advised to stick to the basic moment in constitutional history in 1776 when Abigail Adams urged John Adams to "in your new code of laws...put it out of the power of the vicious and lawless to use [women] with cruelty and indignity with impunity" to which the Founding Father replied, "Depend upon it, we know better to than to repeal our masculine systems."

It will take much more than engraving one woman's face on a coin to remedy two centuries of distortion, trivialization, concealment and neglect that have made our country's historical record largely, as scholar Laura Oren has described it, "the story of what great men did." But the Anthony dollar is a start, and we value it. The current officers of the U.S. Treasury have the opportunity --and the responsibility-- to model appropriate attitudes and behaviors which present women political historical figures seriously and respectfully on our coins and paper currency.

Rep. Mary Rose Oakar, sponsor of the House bill creating the Anthony dollar, stressed the hope that millions of people would get a history lesson each time they used the coin. "It will make all of our children aware of the role that women have played in history, " she said. [Washington Post, 7/2/79, A7.5]

We understand that there has been discussion of depicting a group of women historical figures on this coin. This notion reveals a lack of respect for the individual accomplishments of great women activists and an apparent desire to lump them together and thus dispose of the problem of recognizing distinguished women so that we can get back to ‘great men.' Other women should certainly be honored by coins and foremost on that list should be: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Alice Paul. The NOW Foundation would be pleased to recommend those important women leaders for separate coins and urges the department to plan for their depiction in the near future.

In a little more than one month we will be honoring great women who met in Seneca Falls, New York one hundred and fifty years ago to deliberate on the subordinated and disenfranchised position of their sex. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her committee issued the Declaration of Sentiments, a document emulating the Declaration of Independence, which asserted the equality of men and women and denounced the denial of women's basic rights. The women at this first Women's Rights Convention demanded "admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

It is a profound reproach to this democracy that, seven generations later, women are still waiting for that demand to be satisfied.