Poor Hamilton. You were already killed once.

With talk of replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill with a historically famous woman, Barnard hosted a discussion with US Treasurer Rosa Rios to talk about the process. Currency Connoisseur Betsy Ladyzhets headed over to the lecture and reports on the event.

Yesterday evening, US Treasurer Rosa Rios sat down with Barnard economics professor Anja Tolonen to discuss the current ongoing process of redesigning the ten dollar bill with a woman at its forefront. This process spans years of planning and a complicated series of bureaucratic steps, but ultimately, it aims to put women where they belong: in a place of recognition for their contributions to American history.

Rios herself is the 43rd treasurer of the US, part of a legacy of all-female treasurers since 1949. Her background in public service facilitating economic development prepared her for her role in advising Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, but her strong commitment to representation for women came later. Rios describes herself as an “accidental feminist,” who realized later in her life that feminism was not the strongly biased viewpoint she’d been taught it was. Now, she’s committed to promoting financial literacy and education, as well as intersectional representation both inside and outside government.

The discussion began with a brief explanation by Rios of the New Ten project’s current status. Since June, when the redesign was officially announced and the project’s official website launched, the treasury department has received suggestions from millions of people across the country (and the world) as to which woman’s face should grace the new bill. Rios hopes to release an official list of top contenders within the next few months, but the bill’s final designs won’t be unveiled until 2020. This new design, followed by the printing of new currency, will coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution – or, the hundredth anniversary of female suffrage in the US.

But why does the process take so long? Prof. Tolonen asked the same question. Rios explained that the process of developing security features to combat counterfeiting is very lengthy, as numerous research labs across the country are involved in various parts of the process. Combatting counterfeiting is, after all, the primary reason why currency is redesigned in the first place. The aesthetic design of a new bill is usually the last decision made, but in this case, that decision is being given more time and weight because, as Rios put it, “it can’t be early enough to have these conversations.”

Prof. Tolonen also asked if this redesign could truly be considered a “landmark victory for women” in an age in which paper money is quickly becoming obsolete. Actually, Rios replied, paper money isn’t becoming obsolete – in fact, during her time in office, the number of bills printed by the national bank rose from 800 billion to 1.3 trillion. Contrary to popular belief, paper money is still the primary form of currency, so female representation on that currency is still relevant.

The redesign is only a landmark victory for American women, though. As Rios pointed out, currency in many other countries has long carried female faces. “I like to think that we’re being progressive,” she said, “but really we’re catching up.” Still, she hopes that the new ten will have a wider impact on women’s economic rights in the US by inspiring conversations about issues such as the wage gap and paid maternity leave.

A question from a student in the audience led Rios to describe how, exactly, this project came into fruition. The idea started when she first started working for the treasury department, as part of a team brought on to help combat the financial crisis in 2008. While exploring the treasury system, Rios found the Bureau of Engraving and Printing – the bureau responsible for designing currency, as well as numerous official certificates and those really nice pages inside our passports. She looked through the designs, all of these fancy engravings meant to “represent our values” as a country, and couldn’t find any real women. The only women she saw were allegorical, representing truth, or justice, or other abstract ideals – and, she said, they all “looked like the statue of Liberty.”

Rios then went to the director of the Bureau and asked a simple question: “Why haven’t we ever had a woman on our paper currency?”

He gave her a simple answer: “The question has never come up before.”

So, when Rios was offered a more permanent position in the treasury department, she took it with one goal in mind: getting women on our currency. For years, she followed the process leading up to currency redesign, by analyzing counterfeit data, doing research, and eventually asking Secretary Lew if a woman could find a place on the ten dollar bill. He “got it right away,” she said – after all, in her words, “why wouldn’t we represent half the electorate on our currency?”

But her story begged the question: why the ten dollar bill? That bill was chosen purely because of counterfeiting threats, Rios explained; the ten dollar bill has less security features than other, bigger bills, and, as a result, is victim to counterfeiting more than any other US currency. That – not any personal grudge against the man it honors – made it the top candidate for redesign.

“This was never supposed to be a conversation about Hamilton versus Jackson,” Rios said. She expressed regret that the media had turned her feminist project into a contest between two male politicians, saying, “I wanted this to be a conversation about the contributions women have made in our history.”

Rios stated that one of her main goals with this project is “to absolutely preserve the integrity of Alexander Hamilton.” So, don’t despair: the ten dollar founding father will hopefully remain, at least in some capacity, the ten dollar founding father.

Still, the most pressing question on the audience’s minds remained at large: who? Which worthy woman will be stuffed into our purses, our cash registers, and our piggy banks? Rios was unable to be very specific, but she mentioned the names of a few women who have come up again and again in the #TheNew10 social media stream: Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other well-known activists, innovators, and leaders, as well as a few names that might not have appeared in your high school US history textbooks. Part of the reason this discussion is so important is because (as the audience members demonstrated by their inability to come up with many names when Rios asked for suggestions) many Americans have not been taught about important female contributions to our history. Picking a woman to grace our ten dollar bills forces people to realize that there are, believe it or not, women in American history who deserve to be on our currency. In fact, there are so many deserving women that the decision Secretary Lew will eventually have to make will be a very difficult one.

If this design was decided by public poll, though, Rios claimed that there would be a clear winner: Juliette Gordon Low. The Girl Scouts aren’t satisfied with ample cookie sales anymore, it seems – they want their founder on the ten dollar bill.

After this bill is redesigned, there’s no saying what the treasury department might do next. The department hopes to redesign more currency to make the themes of democracy and inclusion more prominent in American money – to represent the true ideals of our country. Rios mentioned that the only two restrictions placed on currency redesign are that Americans can only be represented on currency after their deaths, and that the one dollar bill must remain unchanged (history still has its eyes on you, George Washington.) So, which bill might be next? The twenty? The five? All Rios could say is that her department has “a definite interest in looking at a lot of options,” and that this bill is “only the beginning.”

Rios ended the event on an inspirational note, talking about feminism in a broader sense and applying her ideals of democracy and intersectional representation to more than just currency. She also described her reaction to those who opposed the New Ten:

“One person came up to me and said, ‘What’re you trying to do, you trying to rewrite history?’ And I said, ‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. I want to write women into history.’”