The U.S.A. has decided to put the portrait of a famous woman on the $20 dollar bill. But when the Treasury consulted the population to choose the woman, it changed its idea.
It decided to include women and Americans from ethnic minorities on lots of its new bills.
American paper money is boring. Unlike Euro notes, American dollar bills are all the same size and the same colours (black on the front and green on the back). And they all have a portrait on the front. (size = taille)
The portrait on the one-dollar bill is of America’s first president, George Washington.
All of the other bills have presidents, too (Thomas Jefferson on the $2 bill, Abraham Lincoln on the $5, etc.), except for the $10 bill. It has a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury (= finance minister). But all of the portraits have one thing in common – they are all men, and all white.
The organisation “Women on 20s” started a campaign to have a woman on the $20 bill by the year 2020.
Why 2020? Because it will be 100 years after women got the right to vote in the U.S.A.
Women on 20s asked Americans to choose a woman to put on the bill. More than a half a million people voted on the Internet. They chose Harriet Tubman. She was an exceptionally courageous person. She was born a slave in 1822, and after she escaped from slavery, she risked her life many times by returning to the South to help other slaves escape. (slave = esclave)
The U.S. Treasury has announced that it will put Tubman's portrait on the front of the $20 bill.
But it will also honour more people on the $5 and $10 bills. The back of the $5 will have people who marked the nation's history at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: civil-rights campaigners Martin Luther King, Marian Anderson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. And the back of the $10 will honour women who campaigned for women's right to vote: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul.
The Treasury has promised to have the designs for the new bills ready for 2020.
2. Quiz:
