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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2892 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be? I would vote for Laura Ingalls Wilder.

@hydroacetylene suggested Bessie Coleman, which prompted some "literally who" responses. I never heard of her myself. Looking her up, I'm assuming she's a Texas regional thing, like Juneteenth. Of course, like Juneteenth, the feds could be happy to use a Texas regional thing nationwide if it pleases the correct demographics.

@sarker suggested Louisa May Alcott.

@erwgv3g34 suggested Amelia Earhart.

Ayn Rand would be funny but not a realistic one.

I think there was a suggestion for Harriet Tubman years ago. I think a gun toting Republican woman of color would please and enrage enough people that it would be a nice compromise.

Amelia Earhart is a very good suggestion. I think my criteria would be pre-1950, not a DEI exaggeration of her accomplishments, non-political, not the wife of a more famous man as that’s a bit demeaning. Earhart has a nice feminist aspect, with bravery and technical competence. I would nominate these:

Laura Ingalls Wilder as kind of a stand-in for the bravery and hard work of women on the frontier, as well as their literary contributions.

Lilian Gish representing women in entertainment/Hollywood. Though maybe her involvement in Birth of a Nation disqualifies her. However, importantly Gish was gorgeous, and would make for beautiful money.

Emily Dickinson representing women’s contribution to literature, especially poetry.

Maybe Grandma Moses?

My issue is all of these feel sort of DEI. Why Earhart and not Lindbergh? Why Dickinson and not Whitman? Why Gish and not Chaplin? I guess Wilder would be my top choice followed by Gish, but more as emblematic of women on the frontier than her specifically.

Amelia Earhart is a very good suggestion. I think my criteria would be pre-1950, not a DEI exaggeration

Earhart's achievements were exaggerated by the 1st-wave feminists of the time for DEI reasons, and continue to be. Dalrock brought receipts

Your list makes me consider Hedy Lamarr. Her achievements as an engineer are somewhat exaggerated for DEI reasons (the US navy didn't take her work on frequency hopping forward at the time, and the people who developed CDMA probably weren't aware of it) but her achievements as an actress are not.

achievements as an actress

What's next, achievements as a prostitute?

Find some mother of ten kids, all or most of which turned out well, who worked herself to the bones all her life long in order to support the family. Make sure she was married to an industrious and law-abiding husband all the while.

Put that on money, and watch the feminists squirm while actual women living real lives get some representation.

Dr. Jill Biden, 46th POTUS.

Edith Wilson got there first.

The reverse side should have the picture of the autopen.

Emily Dickinson

If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be?

The statue of liberty

If there still hasn't been a female President 10 years after Nancy Pelosi dies, then this question will have an easy answer. She is by far the most significant female political leader in the US to date.

Right now, I don't see any advance on Susan B Anthony, who was on the 1979 dollar coin for a good reason. She was also a leading candidate when the Obama administration wanted to replace Hamilton and/or Jackson with women.

It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.

It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.

I'm not sure why they chose Jane Austen instead of Florence Nightingale. The woman who invented modern nursing vs a woman who wrote six books about thinly veiled author inserts finding rich husbands. My guess is that the civil servants who decide are more likely to be English Lit graduates than nurses.

They change the portraits roughly every 20 years - Florence Nightingale was on the £10 from 1975-1994, making her the first woman to appear on British money who was neither the Queen nor Britannia.

I stand corrected. I wonder who's next. Hopefully not Mary Seacole.

I would favour Rosalind Franklin. Agatha Christie is the other obvious candidate.

I don't think anyone knows what Ada Lovelace looked like, and her achievements are overrated anyway. J K Rowling is still alive, which rules her out. Enid Blyton is too politically incorrect to be a serious candidate. Emmeline Pankhurst hasn't been on a banknote, and if she counts as a politician she probably won't be - Churchill is the only politician featured to date.

She is by far the most significant female political leader in the US to date.

I'd say Eleanor Roosevelt, depending on the definition of "political leader", for her work on UDHR, which has had humongous effect on global politics and ideology ever since its declaration.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or Sacagawea.

Maybe add Sally Hemings to the $2 alongside Thomas Jefferson?

LOL Ayn Rand would be hilarious. Would love to see that.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would be amazing. I basically grew up with her Little House book series (the first proper novel sized book I ever read was her Little House in the Big Woods). A few years ago I read the recently published Pioneer Girl which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who wants to get a good idea of what it was like living in the then desolate American Midwest in the 1870s.

I even spent a fair amount of time cataloging her family tree and learning about them from other sources on the internet. For instance Charles Ingalls was a Freemason, which was of course good to see. I'd have liked to have had the chance to meet some of her descendants today but unfortunately the whole line has died out, even including her sisters' descendants.

Abiah Folger, Benjamin Franklin’s mother. She had ten children.

To be clear, if I was dictator of the US, and I decided not to do a maximum troll answer(let’s have $5 bills assigned to have Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schafly at random…), I’d probably do Elizabeth Ann Seton and send the first run as bonuses to schoolteachers.

Bessie Coleman simply seems like an answer that makes everyone happy.

I'm starting to think you're Coleman's descendant.

I’m not black, but it’s difficult to use her for political shitflinging and pilots licenses seem worth celebrating so no one will mind overcelebrating the black woman- and her being a black woman makes the ‘we need a literally who’ crowd happy.

Molly Pitcher

I would vote for Laura Ingalls Wilder.

She was canceled a while ago.

NPR:

A division of the American Library Association voted unanimously Saturday to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from a major children's literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks.

In 1935's Little House on the Prairie, for example, Wilder described one setting as a place where "there were no people. Only Indians lived there." That description was changed in later editions of the book. And multiple characters in the Little House series intone that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

National Review:

Most news stories covering the travesty of renaming the Wilder medal have cited the earliest known objection to Wilder’s representation of the Kansas landscape in Little House on the Prairie (1935) as empty of people. “There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.” Until 1953, the text read, “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” A reader complained in 1952 to Nordstrom. Her response to the reader clearly reflected her horrified shock at the realization of how the passage read. “I must admit to you that no one here realized that these words read as they did. Reading them now it seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person who has picked them up and written us about them in the twenty years since the book was published.” The letter emphasized the response of everyone at Harpers & Row: “We were disturbed by your letter. We knew that Mrs. Wilder had not meant to imply that Indians were not people.” Indeed, Wilder responded just as Nordstrom predicted. “Your letter came this morning,” Wilder wrote on October 4, 1952. “You are perfectly right about the fault in Little House on the Prairie and have my permission to make the correction as you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not intend to imply they were not.”

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