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Anthony, Mott, Truth, Stanton and Paul: Meet the Women on the New $10 Bill

Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul will be on the new $10 bill. A look at their achievements.
Image: Alice Paul; Lucretia Mott; Susan B. Anthony; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Sojourner Truth
Alice Paul; Lucretia Mott; Susan B. Anthony; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Sojourner TruthAP; Library of Congress; Library of Congress; AP; Hulton Archive via Getty Images

The replacement of Andrew Jackson on the front of the new $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman isn’t the only change to new versions of U.S. currency announced Wednesday — five leaders of the women’s suffrage movement will also be featured on the back of the $10 bill.

Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul will be on the back of the bill, the Treasury Department announced. Alexander Hamilton’s image will still appear on the front of the $10 bill.

"I'm very excited by it and I think it's much bigger than just honoring one woman," Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told NBC News. "This is about saying that our money is going to tell a much bigger part of our story."

Here’s a look at the women who will be on the new $10 bill and what they achieved.

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)

Image: Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), American Feminist, Reformer and Abolitionist, Portrait, circa 1860's.Universal History Archive / UIG via Getty Images

A Quaker from Massachusetts, Mott was an abolitionist and fighter for women’s suffrage who along with others formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the first women’s rights convention in 1848 held at Seneca Falls, New York.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal,” read one of the beginning lines of the "Declaration of Sentiments," which emerged from that convention and which Mott is listed at the top of a list of signers.

The Seneca Falls convention is considered by some as launching the women's rights movement. Mott, considered a gifted and moving speaker, lectured widely and was an advocate of women's rights throughout her life. Mott was president of the American Equal Rights Association, which called for equality for women and African Americans.

“Let our lives be in accordance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles," Mott said in an 1849 sermon in Philadelphia, according to “Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons."

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)

Image: Sojourner Truth
Portrait of African-American orator and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth (1797 - 1883), 1860s.Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth fled a plantation owner after New York passed a law ending slavery in the state and went on to become a preacher and orator regarded as one of the greatest advocates for human rights in the 19th century.

She delivered an address at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, that according to a later account, became titled "Ar'nt I a Woman?" and fought against slavery and for fugitive slaves throughout her life.

After a religious epiphany in 1843, she changed her name Isabella to Sojourner Truth, and believed she was called by God to fight for the abolition of slavery. “The Spirit calls me, and I must go,” she told friends. Smithsonian magazine in 2014 called her one of the 100 most influential Americans of all time.

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

Image: Susan B. Anthony
Social reformer and women's suffrage movement leader Susan B. Anthony is shown in this undated photo at an unknown location. Anthony co-founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.AP, file

One of the most recognized figures of the women’s suffrage movement, Congress in 1978 passed a bill naming a dollar coin after the social reformer.

Anthony was a founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and was arrested in 1872 for voting in the presidential election. She was found guilty and fined $100, which she refused to pay.

Anthony said she was convicted by “laws made by men, under a government of men, interpreted by men and for the benefit of men,” according to an account in the Kansas Leavenworth Times from 1873, which is online at Rutgers University.

“The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law, as I have done, and as I shall continue to do,” Anthony said, according to the account.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Image: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Shown in an undated photo are head and shoulder shots of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mrs. Stanton helped organized the world's first women's rights convention which met in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. She became first President of National Women's Suffrage Association and held that office from 1869-1890.AP

Another leading figure in the women’s suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the women’s rights convention in 1848 and was a longtime collaborator with Anthony for women’s suffrage.

Hailed as an outstanding orator and chief philosopher of the women’s rights movement, Stanton coauthored “History of Woman Suffrage” and was first president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. Stanton is credited with popularizing women’s suffrage movement with the public.

“We are persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, tax-payers; yet are we denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no voice in your councils,” Stanton said in an address to New York Legislature in 1854.

“We have every qualification required by the constitution, necessary to the legal voter, but the one of sex,” she said.

Alice Paul (1885-1977)

Image: Alice Paul
Among the passengers arriving at Plymouth from America on the liner Washington was Alice Paul, who was once imprisoned in England and the United States for her activities in the woman's suffrage movement. Alice Paul is on her way to Geneva to open the headquarters of the world's woman's party there. Alice Paul pictured on arrival at Plymouth, England, on May 24, 1939.AP, file

Paul has been described as chief strategist for a vocal and confrontational wing of the women’s suffrage movement that led to the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.

She founded the Congressional Union, later known as the National Woman's Party, and took a more aggressive stance than the National American Woman Association, and one that was focused on a national amendment.

Members of the group picketed the White House and, after the U.S. entered World War I, referred to President Woodrow Wilson as “Kaiser Wilson.”

Protesters were arrested and jailed after refusing to pay fines, and Paul and others staged hunger strikes that led to force feeding by authorities. Outrage over that treatment led Wilson to change course and support a national amendment, according to the Alice Paul Institute.

Paul continued to fight for equality even after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

“It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun,” Paul said. "There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women ... Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically."