David CookI go weak in the knees over Alice Paul. Always have, always will.
She represents the best of American conscience, protest and vision. In early 20th-century America, she introduced an unapologetic radicalism into the fight for voting rights. Whereas Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's suffragism had been mainstream and patient, Paul, who had trained with brick-throwing suffragists in Britain, was aggressive in all the right ways.
She picketed the White House during wartime. As Americans went to fight in World War I, Paul and other suffragists shouted: How can we fight for democracy overseas when we don't have it here?
She and fellow suffragists were harrassed. Shot at. Arrested. Fined. Assaulted. In 1917, she and other suffragists (some having been arrested on the bogus charge of obstructing sidewalk traffic) were sentenced to a prison workhouse.
In the face of solitary confinement, disgusting conditions and torture, Paul invoked the Gandhian tactic of self-suffering.
She stopped eating.
Her hunger strike provoked prison officials into more violence. They began tying her down each day and ramming a rubber tube down her throat in order to force-feed her.
Her story got smuggled out of prison and into the press. A shamed Congress soon voted on the 19th Amendment (40 years after it had been first proposed), which grandly, finally, gave women the right to vote.
To honor the 100th anniversary of suffragism, which comes in 2020, a national group - Women On 20s - is advocating for a new $20 bill that would replace Andrew Jackson with a heroic American woman.
Online at womenon20s.org, there is a list of 15 possible $20 women. You can vote. And gush.
There's the love-of-earth activism of Rachel Carson. The mystique-busting of Betty Friedan. The civil disobedience of Rosa Parks.
There's Sojourner Truth: a former slave turned fiery, mystical abolitionist who once bared her breasts to a white, pro-slavery crowd when they dared to ask if she was really a woman. (At another rally, pro-slavery folks threatened to burn down the building. According to Gail Collins' wonderful "America's Women," Truth then responded, "Then I will speak upon the ashes.")
There's Margaret Sanger, who, as Paul was fighting and being arrested for suffrage, was fighting and being arrested for birth control rights for American women.
Eleanor Roosevelt, the bravest first lady of all. Harriet Tubman, the slave-stealing braveheart whom slave-owners wanted dead.
It's a grand, glorious list of powerful American women.
And not one of them belongs on a $20.
Putting these women on a $20 is a distortion of American radicalism and feminism, and misses the entire point of what they did. It is a dishonor. It is pearls before swag.
(Martha Stewart? Beyonce? Sure, put them on the $20. Maybe even Oprah. But price-on-her-head Harriet Tubman?)
Linking radical women with mainstream currency is no honor. Spiritual courage does not equate to financial capital. Civil disobedience does not spring from the same soil as money, which, lest we forget, the saints remind us is the root of so much evil.
Yes, their fight involved money, especially equal pay. But money - especially the love of it - is intimately connected to the very forces women have been consistently fighting against.
The male gaze is often infatuated with two things: sex and money. With one eye, we objectify. With the other, we desire. It can be the female body, or the Benjamins. Sexism and greed are bifocals of one another.
(When they shoot the music videos and movies that seem so decadent - full of cash and thongs - would Rosa Parks' face be on the $20 bills they're rubbing all over one another?)
Spiritual courage does not belong on money. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's. The legacy these women left behind will always be non-monetized, always found in the pearls of great price.
Liberation.
Conscience.
Soul.
Those are the things money can never buy.
Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.