(Bank)notes for women!

You may have followed the Women on Banknotes campaign earlier this year (led by Caroline Criado-Perez - who received a lot of abuse on Twitter for her successful campaign). She started a petition (which garnered 35,000 signatures) to appeal the decision to replace the only representation of a woman on British banknotes currently in circulation (Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer) with yet another man (Winston Churchill). The campaign was successful, in that old WC (£5) will still be replacing Lizzie F (in 2016), but in, turn, Charles Darwin (£10) will be replaced (in 2017) by a new female person, Jane Austen.

So why am I complaining? There’s still going to be a woman on a banknote!

The thing is, including those two new, yet-to-be-released notes, there have been seventeen people on British banknotes, since the introduction of putting people on ’em, in 1970. Three of whom have been or will be women (Florence Nightingale did a long stint on the tenner 1975-1994; Elizabeth Fry rocked up on the fiver in 2002 and is still in circulation). That means that, overall, between 1970 and 2017, 17% of people on banknotes were female. Now, that is a totally stupid and useless statistic, I’ll admit. As any able-minded person can work out, from the information here given, for eight years there wasn’t a single woman on a bank note!

So I say: let’s have eight years where it’s only women on ’em!

(And then another four decades where seventy-five percent of the folk represented are women.)  After all, it’s only fair. Speaking of being fair, let’s try to steer clear of stereotypically acceptably-feminine professions such as nursing and writing Romance novels. I’ve stuck to British (obviously) and deceased as well, as, somehow, putting someone who’s still alive on a banknote feels a bit too ‘Cult of Personality’ for me.

Here are my suggestions:

The one to ease us in:

James Miranda Stuart Barry (c. 1789-1799 – 25 July 1865): after graduating from University of Edinburgh Medical School, James Barry had a fantastic career which spanned five decades as a military surgeon. When he died, the year after he retired, it transpired that he was actually a woman. Margaret Ann Bulkley had disguised herself as a man in order to get into medical school, so that she could fund her family, who had fallen on hard times. She managed to keep up the charade for her entire life. (She even snuck off to Mauritius to have a baby at one point!)  No woman before her had graduated as a doctor.

The intersectional one:

Mary Jane Seacole (1805 – 14 May 1881): the child of a Scot and a Creole, Mary Seacole, basically did what Florence Nightingale did, whilst simultaneously battling the prejudices of her peers (including Florrie N), which were aroused due to the fact that Mary was not entirely white. The British War Office refused her offer of assistance when the Crimean War broke out, so she took herself out to Balaclava and set up her own hospital (“hotel”) independently. (Okay, I said I’d steer clear of nurses, but she was awesome, and she also would be a useful play in terms of recognising that not everyone who did good stuff for Britain was an upper- or middle-class white dude or dudette.)  

The mathematician:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852): the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. Originally charged with translating someone else’s work, she ended up developing it as well. She wrote the first algorithm intended to be read by a machine - she was the first computer programmer.

The early proponent for racial equality, AKA the one who, as she said herself, was definitely not a feminist:

Mary Henrietta Kingsley (13 October 1862 – 3 June 1900): an ethnographer who, at a time when the only women visiting Africa were the wives of missionaries, set out to explore Africa on her own, producing two works - Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). She worked to raise the notion that there should be no hierarchies based on skin colour, and she died whilst volunteering as a nurse during the Second Boer War.

The Wild(ing) card:

Emily Wilding Davison (11 October 1872 – 8 June 1913): a militant activist for women’s suffrage , Emily Davison died due to injuries incurred by being trampled by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, whilst attempting to promote votes for women. Once, whilst serving time in Holloway Prison (for arson - though Suffragette arson was responsible, in that they took pains only ever to damage property, not people), she threw herself down a ten-metre iron staircase in an attempt to divert the guards who were force-feeding her and her hunger-striking sisters. She also, in 1911, hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, so that she could legitimately claim, on the census of that year, to live in the House of Commons.

The jitsuka:

Edith Margaret Garrud (1872–1971): trained the Bodyguard - a thirty-woman-strong group of suffragettes charged with protecting high-profile members of the Women’s Social and Political Union once the Cat and Mouse Act had been passed. Mary was one of the first, Western, female instructors of martial arts, and practised a form of (my own, much-loved) Jiu Jitsu. She was introduced to it by Edward William Barton-Wright (founder of Bartitsu), and she, with her husband, co-ran Sadakazu Uyenishi’s jujutsu school in Soho, teaching the women’s and children’s classes, once he had returned to Japan.

The musician:

Alexandra Elene Maclean "Sandy" Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978): Sandy Denny, after a brief stint in nursing, started out performing folk songs (and accompanying herself), including appearances on the BBC. She joined the folk band Fairport Convention to stretch her vocal talent and to write her own songs, including “Who knows where the time goes”. She, later, formed her own band, Fotheringay. Sandy sadly died young, as a result of substance abuse, so perhaps is not a perfect candidate if we’re looking for a role model, but since that isn’t necessarily the case (I wouldn’t suggest anyone follow Emily Davison’s example either), I thought I’d put her on the list. I was going to add Evelyn Glennie (the profoundly deaf, virtuoso percussionist) but, happily, she’s still alive.

So, those are some of my choices, but we’re certainly not going to populate banknotes for the next forty years with only seven options; who would you like to see on our paper currency? I’d love to know of some more recent women who should be celebrated! Go on! Have a think, and let me know!