U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters Program 2022 quarters.
Credit: US Mint

Check your change for some new faces! The United States Mint has released the first of the American Women Quarters Program. The program will feature prominent women in American history. The mint is a place where coins are made. In the United States and most other countries, only the government may mint (manufacture) money. American mints are supervised by the United States Mint, a division of the Department of the Treasury. Mints now operate in Denver, Colorado; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; and West Point, N.Y. They make only coins.

The first five women featured on quarters will be the poet and scholar Maya Angelou, the first American woman in space Dr. Sally Ride, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and activist Wilma Mankiller, the Hispanic suffragist and politician Nina Otero-Warren, and the trailblazing Asian American actress Anna May Wong.

On the other side of the quarter will be George Washington facing right, a design made by Laura Gardin Fraser. Fraser’s design was submitted for the 1932 commemorative quarter for George Washington’s 200th birthday. However, the treasury secretary chose a different design by John Flannigan.

The mint began shipping quarters featuring Maya Angelou on Jan. 10, 2022. Angelou was an American writer who drew from the Black American storytelling tradition. She wove humor, wisdom, and folk sayings into her writing. Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. She spent much of her early life in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou was best known for her series of autobiographical writings, especially I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). It tells about the author’s childhood in the segregated rural South and her transition to urban life. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, in 2011. Angelou died on May 28, 2014.

Make sure to keep an eye out for these legendary women in your pocket change. The mint will be releasing more quarters in the American Women Quarters program through 2025.

July 24, 2012

United States astronaut Sally Ride died on July 23 at the age of 61. Ride was the first American woman–and, at the age of 32, the youngest American–to fly in space. Her flight aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 inspired many young women to pursue careers in science, mathematics, and technology at a time when men still overwhelmingly dominated those fields.

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles. She studied at Stanford University, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and physics in 1973, a master’s degree in physics in 1975, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978. During her time at Stanford, Ride became a nationally ranked tennis player and briefly considered a career as a professional. However, she instead answered a job advertisement posted by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and was accepted as an astronaut candidate in January 1978. By that time, the Soviet Union had already sent a woman into space. Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times in 1963.

Sally K. Ride became the first U.S. woman in space on June 18, 1983. In this photograph, Ride eats a meal on the shuttle Challenger during her second shuttle flight in October 1984. (courtesy of NASA)

In her early years at NASA, Ride studied engineering and contributed to the development of a robotic arm for the space shuttle. That work, in part, brought her to the attention of Captain Robert L. Crippen, who chose her to serve as a mission specialist aboard the Challenger mission he commanded in 1983. A crowd of some 250,000 people at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, chanted “Ride, Sally Ride” as the shuttle took off on June 18. During the nearly six-day mission, Ride used the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite. She flew a second mission aboard Challenger in 1984 and was slated to fly a third. However, when Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in January 1986, future flights were suspended, and Ride retired from NASA in 1987. Then-President Ronald Reagan appointed her to serve on the commission investigating the tragedy, in which seven crew members were killed. Ride later also served on the federal panel investigating the second shuttle disaster–the disintegration of Columbia in February 2003 as it reentered the atmosphere after a mission. All seven crew members aboard were killed.

In 1989, Ride became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the California Space Institute. In 2001, she founded a company called Sally Ride Science that creates science programs for upper elementary and middle school students, their teachers, and their parents. According to Ride, she wanted to “make science and engineering cool again.”

Upon hearing of her death, President Barack Obama called Ride “a national hero and a powerful role model.” But perhaps Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. magazine and a leading supporter of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, best captured the impact of Ride’s achievement when she said in 1983, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers, and scientists.”

Additional World Book articles:

• Space exploration 1983 (Back in Time article)
• Space exploration 1984 (Back in Time article)