Banknote blunders

So Caroline Criado-Perez from The Women's Room UK has started a new petition on Change.org which is appealing to Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, about the figures pictured on our pound sterling bank notes. Social reformer Elizabeth Fry is scheduled to be removed from the face of the £5 note in 2016 and replaced with Sir Winston Churchill. If this happens it would mean that all 4 of the note denominations (£5, £10, £20, £50) would depict men only. I agree that this is unacceptable so I signed the petition.

You can too, here

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bank-of-england-keep-a-woman-on-english-banknotes

She suggests some women who would be suitable for replacement instead:

"Mary Wollstonecraft: in the vindication she wrote about how if you treat women like vapid children, that's the kind of women that will get produced -- she wrote forcefully about a culture that didn't give women a chance to flourish, and those insights are backed up now by a growing field of research into role models.

Mary Seacole: she was an amazing woman fighting oppression on two fronts and who just wouldn't take no for an answer; she did what she set out to do, she got to the Crimean war on her own and is a great role model for women today who still face obstacles and oppression.

Rosalind Franklin: she has been unfairly expunged from history despite her indisputable and crucial contribution to discovering the DNA double helix -- she's in many ways the poster girl for the way women are ignored and diminished. Watson and Crick won a Nobel Prize, they barely acknowledged her work which enabled them to get that prize, and she died with hardly anyone knowing who she was and what she did.

George Eliot: she's a brilliant author and wrote at a time where she had to hide her sex in order for her work to be taken seriously and judged on its own merits -- and as soon as her sex was revealed, the tone of the reviews about her books noticeably changed, with reviewers talking about the 'coarseness' and 'appropriateness' of her writing. She also broke boundaries in her personal life, 'living in sin' with her lover. "

 

These are good choices. All have made valuable contributions to society in their own ways. My personal preference, as someone who is "into science" has to be Rosalind Franklin, an X-ray crystallographer, who was largely responsible for the data used in the work that Watson and Crick were later credited for, in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. It was a tragedy that she was not recognised at the time and the whole episode smacks of “mansplaining” to me. Nah, worse that that. A cover up to deny credit where credit was due. Tantamount to the usurping of a deserved Nobel prize. It would be a slap in the face to that whole shebang to have her on our notes.

 

The part of the petition I'm not too happy about was the proposal to remove Charles Darwin from the £10 note he deservedly occupies, mainly because he's been there the longest. This reasoning doesn't really hold up – the length of time the notes depicting a person are in circulation varies from between approximately 10 to 20 years, in the most recent series D and series E edition notes. Seeing as Darwin's note has been in circulation about 12.5 years and Fry's 11 years, it is not to much of a stretch to think that Fry could be taken off first. By 2016 her note will be 14 years old and Darwin won't have much longer left either if precedent is anything to go by.

So the strongest argument here is easily the gender balance issue and the strong contribution of women. That sentence about removing Darwin is a bit like scientific heresy! Seriously though, I would like to see him do the full stint of 20 years. If he comes up for early change, I might start my own petition for just that purpose.

 

But I definitely agree with the petition in that if Fry must be replaced, it should be with another woman. Preferably Franklin. And come 2017, economic pioneer Adam Smith would have been in circulation for 10 years on the £20 note and he could then be replaced with another woman for example George Eliot, which would square up the ratio 50:50. It's worth another campaign at the time I think!