MARCH 8
2022•American Women Quarters
1899•Lafayette Dollar Authorized
The First American Women Quarters Proof Set Goes on Sale
On March 8, 2022—International Women's Day—the United States Mint released the first Proof Set devoted to the new American Women Quarters Program. The five San Francisco proof quarters honored writer Maya Angelou, astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller, suffrage leader Nina Otero-Warren and Hollywood trailblazer Anna May Wong. Together, they launched a four-year series that would place twenty women from American history on circulating quarters and introduce a dramatically different portrait of George Washington on the obverse.
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For ninety years, George Washington had dominated the quarter.
The reverse had changed many times.
The obverse had remained familiar.
Then 2022 brought a major transformation.
Five women appeared on five new reverses.
And even Washington looked different.
A New Quarter Program Begins
The American Women Quarters Program was authorized by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020.
The law directed the United States Mint to issue up to five quarter designs per year from 2022 through 2025.
Each reverse would honor a prominent American woman.
The subjects could come from fields including suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space and the arts.
With five honorees scheduled annually, the complete program would feature twenty women.
The structure followed the successful model of earlier rotating quarter programs.
State Quarters had explored geography.
America the Beautiful had explored national parks and historic sites.
American Women would center biography.
The first dedicated American Women Quarters Proof Set went on sale on March 8.
The date was especially appropriate: March 8 is observed internationally as International Women's Day.
The set contained proof versions of all five 2022 quarter designs.
They were struck at the San Francisco Mint and carried the S mintmark.
Proof coins are specially manufactured for collectors rather than ordinary circulation.
Modern proof production uses carefully prepared dies and planchets.
The coins are struck to produce sharp detail and strong contrast between design elements and reflective fields.
The result allows collectors to study the artwork in a form very different from a quarter worn by months of pocket change.
Five Women, Five Different Stories
The inaugural set honored:
- Maya Angelou
- Dr. Sally Ride
- Wilma Mankiller
- Nina Otero-Warren
- Anna May Wong
The group spans literature, science, tribal leadership, political activism and film.
It also reflects different racial, ethnic and cultural experiences within American history.
Maya Angelou was a writer, poet, performer, educator and civil-rights activist.
Her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, became one of the most influential American memoirs of the twentieth century.
Her writing explored identity, racism, trauma, dignity and resilience.
Angelou's career extended far beyond books.
She worked as a journalist, actress, director and teacher.
She participated in the civil-rights movement and worked with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
In 1993, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton's inauguration.
The reverse was designed by Emily Damstra and sculpted by Craig A. Campbell.
Angelou appears with her arms uplifted.
Behind her are a bird in flight and a rising sun.
The composition evokes themes associated with her writing and life without attempting to illustrate one literal scene.
The Maya Angelou quarter became especially significant because she was the first Black woman depicted on a circulating United States coin.
That distinction gave the first release of the American Women program immediate historical importance.
The quarter began shipping into circulation before the March 8 Proof Set release, so March 8 should not be confused with the coin's first circulation appearance.
Dr. Sally Ride was a physicist and astronaut.
On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.
She flew a second shuttle mission in 1984.
Her achievements made her one of the most recognizable figures in American spaceflight history.
A Scientist Before and After Spaceflight
Ride earned advanced degrees in physics from Stanford University.
After leaving NASA, she became a professor and worked extensively to encourage young people—especially girls—to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
She later helped establish Sally Ride Science.
The reverse was designed by Elana Hagler and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill.
Ride appears beside a window on the space shuttle.
Earth is visible beyond.
The design emphasizes both the astronaut and the view that defined her historic profession.
The Mint's artistic description drew inspiration from Ride's own reflections on viewing Earth from space.
The quarter avoids rockets and launch imagery.
Instead, it captures a quieter moment of observation.
That makes the design unusually intimate for a space-themed American coin.
Wilma Mankiller became the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
She served as principal chief from 1985 to 1995.
Her leadership emphasized community development, education, health care and tribal self-determination.
Mankiller's political consciousness developed partly through Native activism and her experiences with federal relocation policy.
After returning to Oklahoma, she became deeply involved in Cherokee community projects.
Her rise to principal chief represented both a personal achievement and a significant moment in modern Native political history.
The reverse was designed and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill.
Mankiller appears in a determined portrait.
The seven-pointed star of the Cherokee Nation appears beside her.
The inscriptions include CHEROKEE NATION and PRINCIPAL CHIEF.
The design also includes ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, representing “Cherokee Nation” in the Cherokee syllabary.
The presence of Cherokee writing on a circulating U.S. quarter is historically meaningful.
It places a Native nation's own written language directly into the federal coinage landscape.
Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren was an educator, suffragist and political leader from New Mexico.
She played an important role in the campaign for women's voting rights.
She also became the first Hispanic woman to run for Congress.
Making Suffrage Bilingual
Otero-Warren recognized that New Mexico's political culture required outreach in both English and Spanish.
She insisted that suffrage materials be distributed bilingually.
That strategy helped connect the national women's suffrage movement to Spanish-speaking communities in the Southwest.
The reverse was designed by Chris Costello and sculpted by Craig A. Campbell.
Otero-Warren's portrait is framed by yucca flowers.
The inscription VOTO PARA LA MUJER—“Votes for Women”—appears prominently.
The Spanish-language inscription is central to the story the coin tells.
The Otero-Warren design does more than identify a suffragist.
It shows how political movements adapt to local culture.
New Mexico was multilingual and multicultural.
The quarter preserves that history in three Spanish words.
Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood.
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, she entered motion pictures during the silent-film era.
Her career extended across film, television, theater and international productions.
Wong confronted an industry shaped by racial stereotypes and discriminatory casting practices.
Anti-miscegenation rules and Hollywood conventions limited the roles available to Asian American actors.
Major Asian characters were often given to white performers in makeup.
Wong nevertheless built an international career and became a fashion and cultural icon.
The reverse was designed by Emily Damstra and sculpted by John P. McGraw.
Wong's face dominates the composition.
Her hand rests near her chin in a pose evoking the dramatic close-up style of classic cinema.
The design is visually unlike most traditional portrait coins.
Wong became the first Asian American featured on U.S. currency intended for circulation.
Her quarter broadened the range of people represented on everyday American money.
For a denomination handled by millions of people, that visibility carries significance beyond the collector market.
A New Washington Portrait
The reverses were only half the transformation.
The American Women quarters introduced a different portrait of George Washington on the obverse.
The design was created by sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser.
Remarkably, she had made it ninety years earlier.
In preparation for the bicentennial of Washington's birth, artists submitted designs for a new 1932 quarter.
Fraser's portrait was highly regarded by the design commission.
But Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon selected John Flanagan's design instead.
Flanagan's Washington became the familiar quarter portrait used for generations.
For the American Women Quarters Program, the Mint selected Fraser's Washington portrait for the obverse.
That gave a design created in 1931 a new life in 2022.
It also made the program's obverse itself part of women's numismatic history.
A woman sculptor's long-rejected Washington portrait finally appeared on circulating quarters.
Laura Gardin Fraser was not an obscure artist.
She designed major classic commemorative coins, including the 1921 Alabama Centennial half dollar and 1922 Grant Memorial coins.
She also designed medals and sculpture.
Her husband, James Earle Fraser, created the Buffalo nickel.
That history gives the American Women quarters an unusual temporal depth.
The women on the reverses represent stories spanning many eras.
The Washington portrait itself reaches back to an artistic competition from the Great Depression era.
The program revived an alternate path American coinage might have taken in 1932.
The selection process involved the Treasury Department, the U.S. Mint, the Smithsonian Institution's American Women's History Initiative, the National Women's History Museum and public input.
The Secretary of the Treasury made final selections.
The program was designed to represent achievements from a wide range of fields and backgrounds.
A national park quarter asks, “Where is this place?”
A biographical quarter asks, “Who was this person?”
That question can lead far beyond numismatics.
Angelou leads to literature and civil rights.
Ride leads to space exploration.
Mankiller leads to tribal sovereignty.
Otero-Warren leads to suffrage and bilingual politics.
Wong leads to immigration, race and Hollywood.
The Coins Are Introductions, Not Complete Biographies
No quarter can explain an entire life.
A portrait and a few inscriptions necessarily simplify.
The value of the program lies partly in prompting further inquiry.
The coin becomes a doorway rather than a textbook.
Before rotating quarter programs, many Americans could go years without seeing a fundamentally new reverse design.
By 2022, changing quarters had become expected.
The American Women series used that expectation to place people previously absent from circulating U.S. coinage into everyday transactions.
The Philadelphia and Denver versions were intended for broader distribution.
San Francisco proofs were collector pieces.
The designs were the same in basic subject matter, but the proof finish presented them as miniature works of medallic art.
The March 8 set allowed collectors to acquire all five inaugural designs together in that format.
This distinction matters.
The Maya Angelou quarter had already begun shipping into circulation in January 2022.
Other 2022 designs followed on their own schedules.
March 8 specifically marks the sale of the first American Women Quarters Proof Set, not the first appearance of the program in any form.
Releasing the proof set on March 8 connected the collector product with a date internationally associated with women's achievements and equality.
The timing gave the Mint a natural opportunity to highlight the purpose of the new series.
The five coins themselves provided five very different examples of women's contributions to American history.
The 2022 women were only the beginning.
Future years would honor additional figures from politics, activism, science, art, aviation, journalism, medicine, sports and other fields.
By design, no single year's group could represent the full range of American women's history.
The strength of the program comes from accumulation.
A collector could follow the program through circulation finds.
Or collect proof sets.
Or pursue Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco issues.
Or build a thematic collection around particular women.
The structure encouraged both casual participation and specialized collecting.
A Significant Moment in Representation
Women had appeared on American coins before 2022.
Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea had appeared on dollar coins.
Women had also appeared on commemoratives and allegorical figures such as Liberty had been central to U.S. coinage since the eighteenth century.
But a multi-year circulating program devoted specifically to real American women was new.
For much of U.S. coin history, female imagery meant symbolic figures.
Liberty appeared as a woman.
So did representations of freedom, victory and other ideals.
The American Women Quarters instead named actual people and attached the coin to their documented lives.
The five inaugural honorees make the mission clear.
They were not selected from a single profession or era.
They include a writer, astronaut, tribal chief, suffragist and actor.
The diversity of subjects was itself part of the historical message.
March 8, 2022 provides a precise collector-product milestone within the larger launch of the American Women Quarters Program.
On that date, all five first-year designs became available together as San Francisco proof coins.
The set preserved the program's inaugural class in one official Mint package.
Who was Maya Angelou?
What did Sally Ride see from the shuttle?
How did Wilma Mankiller change Cherokee government?
Why did Nina Otero-Warren campaign in two languages?
What barriers did Anna May Wong face in Hollywood?
A good historical coin makes someone curious enough to ask.
On March 8, 2022, the United States Mint released the first American Women Quarters Proof Set, bringing together Maya Angelou, Sally Ride, Wilma Mankiller, Nina Otero-Warren and Anna May Wong on five collector-quality quarters. With Laura Gardin Fraser's long-delayed Washington portrait on the obverse, the set marked not only the beginning of a new coin program but a major expansion of whose stories could appear on everyday American money.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
1899 — Lafayette Dollar Authorized — Congress approved legislation authorizing 50,000 Lafayette commemorative silver dollars.