On April 20, 2016, US Treasury secretary Jacob J. Lew announced that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. The decision was a victory for the grassroots movement Women on 20s, which from March through May of 2015 conducted a public campaign to select a successor for the former president, who famously distrusted paper currency and vetoed the reauthorization of the United States’s onetime national bank. More than 600,000 votes were cast, narrowly selecting Tubman, the former slave and Civil War spy for the Union cause, over Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The announcement marked a change of heart for Lew. In June 2015, just over a month after the conclusion of the Women on 20s vote, the secretary had stated his intention to put a woman’s face on the $10 bill instead, in the space currently occupied by the Treasury Department’s founder, Alexander Hamilton. In reversing himself, Lew apparently yielded to pressure from devotees of the Broadway musical Hamilton, a pop-cultural phenomenon that has helped propel the Founding Father back into high renown. Hamilton’s face will remain on the front of the $10 bill, while the back will be given to a quintet of suffragist leaders, including Lucretia Mott and Sojourner Truth.

So far, Lew has not publicly acknowledged the Women on 20s movement or betrayed any awareness of its campaign. In his remarks on the new $20 bill design, he said, “When we started this conversation not quite a year ago, it wasn’t clear to me that millions of Americans were going to weigh in with their ideas.”

Hannah Margaret Callowhill, born in 1671, the daughter of an English Quaker, was twenty-five years old when she married a man more than twice her age. Two years later, pregnant with their first child, Hannah accompanied him by sea to the Colonies. Their destination was Pennsylvania; her husband was William Penn.

For a dozen years, William ran the colony while Hannah ran the cellar, the dairy, the herb garden, the larder, the kitchen garden, and the smokehouse and oversaw both the paid servants and the slaves. When she was forty-one, her husband suffered his first stroke. After his death in 1718, she inherited the colony and his fortune, or rather his debts. Under her leadership, the Province of Pennsylvania passed a law allowing married women to own and manage property in their own name during the incapacity of their spouse.

Hannah ran the province for another eight years, until her own death, in 1726. She also managed her father’s estate back in England, cleared her late husband’s debts, settled a border dispute with Maryland, and raised six children.

Joan and Harold Feenstra were cash-strapped from the start. They lived in poverty on the outskirts of Louisiana’s Irish Bayou in a small house they’d purchased for $3,000. Joan worked as a crabber on her own plot, while her husband worked in construction.

In 1974, Joan filed a criminal complaint against Harold for molesting their daughter. To pay his attorney, Harold signed a promissory note for $3,000, which he secured with the mortgage of their house. At the time, Louisiana’s Head and Master law granted the husband final say over all household decisions, including those concerning the couple’s jointly owned property, whether or not he had his wife’s knowledge or consent. Harold didn’t tell Joan about the promissory note.

Eventually, Harold agreed to leave Louisiana if Joan dropped the charges, which she did, and the case was settled. Two years later, Harold’s lawyer, Karl Kirchberg, knocked on Joan’s door. He told her that he owned her house, that she must leave, and that he planned to put a trailer park on the land.

It was Kirchberg who pursued the case to the Supreme Court, where he called Joan “the architect of her own predicament.” Although the court struck down Louisiana’s Head and Master law and nullified the mortgage, several months passed before the property was released. No lawyer would help Joan with the paperwork and various fees.

In 2013, Carman Iverson was twenty-eight years old and living in Kansas City, Missouri. She’d started working at McDonald’s in 2012, making $7.25 an hour. A year later, she was given a raise, to $7.35. She brought in between $400 and $600 a month, she told Forbes magazine, but the three-bedroom apartment she lived in with her four children, ages eleven, seven, five, and four, cost $650 a month. Her landlord often forgave her rent. Water was included, and she didn’t pay for heat, but she was behind on electricity. She took public transit back and forth from work each day, $0.75 a ride, and paid her sister $10 a week to look after the kids. Each month, she received $543 worth of food stamps, which was still not enough to feed the whole family. She didn’t have a phone.

That same year, during the stormiest moments of the Fight for $15, McDonald’s wrote a sample budget for its employees. It assumed health insurance cost $20 a month, its employees worked two jobs, and that no money would be allocated to child care, groceries, clothing, or gas.

Hetty Robinson was born into a whaling family in 1834, and because her mother was often sick, Hetty took after her father. At age six, she started reading the financial papers to him. At thirteen, she became the family bookkeeper. At twenty, she sold the $1,200 wardrobe her father had purchased for her society debut, investing the proceeds in the stock market. When her father died in 1865, he left her $5 million in a trust, which she also invested. She put her money in greenbacks, Civil War bonds, railroads, and property. She owned mortgages on churches and didn’t hesitate to foreclose. She lent money to bankers, brokerage houses, J.P. Morgan, and the City of New York.

When Hetty married businessman Edward Green, she insisted on a prenuptial agreement. They lived comfortably in London, spending only Edward’s money. When he lost his fortune in the stock market, she left him and returned to the United States.

She didn’t spend money on clothes: she wore the same black dress daily, until it turned brown, until it turned green. In the winter, she lined her children’s clothing with paper for insulation. She didn’t spend money on food: every day she ate a can of oatmeal for lunch; she heated it on a radiator. She didn’t spend money on housing: she moved from one cheap flat to another in Brooklyn, Hoboken, and on the Bowery. To evade tax collectors, she leased the apartments under the name of her dog, Curtis. She didn’t spend money on medical care: when her only son was nine, he got into a sledding accident, and she refused to take him to the doctor. He limped into his teens, when his leg became gangrenous and had to be amputated.

Hetty once told a reporter, “My father told me never to give anyone anything, not even a kindness.” She died in 1916 with $200 million, the richest woman in America.

In 1716, Mary Butterworth began using a hot iron and starched cloth to transfer the ink from new banknotes onto fresh pieces of paper, filling in the designs with a quill and ink. She enlisted her whole family in the counterfeiting business, and they helped her sell the bills for half their face value.

In 1722, Colonial authorities became suspicious of Mary after her husband, John, built an expensive new home for the family. Her own brother testified against her, but Mary was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Sociologist Rhacel Parreñas interviewed migrant women in the 1990s. She found that a woman from the Philippines working as a teacher, a nurse, or a clerical worker could make $176 a month in her home country, or she could make $200 a month as a nanny in Singapore, $700 a month in Italy, or $1,400 a month in Los Angeles.

According to the United Nations, women outnumbered men among migrants to the United States, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Israel throughout the 1990s. They left poor countries by the millions to do “women’s work” in affluent countries, which in turn allowed women in affluent countries to get out of the house.

“To an extent, then, the globalization of child care and housework brings the ambitious and independent women of the world together,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. “Only it does not bring them together in the way that second-wave feminists in affluent countries once liked to imagine—as sisters and allies struggling to achieve common goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.”

Fulvia Flacca Bambula was the first woman to appear on money who wasn’t a goddess or mythological heroine. She was Mark Antony’s third wife, and she defended her husband’s interests in Rome while he was off with Cleopatra. When Cleopatra ascended the throne in Egypt, she too appeared on a coin. Notes the New Yorker in an article published on its website last year, Cleopatra’s female contemporaries were engraved on money as the sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters of male rulers. Cleopatra was the first woman whose face was minted as a result of her own power.

Before Elizabeth I became queen, English money experienced drastic inflation. She had the Royal Mint melt down the debased coins and stamp her own face onto silver and gold, restoring the value of English currency and consolidating power in her own image, writes Sarah Archer, the author of the New Yorker piece. “Elizabeth’s portrait on the new coins made literal the association between her person, her title, and the fiscal power of the country she ruled—a kind of financial body politic,” she says. Other women rulers followed Elizabeth’s lead: Anne of England, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Catherine the Great all put their own faces on money.

Women have appeared on US money, though more often in allegorical roles than as themselves. Between 1880 and 1910, the mint produced bills with elaborate, sentimental designs, featuring women as the embodiments of Liberty, Peace, History, Art, Victory, Union, Justice, Loyalty, Prayer for Victory, America, Science, Manufacture, Commerce, and Progress. On the back of a $5 silver certificate from 1896 titled “Electricity as the Dominant Force in the World,” the wind picks up Electricity’s robes, revealing her supple left breast. (Civil War Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan scowl on the bill’s front.)

Susan B. Anthony briefly appeared on a US dollar coin, and Sacagawea does today, although new Sacagawea dollars are now minted only as non circulating collectors’ coins. Martha Washington’s face was put on silver certificates in the nineteenth century, and Pocahontas could be seen on a $20 note. One could, theoretically, walk into a store tomorrow and make a purchase using either bill, although that would be foolish. They’re much more valuable on a collector’s shelf than they are out in the world.