Story at a glance
- Five women will feature on the back face of quarters to be minted for 2025.
- The list includes famed journalist Ida B. Wells and trailblazing tennis and golf star Althea Gibson.
- The 2025 coins will be the final set in a four-year, 20-coin production run of quarters honoring significant women in American history.
A trailblazing athlete, activist and scientist are among the five women who will feature in a special run of quarters to be minted for 2025, the Treasury Department announced.
The final honorees of the four-year American Women Quarters Program were announced Tuesday.
The group includes journalist and NAACP co-founder Ida B. Wells, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, astronomer Vera Rubin, disabilities activist Stacey Park Milbern and tennis and golf star Althea Gibson.
“It’s a privilege for the Mint to connect America through coins, and to tell our nation’s story through honoring the women in this amazing program,” Mint Director Ventris Gibson said in a statement. “The pioneering women we have recognized are among the many in our nation’s history who have made significant contributions and championed change in their own unique way.”
The women’s faces will feature on the tail side of a run of quarters, with the designs announced next year.
The honorees were selected by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — herself the first woman to hold that post — in collaboration with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, the National Women’s History Museum and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus.
Wells was a trailblazing investigative journalist and civil rights activist. Her work reporting on injustices in the American South in the 1890s, especially lynching, helped inspire the civil rights movement, and she later co-founded the NAACP alongside other notable Black thought leaders.
Low founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1912 in Georgia, creating an organization for young women to learn crucial leadership skills and gain independence just as the suffrage movement was in full swing.
Rubin was one of astronomy’s most notable women, famous for her work in the 1970s on the rotation of galaxies. Her work provided some of the first evidence of dark matter, radically changing our understanding of the universe. She was also a significant activist for women in science.
Milbern was one of the leaders of the disability justice movement starting in the early 2000s when she was just 16 years old. She served on disability rights boards in North Carolina and in the Obama administration and was crucial in advocating for disability rights in the last two decades.
Gibson was the first Black athlete to play tennis at its highest level and the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam title in 1956. She won Wimbledon twice and has been inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Sports Hall of Fame. Gibson was also the first Black athlete in the Women’s Professional Golf Tour.
A total of 20 women have been featured on quarters since the American Women Quarters Program’s inception starting in 2022. Other notable women who feature on coins include writer Maya Angelou, astronaut Sally Ride and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.