Who Woman Will Be On $10

Photo: Bebeto Matthews, AP

Amid flood of public input, Lew delays decision on putting woman on $10 - After six months of public input on the biggest currency redesign in nearly a century, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew still can't decide which woman to put on the $10 bill.

The Treasury Department said Friday that it would delay any announcement about the redesign until 2016. Lew had originally said he wanted to hear input over the summer and make a decision by the end of this year.

The problem, if anything, is that the Treasury Department has gotten too much input.

"The public’s input on redesigning our currency has been a valuable part of Secretary Lew’s decision making process," said a statement from Casey Hernandez, a senior Treasury adviser. "As a result of the tremendous amount of engagement, we have many more ideas than we had originally anticipated."

Lew's announcement in June that he would put a woman on the $10 bill was immediately controversial — not so much because of the woman, but because founding father and first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton now occupies that space. Activists had wanted to see Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, replaced because of his policy of removing American Indians from their lands.

"We're encouraged that they’re taking a little more time. Symbols are important," said Barbara Ortiz Howard, the founder of the group Women on $20s. "I think they’ve gotten quite a bit of input that people are sensitive now in our climate to offensive symbols. Hamilton says more about who we are today than Jackson does."

Among the more popular contenders are abolitionist Harriet Tubman, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low and deaf-blind humanitarian Helen Keller. But Treasury officials have been careful not to suggest that they've narrowed the field.

In fact, Lew has said the redesign "is about more than just one square inch on a bill," and is looking for creative ways to accommodate both Hamilton and a new woman — or women — on a bill that also showcases the broader theme of democracy. That theme will carry over into a new series of bills to be redesigned over the next half century.

Treasury officials say they hope to announce next year which woman will be featured. The original plan was to unveil the bill in 2020 and have it enter circulation some time after that.