The stories the past few weeks featuring the outstanding women in our community are so inspiring. Many thanks to the Herald for shining the spotlight on our local heroines. For years, I’ve been struck when visiting the Smithsonian museums and national monuments in Washington, D.C., that you can find just about every race, ethnicity and even some religions well represented – and yet women seemed to be still off in corners, featured in collections of first ladies’ dresses or their choices in the plates used for the White House dinners.
Really? That’s the best we could do?
Here’s a call to action for us: In the news recently, it featured a story of a group working to put a woman’s face on our paper currency by the year 2020, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. The question at hand is who should the woman be?
That’s where we come in. Go to www.womenon20s.org, read up on the slate of 15 inspiring American women heroes, and cast your vote in the caucus phase for your top three candidates. Return to vote in the final round, and the people’s choice will be the woman they’ll propose to President Barack Obama for the new face of the $20. As noted on the website, whoever is chosen, we are confident she will embody the values, ambitions and ethics upon which this country was founded. I just placed my vote and found it tough to narrow down to three.
If we can make this happen, with such a commonly circulated bill, it will make a proud legacy for our future generations of daughters to remind them, on a daily basis, that they too have the shoulders of giants they stand on. Let’s make this happen by a landslide.
Jennifer Scholfield
Durango
