Eleanor Roosevelt favourite to appear on new US $10 bill

Washington, Aug 6: Eleanor Roosevelt, who was US first lady from 1933 to 1945, is the frontrunner in the campaign to find a new face for the $10 bill, starting in 2020, according to a survey.

The US treasury department said in June that it would put the face of a woman on the $10 bill, for the first time in 119 years and launched a public campaign to determine which female historical figure should receive the honour.

The results of the survey were made public on Wednesday

Twenty-seven percent of Americans prefer to have the face of Roosevelt (1884-1962) on the newly-designed bill, and that percentage rises to 33 percent among women alone, according to the survey conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion of New York and the McClatchy Company.

The wife of president Franklin D. Roosevelt left a noteworthy mark on US history as a result of her activism for the rights of minorities and social justice, and the fact that she was the only woman among the five US delegates at the United Nations General Assembly from 1946 to 1952.

The second most popular woman in the survey was Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), who went from being a slave to an abolitionist leader during the Civil War and was preferred by 17 percent of the 1,249 US adults surveyed. Among African-Americans, Tubman was preferred by 47 percent of the polling sample.

The other female figures in the running were native American Sacagawea with 13 percent, suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony with 11 percent and the first woman aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart, also with 11 percent.

The first woman on the US Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, who is still living, received 4 percent in the survey.

Other women who have been mentioned as candidates to appear on US currency are anti-racial segregation activist Rosa Parks, poet Maya Angelou and native American Pocahontas.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said last Sunday that the response to the campaign to put a woman on the $10 bill has been tremendous with more than 1.5 million proposals posted on "The New 10" web page, as well as on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Lew said in a video posted on YouTube that soon he will make a final decision about who will be placed on the new bill.

The survey was conducted between July 22-28 and has an error margin of plus or minus 3.2 percent.

IANS