Meet the 5 iconic women being honored on new quarters in 2024

Since its debut in 2022, the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters Program has issued special quarters each year featuring women who shaped the country. Past honorees include writer Maya Angelou, astronaut Sally Ride, and actor Anna May Wong.

In 2024, the program will issue new quarters honoring five women: Pauli Murray, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Mary Edwards Walker, Celia Cruz, and Zitkala-Ša. These women’s accomplishments were as diverse as America itself. They were activists, authors, physicians, and politicians. Yet, one common purpose united their work: They broke down the barriers that tried to limit what they could do.

Who was Pauli Murray?

Pauli Murray accomplished a great deal for women’s and civil rights, all while questioning her own gender identity. As a result, biographers have used different pronouns to describe Murray. This story follows Murray’s public use of the pronouns “she/her.”

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, and raised in North Carolina, Murray felt the sting of segregation from a young age.

As she recalled in her 1956 family history Proud Shoes, she noticed that white students had better educational opportunities than her. “Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate space, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people.”

Murray decided she wouldn’t abide by the rules of Jim Crow. Instead, she armed herself with a law degree and worked to dismantle the rules.

In adulthood, Murray was active in the civil rights movement. Her 1951 tome, States’ Laws on Race and Color, became a signature work in the movement, highlighting how widespread segregation laws had become so that they could one day be defeated.

Murray also promoted women’s rights. She helped establish the still-active National Organization for Women in 1966.

In 1977, 66-year-old Murray was still breaking barriers when she became the first Black woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Who was Patsy Takemoto Mink?

When Patsy Takemoto Mink was born on December 6, 1927, her birthplace of Hawai‘i was not yet an American state––and wouldn’t become one until 1959. Nonetheless, she would grow up to become one of the country’s most distinguished members of Congress.

After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951, Mink returned to Hawai‘i. She soon began a political career and was elected to the state senate in 1962.

Just two years later, Hawaiians elected her as a representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. A third generation descendant of Japanese immigrants, Mink became the first Asian American woman to serve in Congress and the first woman of color elected to the House of Representatives.

Mink made the most of her time in Washington. As a champion of women’s rights, she co-wrote Title IX, a landmark law in 1972 that banned sex discrimination in American education programs. Thirty years later, she said this was one of her “most significant accomplishments” from her time in office.

Who was Mary Edwards Walker?

Mary Edwards Walker defied the gender attitudes of the 19th century to become a pioneering surgeon. Born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego, New York, Walker graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855, only six years after Elizabeth Blackwell had become the first woman to earn a medical degree.

Walker had been raised an abolitionist, so when the Civil War erupted in 1861, she wanted to play her part by supporting Union troops. The army refused to enlist a woman as an official surgeon, yet that didn’t deter her. Instead, she volunteered to do the work without pay.

In 1863, deep into the war, military officers, urgently needing doctors and nurses, officially contracted her as a civilian surgeon in the Army of the Cumberland.

After the war, Walker continued to support women’s rights. She also promoted dress reform, a movement that sought to change women’s fashion. Rather than the bulky hoop skirts of her era, Walker preferred to wear pants.

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She was an Osage dancer. She was also America’s first prima ballerina.

This radical act sometimes made her the target of local law enforcement, since 34 cities in the United States enacted laws against cross-dressing in the second half of the 19th century. In 1866, for instance, Walker was arrested for supposedly disturbing the peace by wearing pants on the streets of Manhattan.

For her wartime service, Walker won the Medal of Honor, and remains the only female recipient in the award’s history.

Who was Celia Cruz?

Cuban-born Celia Cruz knew the magic of music from a young age. “I truly believe that music is Cuba’s greatest gift to the world, and I learned to appreciate it at home, since music was very important in our family,” she wrote in her 2004 autobiography Celia: My Life.

Born in 1925, the roots of her artistry lay in Havana, where she soaked up African, Spanish, and Caribbean rhythms and melodies. By the age of 25, Cruz had become the lead singer of Sonora Matancera, an Afro-Cuban orchestra.

After Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959, Cruz immigrated to the United States, where she continued to perform and popularize Latin American music.

Known as the “Queen of Salsa,” Cruz won accolades in the subsequent decades. Her work earned her three Grammy Awards, and she was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest arts honor, in 1994. Nine years later, a music school in the Bronx was renamed the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music.

Who was Zitkala-Ša?

Gertrude Simmons was born on the Yankton Sioux Nation’s reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876. Missionaries brought eight-year-old Simmons to a boarding school in Indiana. The goal of the school, like so many others in the era, was to estrange Native children from their culture.

But she refused to have her culture erased.

Instead, she used her Native identity as a basis for her art and activism. Sometime around 1898, she adopted a new name: Zitkala-Ša, which is Lakota for “Red Bird.”

She co-wrote The Sun Dance Opera, which drew on the music and dances of her community. She also wrote poems and short stories that depicted the trauma of Native boarding schools, like the one she attended.  

Zitkala-Ša was not only interested in preserving Indigenous culture; she was also ardently committed to protecting and expanding the rights of both women and Native Americans. And she was successful in both goals, helping to promote women’s suffrage and playing a role to secure Indigenous citizenship in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.

Zitkala-Ša kept fighting for Native American protections and rights. In 1926, she co-founded the National Council of American Indians, which promoted Indigenous rights.

Like Zitkala-Ša, all of the women honored by the U.S. Mint in 2024 exhibited tenacity and creativity as they challenged America to live up to its promise of freedom and justice for all.