Washington Quarters: American Women (2022–2025)

Fraser's Washington Portrait Finally Reaches the Quarter, 90 Years After Mellon Rejected It

The obverse of every American Women Quarter carries a portrait of George Washington facing right, originally composed and sculpted by Laura Gardin Fraser in 1931 as her submission for the 1932 quarter competition. The Commission of Fine Arts endorsed Fraser's design; Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon rejected it in favor of John Flanagan's submission and that design circulated for 90 years. When the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 (Public Law 116-330) required a new obverse design for the 2022 program, the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the Commission of Fine Arts jointly recommended Fraser's portrait, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen approved it in June 2021. Fraser's initials LGF appear at the base of the bust truncation, visible on every coin in the series.¹

The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee described the adoption of Fraser's design as the correction of a historic injustice. That characterization is accurate, and the program that finally delivered it has an additional symmetry: a portrait designed by a woman who was passed over in 1932 now serves as the obverse for a program honoring women who were themselves passed over, overlooked, or actively excluded from recognition in their own times. That convergence was clearly intentional. Whether it qualifies as redress or symbolism is a matter of interpretation; that it is significant is not.²

20 Honorees, 4 Years: Program Structure and Selection

The program issued five new reverse designs per year from 2022 through 2025, for 20 total designs. Women were selected by the Treasury Secretary in consultation with the Smithsonian Institution's American Women's History Initiative, the National Women's History Museum, and the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. The legislation required that no living person be featured, that honorees represent ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse backgrounds, and that the fields of contribution span a wide range including suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and the arts. The 20 women honored across the four years were Maya Angelou, Dr. Sally Ride, Wilma Mankiller, Nina Otero-Warren, and Anna May Wong (2022); Bessie Coleman, Edith Kanaka‘ole, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jovita Idar, and Maria Tallchief (2023); Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, Celia Cruz, and Zitkala-Šá (2024); and Ida B. Wells, Juliette Gordon Low, Dr. Vera Rubin, Stacey Park Milbern, and Althea Gibson (2025).³

Portrait Reverses Present a Different Design Problem Than Landscapes

Unlike the national parks reverses of the America the Beautiful program, which gave sculptors landscapes and architecture to work with, the American Women Quarter reverses are primarily portraits. Portraits on coins succeed or fail on likeness, expression, and the sculptor's ability to render individual character within a 24-millimeter circle. The design challenge is harder than it looks. Emily Damstra's Maya Angelou reverse, the first coin in the program, handled the problem well: the figure sits with authority, and the composition balances the portrait against the birds in flight above her in a way that does not require a caption to communicate what kind of person is being commemorated. Not every design in the series achieved that integration. Several reverses read more as official portraits than as compositions, technically competent but not particularly revelatory. The program produced its best work when the designer found something to say beyond depicting a recognizable face.

Composition, Mint Marks, and the Collector Parallel

Clad business strikes were produced at Philadelphia and Denver throughout the program, with mintages in the hundreds of millions per year following the same pattern as the preceding circulating commemorative programs. San Francisco struck .999 fine silver Proof versions for inclusion in annual silver Proof sets, continuing the composition adopted for all United States silver Proof coins in 2019. No W mint mark issues were produced for the American Women Quarters program; the West Point facility did not participate. Gem (Mint State 65 or finer) clad business strikes carry modest premiums in the same condition-rarity structure as all post-1965 Washington quarters: mintage figures are irrelevant, and grade above Mint State 64 determines value.⁴

Building the Set

A complete P and D business strike set runs to 40 date-and-mintmark combinations, all available at or near face value in circulated grades and at modest cost in lower Mint State grades. Twenty silver Proof issues from San Francisco complete the collector parallel. The program concluded with Althea Gibson in 2025 and was succeeded by the Semiquincentennial quarter program for 2026, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Yeoman and Garrett's annual Guide Book of United States Coins provides current mintage and variety data for all American Women Quarter issues.