How social media helped me get Jane Austen on to £10 notes
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Version 0 of 1. Until I saw reports about Winston Churchill being introduced as the new face of the five pound note, I’d never given bank notes much thought. But on reading that he’d be replacing the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry I realised this meant that, other than the Queen, there wouldn’t be any women on sterling at all. It was only a few months since I’d set up the Women’s Room, which explores female representation, and I was acutely aware of how often women have been excised from our history in the past. I didn’t think there was any Machiavellian intent in the Bank of England’s decision but the oversight made me angry and I wanted to make a stand. I started tweeting about it and set up a petition on Change.org. Then the media picked up on the story and I started getting requests to do press and TV interviews. A lawyer contacted me saying she thought the bank’s decision breached the Public Sector Equality Duty and put me in touch with a solicitor, Louise Whitfield, who helped me draft a letter of complaint. The Bank was surprisingly quick to respond, but its letter was very dismissive. It said women had been considered in the selection process, and seemed to imply that was enough. Pre-internet, that might have been it – I can imagine a situation where I’d have been very disheartened by that response and not known what to do next. Instead, I was able to post a screenshot of the letter and publicly mock it. This added fuel to my campaign – as the letter was reposted across the internet, the number of petition signatories rocketed and we presented over 30,000 signatures to the bank. We made a request on Twitter for people to attend the presentation dressed as historical female figures. I remember being really nervous because it could just have ended up being me dressed as Rosalind Franklin, with my dog, but I needn’t have worried – the response was phenomenal. We had Mary Sewell, Emmeline Pankhurst, Amy Johnson, George Eliot, Boudica – an amazing turnout. Related: Managing negativity in the face of internet abuse: take the high road The Bank seemed reluctant to back down, and maintained there were no grounds for a legal challenge. Nevertheless, I set up a crowd-funding page to raise money to potentially take them to court and the response was incredible – within two weeks, we’d raised up to £13,000. Then I had a request from the bank for a meeting. I think this coincided with Mark Carney taking over from Mervyn King as governor – it’s possible he came in on his first day and said, “I don’t want to be worrying about the bloody faces on bank notes. Get all this off my desk!” I maintained a poker face when I was called back in and told Jane Austen would be the new face of the £10 note, but I was overjoyed. There will still be a few months after Churchill is introduced when the notes will be all-male, but now the process has been reviewed, I’d like to see more women joining Austen – the Crimean wartime nurse Mary Seacole, perhaps, or Mary Wollstonecraft. The bank obviously made the right decision, but without the power of the internet, who knows what would have happened? Early on, I’d felt like just one person taking on a leviathan, but social media turned out to have a wonderful galvanising power. |