My dad collected coins for most of his life. I’m just now getting into it myself, and the 2025 quarters are part of what has caught my attention. I keep looking at the people on them and wanting to know a little more. Who were they? What did they do? Why did someone decide their story belonged on a coin?
I like having something I can actually look at while I learn. A date in a history book is one thing. A face on a coin gives me a person to start with. Before long, I’m reading about a newspaper in Memphis or a young girl looking through a homemade telescope. That’s the part of collecting that interests me right now.
I’m still learning the coins themselves, too. I don’t want to pretend I’ve suddenly become an expert. These are some thoughts from the beginning of a collection, from somebody who already enjoys history and has found another way into it. Dad spent years with this hobby. Now I’m finding my own reasons to pay attention.
A Very Old Way of Telling a Story
People have been putting messages on coins for a very long time. The Romans certainly understood that. Portraits of rulers and carefully chosen images traveled through their empire with the money people used. The British Museum’s Money Gallery guide describes coins as a means of communication in the Roman world.
Of course, the Romans didn’t invent coinage, and an emperor advertising his authority isn’t the same thing as honoring a woman for her achievements. Still, I find the connection interesting. We have been deciding whose face to put on money, and what that face should tell people, for centuries.
A coin can’t tell the whole story. Somebody has to choose a portrait, a few words, and perhaps one symbol. The rest is left for us to ask about. I’m beginning to think that is one of the pleasures of collecting them.
The five women on the 2025 quarters are Ida B. Wells, Juliette Gordon Low, Vera Rubin, Stacey Park Milbern, and Althea Gibson. These were the final five honorees in the American Women Quarters Program, which ran from 2022 through 2025. My proof set puts their coins together, but their lives take me in five very different directions.
Ida B. Wells and the Cost of Speaking Up
Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. At sixteen, she lost her parents and a sibling during a yellow fever outbreak. She became a teacher while helping support her younger siblings. That’s a great deal of responsibility before we even get to the work for which she is remembered.
In Memphis, Wells taught and wrote for newspapers. Criticizing the city’s segregated schools cost her teaching job in 1891. Then, in 1892, three Black businessmen, including her friend Tom Moss, were lynched. Wells investigated the violence and challenged the excuses offered for it. A mob destroyed her newspaper office while she was away in New York. Returning to Memphis would have put her life in danger.
The National Park Service’s biography follows her work into the North, her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett, their four children, and her continued fight for civil rights and women’s voting rights. She didn’t have one public cause and then quietly retire from it. She kept working.
Her quarter shows her looking ahead, with words identifying her journalism, suffrage work, and civil rights activism. Once I know a little of her history, that expression feels different. I think about what it would take to continue writing after someone had destroyed the place where you worked.
It’s easy to call someone courageous from a comfortable distance. Learning what Wells actually risked makes me slow down before using the word. There was a woman with a family and a livelihood behind that portrait, making decisions that had consequences for both.
Juliette Gordon Low Started With Eighteen Girls
Juliette Gordon Low is the name I connect with Girl Scouts. I wanted to get beyond that familiar connection and find out a little about her before the organization became so large.
Born in Savannah in 1860, she was called Daisy. She enjoyed art, animals, nature, and athletics. Ear injuries left her with severe hearing loss. Her adult life included homes in England and Georgia and an unhappy marriage. In 1911, meeting Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Boy Scouts, gave her an idea for something she could build for girls.
In 1912, the first troop gathered in Savannah with eighteen girls. The Girl Scouts’ account of her life describes her determination to give girls opportunities to develop skills, confidence, and leadership. Low died in 1927, but the organization continued far beyond her own lifetime.
Eighteen is the detail I keep coming back to. When something becomes a national institution, its beginning can seem almost inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable to those first eighteen girls. Somebody had to bring them together, find supporters, and keep the idea going after that first meeting.
Her coin includes the original Girl Scout trefoil she designed. I like that it gives us both the person and something she helped create. It makes me think about how much history begins with a small group getting together. A meeting can look ordinary while it’s happening. Years later, people may point to it as the beginning of something that changed their lives.
Vera Rubin Kept Looking
Vera Rubin’s quarter looks different from the others. She’s looking upward, surrounded by a spiral galaxy and other objects in the sky. It invites a fairly obvious question: what was she seeing that other people hadn’t understood?
Rubin was born in 1928. As a teenager, she built a telescope with cardboard tubing and a purchased lens. She went on to study astronomy at Vassar, Cornell, and Georgetown, earning her doctorate in 1954. She also raised four children. In 1965, she became the first woman staff scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.
Working with Kent Ford, she studied how galaxies rotate. The speeds they measured could not be explained by the stars we can see alone. Their observations helped establish the evidence for a great deal of unseen mass in galaxies. Carnegie Science’s biography also describes her efforts to open opportunities for other women in astronomy.
I won’t pretend I could sit down and explain all the calculations. What I can appreciate is the patience behind looking carefully, recording what you find, and accepting that the evidence may not fit the explanation you expected. That sounds familiar to anyone who has followed a family-history question further than planned.
But I don’t want to reduce her life to a useful comparison for my own hobby. She changed how scientists understood galaxies, and she helped younger scientists have a place in the work. The homemade telescope is a lovely beginning to that story. It reminds me that a serious interest can begin with a very simple wish to see more clearly.
Stacey Park Milbern Found a Community
Stacey Park Milbern brings this set much closer to our own time. She lived from 1987 to 2020. Her coin shows her speaking, with one hand turned outward and the other near her tracheostomy. It presents a person taking part in a conversation, which seems a thoughtful choice for someone whose work centered on community.
In an account for the Smithsonian, her father, Joel Milbern, describes her childhood with congenital muscular dystrophy and the change that came when she found other young people with disabilities. At sixteen, she attended a National Youth Leadership Network gathering in Washington with her mother. Hearing disability rights leader Judy Heumann helped her see her own experiences in a larger history.
Milbern helped establish a youth leadership forum in North Carolina and later became a disability justice organizer. Her writing and organizing considered how disability connects with race, gender, and other experiences. The Smithsonian’s account by her father gives that public work a family perspective, too.
I find that change in perspective interesting. Meeting people who understand something about your life can change what you believe is possible. It can also change the questions you ask of the world around you. Instead of assuming a person simply has to manage alone, you begin asking what a community could do together.
Her story also keeps me from thinking of history as something safely finished a hundred years ago. People were listening to her, working with her, and learning from her quite recently. Seeing her on a quarter brings that ongoing history into the same small holder as women born in the nineteenth century.
Althea Gibson Had to Reach the Court First
Althea Gibson’s coin shows a racket, a ball, and a tennis net. Those details are enough to tell me what sport I’m looking at. They can’t show everything she had to go through for a chance to compete at its highest level.
Born in South Carolina in 1927, Gibson grew up in Harlem after her family moved there. She played paddle tennis and developed her tennis game through the American Tennis Association, which provided opportunities for Black players excluded elsewhere. Starting in 1947, she won ten consecutive ATA national women’s singles championships.
In 1950, she became the first Black player to compete at the U.S. National Championships. Her breakthrough was followed by the French singles title in 1956, then Wimbledon and U.S. singles titles in both 1957 and 1958. The International Tennis Hall of Fame documents eleven major titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, as well as the mentors and advocates who supported her progress.
The championships are impressive. Yet I keep thinking about the years before them. There had to be practice, instruction, travel, and people willing to provide an opportunity. There was also the unfair burden of being asked to prove she belonged before she could simply play.
The quarter calls her a trailblazing champion. Looking into her history helps me understand both parts of that description. Winning a match and opening a door for the next person are related achievements, but they aren’t quite the same achievement. She did both.
What I’m Beginning to Collect
Looking at these five coins, I can see how easily I could spend more time reading than arranging a collection. That’s fine with me. The coins are giving me names and questions I might otherwise have passed by.
They also leave me thinking about Dad. We came to collecting at different points in our lives. I don’t need to assume his reasons were exactly the same as mine to appreciate that connection. He collected for years. I’m at the beginning, learning what draws me back for another look.
For now, it’s the people. A reporter who kept writing, a woman who gathered eighteen girls, an astronomer who kept measuring, an organizer who found strength in community, and a champion who had to fight for the opportunity to compete. Those are a good five stories to begin with.
Learn More
The biographies linked above are where I followed these stories beyond the coins. The U.S. Mint’s 2025 design announcement explains the images and inscriptions. If this leaves you thinking about people outside the main outline of a family story, you may also enjoy The Person Named Beside Your Ancestor.
The 2025 United States Mint Proof Set is available on Amazon.