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Chicago Students Want Eleanor Roosevelt On $20 Bill

CHICAGO (CBS) -- The student government group at Roosevelt University has launched a campaign to get a former First Lady's face on the $20 bill.

Roosevelt University student government president Rachel Pieczura said Eleanor Roosevelt was a powerhouse in her time, and would be great to have as the first woman pictured on paper U.S. currency.

To generate student awareness, the campaign was featured on social media, and fake $20 bills with Eleanor Roosevelt's face were randomly placed around campus.

"So you would find them, say behind a computer, or faculty would find them in their mailbox. We put one in a marker box," she said.

The group Women On 20s has set up an online poll asking which of four prominent American women would be best to place on the $20 instead of President Andrew Jackson: Roosevelt, escaped slave and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, civil rights icon Rosa Parks, or Cherokee Naiton chief Wilma Mankiller – who was chosen as a finalist because of strong public sentiment a Native American replace Jackson, who supported the Indian Removal Act, which relocated many native tribes to Oklahoma, along the infamous Trail of Tears.

"I think Eleanor Roosevelt is the best representation, not only because she really was kind of the first lady, as a First Lady, to really be a powerhouse, not standing behind her husband. She was out in the forefront," Pieczura said.

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Once Women On 20s ends voting on its campaign, it plans to formally ask President Barack Obama to start the process of getting a woman on the bill. They hope to get the plan approved by 2020, the centennial of ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) also has proposed legislation calling for a woman to appear on the $20 bill.

Three women have been pictured on U.S. coins:

• Susan B. Anthony, a leader in the women's suffrage movement, on a dollar coin from 1979 to 1981;
• activist Helen Keller, the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor's degree, on the reverse of the Alabama quarter in 2003;
• and Sacagawea, a Native American who accompanied the Lewis & Clark expedition to explore the west in the early 1800s, who has been on a gold dollar coin since 1999.

There also have been three other women pictured on commemorative coins produced by the U.S. Mint.

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