The Susan B. Anthony is well known and practically infamous for a lot of different reasons. It is a pretty historic coin and it is special for many different reasons. This article goes into some of the more interesting aspects and facets of the Susan B. Anthony coin, and it highlights the significance of the coin and all that it means to us.

First of all, the Susan B. Anthony coin set a precedent. How? Susan B. Anthony herself was the first woman to be honored by having her likeness appear on a circulating United States coin. The first woman in history. One could say that Liberty herself is a woman too, and while that’s true, Susan B. Anthony was an actual woman who lived and breathed and contributed greatly to this nation’s forward progress and improvement.

For how the coin came about, in the year of 1978 President Jimmy Carter himself put pen to paper and signed the Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin Act into law (it was recorded as the Public Law 95-447). This law did more than just introduce a woman onto a coin. This law also made a change in the way the coin could look and what size it could be. For the specifics on it, this law essentially amended the Coinage Act of 1965, which caused the size, weight, and design of the one-dollar coin to be slightly different.

Fast forward just a few months and, on July 2, 1979, the U. S. Mint officially released for purchase and use as currency the final version of the Susan B. Anthony coin in Rochester, NY. The coin was actually released in the very town that Susan B. Anthony lived in during the most politically active years of her life. Just in the 1979 year no less than 757,813,744 coins were produced by the U.S. Mint. Additional coins were dated 1980, 1981 (numismatic items only) and 1999. Ultimately, the United States Mint produced 888,842,452 Susan B. Anthony coins for circulation all in all.

More Recent History of the Susan B. Anthony Coin

Fast forward a few decades and, in 1997, Congress passed the game changing act of the United States $1 Coin Act (Public Law 104-124, Sec. 4), which replaced the Susan B. Anthony dollar with the newer golden dollar coin. A lot of the reason for doing this was that because the golden color of this new coin (rare and eye catching for a U.S. coin) combined with a smoother edge and wider border on the coin ultimately helps to more easily differentiate it from a quarter, which was one thing about the Susan B. Anthony that made differentiating it difficult.

The act in 1997 also authorized the Secretary of Treasury to continue to mint Susan B. Anthony coins though, until such time as the production of new golden coins was ready and positioned to produce the coins and sell them into the marketplace. In the year 1999, the final 41,368,000 Susan B. Anthony coins were minted and placed into circulation and made available for the American populace. Though the coins are not as common as they once were, the Susan B. Anthony coins continue in circulation today, and are a loved and cherished part of our history and our culture.

The Susan B. Anthony coin was struck over five-hundred million times, close to a billion in fact, throughout its life span, and the coin will go down in history as being the first coin in the United States made for circulation that featured a woman from history on it. This was a big deal for the United States, as the coin came out shortly after the Civil Rights period of our history. With the Susan B. Anthony, forward progress was made and the nation advanced a little bit once again.