Money tells stories. If we look closely at how it is made, designed, spent, saved, priced, and circulated, we can learn more about what a person, a family, and a nation values, fears, rewards, and tries to hide. Yet the stories of the women who worked in the U.S. Mint and Treasury are rarely the ones most fully told or preserved. Not only have women been traditionally underrepresented on currency, money making is a literal but often overlooked story about whose labor counts, whose face counts, and whose signature counts.

Currency, at Work: Women of the U.S. Mint and United States Department of Treasury centers the important and often overlooked work of women throughout the history of the U.S. Mint and Treasury Department, sometimes through the stories that survive and sometimes through the gaps, distortions, and silences around them. For some, an archival or published record exists, but it was written by someone else. For others, only fragments remain. Focusing especially on women connected to the Philadelphia Mint and United States Department of Treasury, this book profiles lesser-known women throughout history, and spotlights their work, ever current, as grounded in the U.S. Mint and United States Department of Treasury, combining historically grounded profiles with quotations, definitions, news clippings, and other hybrid forms. Its varied forms reflect the uneven nature of the archive itself. Together, the pieces trace not only women’s labor and presence in these institutions, but also the ways historical memory is made, managed, and lost.