Read any history of New York City and you will read about men. You will read about male political leaders and male activists and male cultural tastemakers, all lauded for creating the most exciting and influential city in the world.

The contributions of men are important, yes. But try for a moment to envision the City without all the women who, over four centuries, wielded pencils and rulers, hammers and washboards, frying pans and guitars. Would NYC look and sound and feel the same? Well, no, actually. Would it have any art museums or dance companies? Would clothing still be so precious that most people would own only one outfit? Would the Brooklyn Bridge be the greatest engi- neering project never completed? How would the skyline look? Would there be takeout? And who would have stemmed the tide of disease and rescued aban- doned children, never mind paraded topless across the bar at Billy’s?

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In short, New York City would not be what it is without the group Simone de Beauvoir only hypothetically dubbed the “second sex.” And even if men had found a way to magically reproduce without their estrogen-besotted associates, the City would be something altogether different, like a plate of rice and beans without the beans. Leaving women out of the story gives a false impression of how NYC was built. This volume aims to fix that.

This is the story of the women who made New York City the cultural epicenter of the world—both literally and metaphorically. Many are famous, like Billie Holiday and Eleanor Roosevelt. Others led quieter, private lives, but were just as influential—like Emily Warren Roebling, who completed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her engineer husband became ill.

When Seal Press asked me to create a list of the twenty-five women who most contributed to the creation of our extraordinary Gotham, my initial thought was: “Easy!” I immediately thought of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nan Goldin, Judith Jamison, Eliza Jumel, Yuri Kochiyama, Margaret Mead, Bernadette Peters, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Sonia Sotomayor, Harriet Tubman, Lauren Bacall, Ellen V. Futter, and Sylvia Woods.

But as I dove into my research, I turned up more and more women I’d never even heard of and yet without whom New York City would not be what it is today. Such as Hetty Green, the so-called “Witch of Wall Street,” who helped save the banks in 1907. And Anne Northup, wife of Twelve Years a Slave author Solomon Northup and a professional cook, who brought sophisticated cuisine to New Yorkers’ palates. And Agnes Chan, the City’s first female Asian American police officer. And Mary Schmidt Campbell, who revitalized 125th Street and Tisch School of the Arts, New York University’s important film school.

The more I searched, the more I realized that there have been hundreds, thousands—tens of thousands of women who have contributed to the making of the Big Apple in so many different, important ways. But how to choose whom to feature? How to present all their gifts?

It would take years to create a comprehensive research volume. So, to narrow the mass of material down to a concise, easily digestible (and, hopefully, fun- to-read) list, I had to develop very specific criteria for who would, and would not, be included.

I opted against identifying “firsts”; rather, I selected women without whom an important part of New York would not exist, or at least not be the same. While someone like Chan broke an important barrier and undoubtedly deserves our gratitude, the NYPD was up and running long before she got there.

Lauren Bacall was surely an iconic actress and celebrated City personality, but did her legacy particularly shape New York? And, yes, two Supreme Court justices with enormous influence grew up in NYC, but isn’t their influence more on the nation as a whole as opposed to specifically on the City? Ditto Harriet Tubman. So, with a bit of anguish, I crossed these remarkable women off my list.

Casting my net as far and wide as possible, I talked to people who studied specific aspects of the City’s history (like musical theater, law enforcement, and education), social justice movements (like immigration, labor, abolitionism, suffrage, and LGBTQ concerns), groups that represented various professions (including the New York City Bar Association and the NYPD Policewomen’s Endowment Association), and organizations devoted to individual ethnic groups (like the Museum of Chinese in America [MOCA], the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

I also consulted architects and city planners and zoning specialists who believe, rightfully so, that the credit for building New York should go primarily to those who designed buildings, parks, and memorials and those who crafted the legislation, zoning policies, and budgets that made it possible for the physical city to be brought to life. These under recognized hero(in)es include women like Sylvia Deutsch, MaryAnne Gilmartin, Janette Sadik-Khan, Billie Tsien, and, most recently, Annabelle Selldorf. (As for the latter, her handsome recycling facility in Brooklyn reshaped the City’s expectation for municipal projects in the twenty-first century.)

To be sure, those women deserve credit for creating the physical body of New York. (Note that the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation established their own informative list of significant projects designed by women.) But, to my mind, the essence of New York City resides in its soul. What would NYC be without it?

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EXCERPTED with permission from the publisher.