Julie Scelfo - The Women Who Made New York

Julie Scelfo has produced a must-read for anyone who loves New York, filling every page with fresh stories and great details about the fascinating and important women we all should know, but dont. Now Im no longer embarrassed by my ignorance of the REAL history of the city. This book filled that huge gap.

JONATHAN ALTER, New York Times bestselling author of The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

What would NYC be without women? In this glittering volume, Julie Scelfo provides the indisputable answer: not much. These women are my muses.

ZAC POSEN, fashion designer

Julie Scelfos astonishing collection of fabulously fearless females reminds us that New York City has always been a magnet for taboo-busting, rule-breaking women.

SIMON DOONAN, author of The Asylum: True Tales of Madness from a Life in Fashion and creative ambassador for Barneys New York

Finallyin Julie Scelfos brilliant collection of portraits and vignettes, the Town Mothers of NYC loom as large as the Town Fathers, often towering over them. Edith Wharton, Margaret Sanger, Billie Holiday, Diana Vreeland, Zora Neale Hurston, and so many more. This is a book that youll want to keep on your shelf and pass along to the next generation.

TERESA CARPENTER, Pulitzer Prizewinner and bestselling author of New York Diaries 16092009

After centuries of womens work being written out of history, The Women Who Made New York gracefully and passionately rewrites that wrong. For anyone who loves this city or any city at all, this book is both a public service and a pleasure.

IRIN CARMON, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

What an inventive and important book! And long overdue. Ms. Scelfo has produced a history of New York City which weve never read, filled with insightful portraits of the women who influenced all facets of our city. Page after page is filled with a thrilling sense of discovery, as you realize the extent of contributors who have remained unheralded. This book is the definition of a must-read!

NANCY BASS WYDEN, co-owner of the Strand Bookstore, New York City

A welcome antidote to male-centered history, The Women Who Made New York should be taught in every New York high school. I long for the day when books like this become unnecessary.

DAVID BYRNE, award-winning composer, songwriter, singer, and author, best known for being the frontman of the Talking Heads

These women were the original prizefightersthe trailblazers and visionaries who built the best city in the world. If you want to keep believing that New York was made by only men well, dont read this book.

JESSICA BENNETT, New York Times columnist and author of Feminist Fight Club

Finally finally finally: the mighty women whose formidable ghosts still walk the streets of New York get their due. A rollicking and necessary book.

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN, New York Times Magazine contributor and author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

How can we begin to contemplate New Yorks history without including the women who helped build it? Julie Scelfo makes clear that without the contributions of some famous and not-so-famous women, the city would not exist as we know it. Taken together, these brief biographies reveal a dynamism and diversity as rich as New York City itself.

VALERIE PALEY, Chief Historian and Director of the Center for Womens History at the New-York Historical Society

For Alice, my grandmother, whom I never got to know, and for all the other women without whom my New Yorkand yourswouldnt be

And for my Brooklyn boys

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 engineering project never completed? How would the skyline look? Would there be takeout? And who would have stemmed the tide of disease and rescued abandoned children, never mind paraded topless across the bar at Billys?

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 worldboth literally and metaphorically. Many are famous, like Billie Holiday and Eleanor Roosevelt. Others led quieter, private lives, but were just as influentiallike 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 Id 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 Citys first female Asian American police officer. And Mary Schmidt Campbell, who revitalized 125th Street and Tisch School of the Arts, New York Universitys important film school.

The more I searched, the more I realized that there have been hundreds, thousandstens 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?