A new women’s history walking tour in New York is working to fix that.

New York City is filled with monuments to power — towering buildings, bronze statues, and the names of men etched into its streets. But generations of women helped shape the city too, even if their stories were rarely preserved. A new women’s history walking tour in New York is bringing those histories back into the places where they happened.

The Day Fifth Avenue Roared

If you walk down Fifth Avenue in midtown, Manhattan today, it’s hard to imagine what it might have looked like 100 years ago. Or maybe it’s not hard at all. The buildings were shorter, but no less majestic, cut from stone with giant pillars and elegant cornices. The streets were still that same bustling energy of pedestrian and vehicle traffic that we know today, though the cars certainly looked different then. Perhaps there was slightly less noise pollution, due to the lack of radios and Bluetooth in cars.

But in May of 1912, the sound was deafening.

It was May 4th, and many years before the day became a popular Star Wars meme, it was the site of another battle: 10,000 people marched from Washington Square to 27th Street along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, clad in white. After years of quiet lobbying, women realized that in order to gain the right to vote, they needed to get louder. This parade was the first major moment when they did just that. They started to make noise.

At the front of New York’s suffragette parade rode a 16-year-old Chinese American girl named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee on horseback. She was only a teenager, but she had quickly stood out as a powerful voice, so she was asked to lead the march. The New York Times called her “the symbol of a new era.” Years later, no one would know her name.

The Woman Who Rewrote the American Workday

A year before Mabel took to the streets, Frances Perkins was having a cup of tea at a cafe farther downtown near Washington Square Park. She went to college at a time when only 3% of college students were women, and she’d built a career in social justice activism. But all of that took a new direction when, mid-sip, she heard the sound of fire engines. 

Around the corner stood the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the largest shirtwaist manufacturer in New York City (and possibly, the country). The factory was a wild success in a booming textile industry, partially because it was able to rely on cheap labor and long hours. Most of the employees were young immigrant women fleeing oppressive nations, and they pulled twelve-hour days, seven days per week. To keep production high, managers locked factory doors from the outside in order to keep people from taking unauthorized breaks (god forbid these women get an extra pee break outside of their 30 minute lunch, amiright?). This seemed to work fine (for management, anyway), until one of the most defining industrial disasters of modern history happened.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Disaster

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the factory, and the garment workers, who worked on the 8th and 9th floors, were trapped inside. As firetrucks rushed to assist, they realized that their ladders were too short to reach them. 146 women were faced with an impossible and urgent choice: either jump to your death or burn alive. Frances and a number of other New Yorkers who had gathered at the scene witnessed a gruesome sight: a line of women at the top of the building, many of whom were already in flames, jumping, one by one, to their deaths.

In response to the fire, Frances served as investigator, expert witness, and guide of the Citizens’ Committee on Safety. She led legislators on inspections of factories across the state so they could see the dangers firsthand of unregulated industrialism. Years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt approached her to be his Secretary of Labor. She was the first female cabinet member in the United States, ever – and most people have never heard of her.

She countered FDR’s offer with a list of demands:

• A 40-hour work week
• A minimum wage
• Unemployment compensation
• Workers’ compensation
• The abolition of child labor
• Direct federal aid for unemployment relief
• Social Security
• A revitalized federal employment service
• Universal health insurance

He met almost every single one of them.

Erased by Design

One could argue that Frances was one of the most impactful women of our modern industrial era in the United States. And yet while she fought for labor laws that protected many, especially women and immigrants, other activists, like Mabel, pushed an agenda that she knew she’d never be able to be part of.

That’s because while Mabel fought for women’s right to vote, she also knew that the Chinese Exclusion Act was alive and well. Which meant she herself would never get that chance.

For those of you who need a brush up on history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. Mabel wouldn’t get her chance to vote. She knew that, but she marched anyway. When women were granted the right to vote in 1920, the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect. It was lifted over 20 years later, in 1943. Despite that, there’s no known documentation that Mabel ever actually voted. While her work made an impact for millions of women, it’s possible that it never served her in her lifetime.

Different Women, Equally Unknown

Here are two women. The first, a white, solidly middle class, college educated labor activist who rose to one of the highest political powers. The second, an immigrant Chinese American who led the suffragette parade and then went on to become the first Chinese woman to earn a doctorate in economics in the United States. And neither of them we’ve heard of before.

But it wasn’t just the first decade of the 1900s that saw such fundamental change. Women had been making progress for years before that. In fact, an entire generation prior, in the 1850s, Fanny Fern became the first woman to have a regular newspaper column. She became the highest paid newspaper columnist in the entire country. Yes, that’s right – for what felt like the first time ever, it was a woman who was paid higher than all the other men.

Walk the streets of New York today and you may not see it right away, but every building and every corner holds a story waiting for those willing to look. The key is knowing where to find them, and how to crack them open.

It’s 2026. Where Are the Women?

These women are extraordinary, and yet the fact that their stories have been kept covered throughout history isn’t coincidence: it’s structural. Until Central Park revealed the Women’s Rights Pioneer Monument in 2020 to commemorate 100 years of women’s suffrage, you’d be hard-pressed to find many statues of women. In fact, only 6% of statues in the United States are. This is partially because it costs money (think $20,000-$75,000 for the initial build, not including maintenance costs), political and social power, and connections to get a statue made. And the people with those things historically have not been women.

But there are other things that have made these stories harder to grasp:

• A lack of documentation. Women haven’t been written about, or documented (and most certainly not women of color), so even basic facts (like, did Mabel ever get a chance to vote before she died in the 1960s?) we’ll never know.
  
• Inconsistent or short timelines due to family and caregiving responsibilities. Mabel’s path to women’s advocacy didn’t always follow a straight arrow. When her father died in 1923, she took over his job as the director of the mission of the First Chinese Baptist Church of New York City. While she built a career advocating for Chinese Americans, her career goal had been to work at the intersection of women and economics in China.  That timeline was diverted due to family and caregiving responsibilities. Today, nearly ⅔ of caregivers are still women, which means that women’s careers are often stunted – or at least affected – by caregiving responsibilities that they disproportionately shoulder..
  
• Complicated themes. What’s better than an epic story of triumph, right? So if that story is less triumphant – Mabel spent years advocating for suffrage but then, ho hum, perhaps never voted herself – don’t ring the clean-cut bell of triumph that often makes it through the “telephone game” of history books. Fanny built her career while fleeing an abusive husband and staying in hotels, to the chagrin of her conservative family. For many, she was a disgrace.

History in the Eye of the Beholder

There are two types of history: first, there’s the complex, multilayered truth of what happened, which can never be fully documented. Then, there’s the subjective interpretation that is documented in history books, movies, and monuments. What we know as history today is a curation of those moments, told through imperfect interpreters, and then passed, and reinterpreted, over time.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the stories that made us what we are are still there – built deep inside the buildings, the laws, and the culture that surrounds us.

She Was Here (formerly She Shapes History NYC) is a women’s history walking tour company that touched down in New York in March 2026. Through oral storytelling and the dynamics of place that only travel can give us, we’re reclaiming women’s stories, and sharing them with others.

“Whether we acknowledge it or not, the stories that made us what we are are still there – built deep inside the buildings, the laws, and the culture that surrounds us.”

It all starts with knowing their names.

Women’s History, Out Loud

When my travel industry tried and colleague Nikki Padilla Rivera and I heard about She Shapes History, we hopped a plane to check it out.

A 16-hour flight later, we found much more than a walking tour. For one, walking tours usually had a lot of tourists on them (duh, right?). But the tours we went on in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra had few tourists at all. 

What we found instead were groups of locals with a deep interest in rewriting history. The tours provided an engaging, interactive way to reclaim that – not through books or statues, but through our voices.

Nikki and I said to each other, “we have to bring this to the States.”

So with Sita’s blessing, we did.

Launching to the public during Women’s History Month, March 2026, She Shapes History New York kicked off with a “Badass Women of New York” public walking tour, which covers a mile and a half of terrain over two hours. It offers more than just a walk through the streets of New York. Instead, stories that have been underdocumented and underprioritized are brought to life through photos, landmarks (when they’re there), and quotes from the women themselves (read through the voices of our tour attendees). Interested attendees can learn more and grab a ticket here.

The tour is also offered to private groups and corporate workshops. Meeting planners, unite! A She Shapes History tour can come to you, too.

The Women in Plain Sight

Some of the other badass women featured on our original Badass Women of New York walking tour include:

• Ellen Stewart, Black fashion icon and founder of legendary underground theatre La MaMa
• Barbara Gittings, “the mother of the gay rights movement”, years before Stonewall
• Antonia Panoja, a Puerto Rican educator and activist who transformed New York City’s schools by fighting for bilingual education
• Audrey Munson, the face and body behind many of New York’s iconic statues, ie the most visible woman in the city that few people knew by name.
• Fania Mindell, who helped open America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, making reproductive healthcare accessible to immigrant women.

Looking for other great women’s history walking tours beyond New York? Check out A Tour of Her Own in Washington DC, and Beyond the Bell Tours in Philadelphia.

How to Travel Like History Matters

Everything that makes a place what it is comes from a swirling, interlayered mixture of history, culture, space, and time. When we travel to a place, we choose to position ourselves within that interplay, even if just for a moment. We may not know it, and we may never see it, but the places around us have come to be what they are because of many factors. That includes the strides that were taken (or not) before us, the people who lived there, and even the physical environment.

When we travel, we choose to immerse ourselves in the result of what years of history have brought upon that place. Years of choices that we likely won’t even know about, even if we live there.

“When we travel, we choose to immerse ourselves in the result of what years of history have brought upon that place.”

When we learn about our past, we unearth opportunities to improve our collective future. It’s why anyone who goes on a She Was Here tour feels more than the satisfaction of a brisk walk. They feel the urgency of elevating women’s voices today. They feel the responsibility to be part of that. And they feel the power of rewriting what has long ago been forgotten.

Perhaps we can teach ourselves as travelers to not just look at the things as they are, but to ask what caused them to be this way. Perhaps we can examine with clear eyes the stories that are still waiting to be picked up, turned over, and learned from once again.