By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — All around lower Manhattan, there are monuments to the men who built the city, from the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall to the ornate courthouse named for William "Boss" Tweed.
But many influential women also paced the narrow streets of downtown, and a new tour in honor of Women's History Month brings their lives and struggles into focus for the first time.
The 21-stop tour on March 27, called "Opening the Way: A Women's History Walk," chronicles the female suffragists, engineers, preachers and reporters who carved out a new role for themselves in a male-dominated city over the past 300 years.
"It's most important for young women, because it affirms their intuitive sense that something is not right, and that others before them had the same sense and took action," said Rita Henley Jensen, founder and editor of Women's eNews, which organized the tour.
The recent attack on Planned Parenthood funding made Jensen think about Margaret Sanger, the first stop on the tour.
Sanger, a nurse, was an early advocate for birth control. She was put on trial at the former federal courthouse near City Hall Park in 1914 for threatening to distribute contraceptive information by mail. After she was sentenced to jail time, she fled to Canada.
"Keep in mind what Margaret Sanger went through," Jensen said. "It affirms people who say, 'I want to do something, but do I have the courage?'"
It's a question that must have confronted many of the women who are highlighted on the tour, a question that they ultimately answered with a resounding: Yes.
Emily Warren Roebling decided she had the courage to finish building the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband Washington Roebling, the chief engineer, got sick and could no longer work.
Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World on Park Row at the turn of the 20th century, had the courage to be committed to the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island so she could write about the notoriously brutal conditions.
And FDNY Capt. Brenda Berkman had the courage to be one of the city's first female firefighters in the early 1980s, and then she had the courage to rush to Ground Zero on 9/11. In the months that followed, she spoke out in memory of the female first responders who were killed, reminding the world that women, too, are heroes.
"Who knew?" Jensen said of the stories she and others uncovered to create the tour. "I've taken feminist historians on this tour and they've broken down and cried, because really, who knew?"
Jensen got the idea for the tour in 2008, when Women's eNews moved from Chelsea down to lower Manhattan. Jensen noticed street signs in honor of a few early feminist activists and began to wonder what other interesting lives lay all but forgotten in the neighborhood's past.
Jensen is leading the tour March 27 in honor of Women's History Month, and she plans to hold several more this fall for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
But all the information is available on the Women's eNews website, so people can do a self-guided version whenever they want. There is a phone number to call at each stop, where people can hear a recording of that woman's words.
The March 27 tour will start at 11 a.m. at 6 Barclay St. and will last for two hours. Limited tickets are available for $20; to RSVP, e-mail events@womensenews.org.
