If you want to understand what made, and makes, Boston's South End one of the most remarkable neighborhoods in America, forget the Victorian brownstones for a minute. Look at the women.

The Boston Women's Heritage Trail's South End walk documents some truly extraordinary people — activists, artists, educators, and organizers who didn't wait for the world to catch up. Most of them still don't get the credit they deserve.

Start with Maria Louise Baldwin. In 1889, she became the first African American female principal in Massachusetts and the Northeast, running a school in Cambridge where the faculty and nearly all the students were white, including the children of Harvard professors. W.E.B. Du Bois said she had achieved the greatest distinction in education of any African American not working in segregated schools. Worth noting: the Cambridge school system initially refused to hire her. The Black community had to protest just to get her in the door. Then in 1916 she was named Master of the school, one of only two women in Cambridge to hold that title, and the only African American in all of New England. Two milestones, 27 years apart. She earned both of them.

Then there's Melnea Cass. You've certainly driven Melnea Cass Boulevard through Roxbury. Did you know she was known as the "First Lady of Roxbury"? Cass spent more than six decades fighting for educational and economic opportunities for Boston's Black community. She started organizing Black women to register to vote the same year the 19th Amendment passed. She co-founded Freedom House. She launched one of Boston's first pre-K programs. She served as NAACP chapter president. When she died in 1978, more than a thousand people showed up — Black and white, rich and poor, young and old.

Mary Evans Wilson started the Women's Service Club during World War I, and also helped build Boston's NAACP chapter, creating an organized infrastructure for Black women's leadership.

Education reformer Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson was teaching Black history decades before anyone else. And Anna Bobbitt Gardner became the first African American woman to earn a bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory in 1932. She then ran music studios in Boston for over 60 years, produced radio and TV programming, and organized "Colored American Nights" featuring Black musicians at Symphony Hall.

Two sculptors you should know. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was a Harlem Renaissance artist who gained international recognition for work that took on race and identity head-on. And Fern Cunningham created "Step on Board," the Harriet Tubman memorial in the South End, installed in 1999. It was the first statue honoring a woman on city-owned land in Boston.

Frieda Garcia ran United South End Settlements for years, focused on literacy, affordable housing, and youth programs. And Myrna Vázquez, the woman Casa Myrna is named for, was one of the earliest and loudest voices against domestic violence and for Latino civic empowerment in this city, at a time when neither issue was getting the institutional attention it needed.

And then there's Kip Tiernan. Tiernan was a lesbian who lived in the South End, and the Boston Women's Heritage Trail walk literally starts near her home. On Easter Sunday 1974, she opened Rosie's Place in an abandoned supermarket on Columbus Avenue, the first shelter for homeless women anywhere in America. She'd seen women disguising themselves as men just to get a bed for the night, and she decided that was unacceptable. So she fixed it, with $250 and four volunteers. She also co-founded the Greater Boston Food Bank, Boston Health Care for the Homeless, and about a dozen other organizations. When she died in 2011, Mayor Tom Menino said there was "a big hole in our lives." USA Today named her a Woman of the Century. The trail starts at her doorstep for a reason.

The trail also includes poet Louise Imogen Guiney and archaeologist Harriet Boyd Hawes.

These are just some of them. There are more. Visit The Boston Women's Heritage: www.bwht.org/explore.