In an effort to correct the civic record left in public art, New York City officials announced in June that we would soon be seeing more statues of women on our streets and in our parks. Right now there are very few — a bronze of Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park, a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park. About a mile north of her you can find Joan of Arc riding a horse, but really, what is Joan of Arc — who fought for many things, not one of them rent control — doing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

The city’s new initiative rightly focuses on honoring women with a significant connection to New York, and it has called upon the public to make suggestions. While those votes are being counted, we conducted our own survey, to which more than 400 people responded. Many of them said they would like to see statues of Jane Jacobs and Margaret Sanger — women whose influence is still so alive in urban and social policy that it feels as if we commemorate them every day. We would like to see those statues, too, but the list below, though it includes some celebrated names, leans heavily on some of the less well-known ones mentioned.

The list is by no means comprehensive — we did not consider candidates who are still living (sorry, Meryl Streep and Madonna). And the conversation will keep going, here and in cities and communities around the country. A recent crowdfunding effort to help erect a statue of the celebrated African-American journalist Ida B. Wells in Chicago, for instance, quickly raised the last $40,000 necessary to make it happen.