But she was accepted quickly, and has felt very comfortable there. “I’m a woman of color and I wear my hair natural,” she said. The beauty room at the Wing includes products and combs that suit her hair. “There always seems to be an effort of inclusion,” she said.

There are challenges to this effort. Along with the membership fees, there are charges of $30 per hour for semiprivate work rooms and for the snack bar’s food, coffee and wine (no outside food is allowed inside). This limits the economic diversity of membership.

Ms. Kassan and Ms. Gelman are sensitive to criticism of elitism and said they plan to announce a scholarship program next year. “It was never my goal to go into business to begin with and certainly not to go into business to create a product for the uber-wealthy, and I don’t think it is,” Ms. Gelman said.

The Wing is also in the interesting position of marketing a women-only company at a moment when the progressive forces in American culture are pushing for a less binary, more fluid interpretation of gender, as evinced by Ms. Nef’s presence on the cover of No Man’s Land.

If a person applied for membership who looked like a man but said he identified as a woman, Ms. Gelman said they would likely check out the person’s social media feeds and look for other indications of the person “living as a woman,” she said. They have looked to women’s colleges for guidance on how to construct their policies. Barnard College, for example, stipulates that it “will consider for admission those applicants who consistently live and identify as women.”

But it is a staple of such colleges’ English curriculums, Virginia Woolf, whose guiding specter still hovers over the enterprise. “We still believe women deserve spaces of their own,” Ms. Gelman said.