By the time she died in 1916, Hetty Green had built one of the largest personal fortunes in American history: without a partner, a firm, or a single man's name on the door. When her father gave her $1,200 to buy clothes and find a husband, she spent $200 on the wardrobe, invested the rest in government bonds, and never looked back. She went on to invest in real estate and railroads with a discipline and integrity that most of her male contemporaries never matched, and she did it in an era when women weren't permitted a seat at the table.

Then came the Panic of 1907. While the banks that had spent decades excluding her began to fail, Hetty had already seen it coming and she had the cash reserves to do something about it. She lent freely to financiers and to the City of New York itself, stabilizing an economy on the brink. She cared about the fate of her city and was the sole female influencer driving real change.

History called her eccentric. A miser. Depending on the source, the Witch of Wall Street. But what she actually was: disciplined, unbothered by the optics of being underestimated, and ahead of every market she ever entered. To more recent historians, and to us, she is the Queen of Wall Street. She is who we aspire to be: principled, influential, and unapologetic about the power we carry.