Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant

by Anne Gardiner Perkins, Erin Bennett (Narrator)

In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "1,000 male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it?

The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future.

This audiobook includes bonus content featuring the real voices behind Yale Needs Women: exclusive excerpts from author Anne Perkins' interviews with Shirley Daniels, Kit McClure, Lawrie Mifflin, Connie Royster, and Elizabeth Spahn.

Genres: Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Published September 10, 2019

About the author

Anne Gardiner Perkins grew up in Baltimore and attended Yale University, where she earned her BA in history and was the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. She is also a Rhodes Scholar and completed a BA in modern history at Balliol College, Oxford University. She has spent her life in education, from urban high school teacher to elected school committee member. She received her PhD in higher education at UMass Boston and has presented papers on higher education at leading conferences.

When she is not writing or doing research, Anne enjoys hiking, tending her vegetable garden, and beating her son at board games. She lives with her husband in Boston and in Harvard, Massachusetts. YALE NEEDS WOMEN is her first book.

Reviews

[Fiona]

Eye opener.

Yale finally admits women as undergraduate students in 1969. There were women in the law school and medical school, but as undergraduates. There weren't many of them. The ratio was 7 men for every 1 women. The school's policy is that they would graduate 1000 men each year because men were the future leaders, not women. The women felt isolated and surrounded by men. What would it take for sex not to be a factor in the admission process?

Not much thought or policy went into protecting or helping the women succeed. Some women were rated and left school. Somehow they found the courage to later return to Yale. It was the women of Yale in 1971 who formed the terminology of sexual harassment. Not much has changed in the last 50 years. The Cornell 7 rape is in the news this week. How different is this from 50 years ago? Not much.

Now there is equality in admissions but the number of tenured women is still not where it should be. There is still a lot of work to he done.

This is a good history of the first few years of Yale admitting women and their trials and tribulations they had to endure to make any change to Yale as an institution.

[Gaili Schoen]

This book chronicles the gradual inclusion of undergrad women at Yale with the first small group admitted in 1969. The author tells a fascinating history lesson and we get to know the stories of many of the Yale women both white and black. I’m not a Yale graduate but found the stories compelling. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes terribly painful, and sometimes triumphant. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys women’s history.