“Yale Needs Women”
The news was so
shocking that the New York Times ran it on the front page.
Yale, which had banned women undergraduates for the previous 268
years, was finally going coed. A student editorial praised Yale’s
decision as a “personal triumph” for Yale President Kingman
Brewster. And yet, had Brewster had his way, Yale would never have
admitted women at all.
Yale Needs Women
tells for the first time the true story of the young women students
who broke the gender barrier at Yale in September 1969. They came
from all over the country: Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore,
Boston, the Bronx. Few were prepared for what they found when they
arrived.
Outnumbered
seven-to-one because of the gender quota Yale put in place, these
young pioneers, most of them just teenagers, were barred from many of
the privileges their male classmates took for granted. Yale Needs
Women follows the story of five women students in particular—two
black and three white—through the tumultuous early years of
coeducation at Yale.
Based on five years
of archival research and eighty oral histories, Anne Gardiner
Perkins’s unflinching account of a group of young women striving
for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage
that continues to resonate today.
