Yale Needs Women by Anne Gardiner Perkins
Yale Needs Women by Anne Gardiner Perkins
"If you've been to college in the past few decades, you may take for granted that men and women have the same educational opportunities... but, of course, that wasn't always the case. In 1969, Yale admitted women for the first time, and this is the fascinating story of that first calss. Perkins does a lovely job of putting Yale's foray into coeducation into the larger context of everything going on a the time (the draft, the Blck Power movement, etc)-it's a portrait of the late '60s filled with things I didn't know."
- Recommended by Erika
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 "one thousand 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. 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.