Join us for a conversation about the integration of women at Yale from those that were there! Panelists include the Bookworm's own Sandy Fuller (class of '73), along with long time local physician Kent Petrie (class of '72) and Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of the the upcoming book, "Yale Needs Women."  

The news was so shocking that the New York Times ran it on the front page. Yale, which had banned female undergraduates for the previous 268 years, was 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 never would have admitted women at all. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the wave of coeducation that started with Yale and transformed America’s top colleges, "Yale Needs Women" tells, for the first time, the story of the young women who broke the school’s gender barrier in 1969. 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 female 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.

BIO:

Anne Gardiner Perkins is an awardwinning historian and expert in higher education. She grew up in Baltimore and graduated from Yale University, where she won the Porter Prize in history and was the first woman elected editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. Anne is a Rhodes Scholar who received her PhD in higher education from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She earned her master’s degree from Harvard, where she won the Littauer Award for academic excellence and served as a teaching fellow in education policy. Anne has spent her life in education, from urban high school teacher to elected school committee member, and has presented papers on higher education at leading conferences. Yale Needs Women is her first book. For more information, visit annegardinerperkins.com