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Yale Needs Women

How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

WINNER OF THE 2020 CONNECTICUT BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOOK CLUBS IN 2021 BY BOOKBROWSE

"Perkins makes the story of these early and unwitting feminist pioneers come alive against the backdrop of the contemporaneous civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1970s, and offers observations that remain eerily relevant on U.S. campuses today."—Edward B. Fiske, bestselling author of Fiske Guide to Colleges

"If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without."

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.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 24, 2019
      This smart, lively first book by Perkins, a higher education scholar and Yale graduate, challenges a “sanitized tale of equity instantly achieved” when the elite university, after 268 years, admitted female undergraduates in 1969. The pressure to admit women wasn’t about gender equality, she writes: male undergraduates were tired of waiting until weekends to socialize with young women from other schools, and Yale’s rival Princeton was going coed. After Yale’s announcement, thousands of women applied; the school enrolled 575, 90% of them white. Perkins highlights five students, among them trombonist Kit McClure, and field hockey player Lawrie Mifflin. McClure, initially barred from the marching band, joined a women’s liberation rock group; Mifflin organized a field hockey team that eventually received varsity status. The new students also organized feminist groups and pushed for courses exploring women’s issues; the university’s health service launched a human sexuality course. But female students still confronted social isolation, sexual violence, and harassment. The university resisted a gender-blind admissions policy until 1972’s Title IX of the Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act made it inevitable. Perkins succeeds admirably in restoring these women’s fascinating voices and weaving in the larger historical context. This is a valuable contribution to the history of higher education, women, and the postwar U.S. Illus. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Company Literary Management.

    • Library Journal

      July 12, 2019

      For 268 years, Yale University was an all-men's college, but in the summer of 1969, all that changed when the first women were admitted. Debut author Perkins, a former high school teacher and education policymaker, reveals the struggles and triumphs of the institution's first women as she explores its move to coeducation from 1969 through 1972. Drawing on primary source documents and oral histories, she provides both the student and administrative perspectives, as women navigated housing, sex education, classes, privilege, isolation, and politics. Perkins focuses on a few women and brings their voices to the fore of the historical and political happenings of the time, including the broader issues of gender and racial inequality and the strife of the Vietnam War, imbuing this slice of history with depth. VERDICT This stunning, engaging work highlights the strength and courage of women who fought for their future against centuries of patriarchy. Perfect for readers interested in seeing how far women have come--and how far they still have yet to go.--Rachel Wadham, Brigham Young Univ. Libs., Provo, UT

      Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      July 1, 2019
      An educational policy expert examines the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that marked the early years of the Yale University experiment in coeducation. Until 1969, Yale was "a village of men." But as Perkins, the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, shows, Yale faced cultural currents from within and without that forced it to change. Coeducation had been the norm at Harvard, Yale's closest Ivy peer, since 1943. By 1968, Yale students were demanding an end to the "stifling social environment" that forced them to seek female company in women bused in from all-women colleges like Vassar. In the end, the students got their wish, but the early years of the transition to a coeducational campus were tumultuous. Behind-the-scenes administrative power struggles emerged between Yale President Kingman Brewster and Elga Wasserman, the assistant dean who spearheaded coeducation efforts. Kingman favored a slow transition that would still leave female students far outnumbered by males. By contrast, Wasserman, a perpetually embattled female administrator in a system controlled by men, favored greater parity sooner rather than later. The "threadbare budget" Yale provided Wasserman also proved problematic, especially in her efforts to create a safer campus for female undergraduates, who dealt with sexual harassment from both their professors and male peers. Perkins' interviews with some of the 575 young women undergraduates who came to Yale in 1969 reveal that many felt alienated and alone. Despite the challenges they faced--such as housing and health care facilities that did not take their needs into account--the first women students at Yale found strength in the bonds they created with each other and through the nascent feminist movement, and they went on to open doors to other women in all-male domains such as the Yale athletics and marching band programs. As it celebrates female achievement, the author's focus on a single university also narrows the readership to scholars of higher education and a Yale-affiliated audience. Well-researched but with limited appeal.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      August 1, 2019
      Yale president Kingman Brewster agreed to open admissions to women on the condition that they not affect the university's commitment to a class of one thousand leaders ?male leaders, natch. A little over 500 female freshman, sophomores, and juniors arrived on campus in 1969, including Kit McClure, who hoped to play her trombone in a rock band; Shirley Daniels, a sophomore who transferred to Yale for its Afro-American studies program; Lawrie Mifflin, field-hockey star; along with Elga Wasserman, the administrator responsible for co-education, whose title was merely Special Assistant to the President. Though none of the women started college as feminists, the isolation they felt during their first years at Yale inspired them to organize and fight for health-care access, racial justice, and gender-blind admissions. Today's activists may be dismayed at how much has not changed in the fight for progress?tone policing, demands for institutional autonomy?and though Perkins (Yale class of 1981) does not sugarcoat history, the 360-degree approach she takes makes Yale Needs Women an engaging, entertaining, thoughtful work of popular history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

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