Yale Needs Women

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

By: Anne Gardiner Perkins

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Note: 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.

©2019 Anne Gardiner Perkins (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

The struggle for equality

Anne Gardiner Perkins does a terrific job at telling the story of the women in the first coeducational classes at Yale, beginning in 1969. she not only gives voice to these remarkable women -- literally with clips at the end of the Audible version -- but brings the reader back to being a first year or transfer student during the Vietnam war, the Black Panther trial, civil rights -- when the country's focus sermed to be focused on men, not women integrating elite institutions.

Kingman Brewster was pushed into admitting a tiny first class and some transfers but refused to budge from his "principle" of 1000 male leaders per class. On coeducation he gets credit only for the initial decision, but failed utterly at building an organizational infrastructure for equality. That struggle for institutionalizing coeducation and truly welcoming women fell to others -- Elga Wasserman, Brewster's special assistant, Dr Philip and Lorna Sarrel, who taght human sexuality and ran sex counseling at Yale, the women who founded the Sisterhood.

Gardiner Perkins shows the links and the gaps in the struggles for coeducation, abortion rights, safety from rape, rampant sexual harassment, the problems and challenges of being double minorities of race and gender, class issues, integrating a virtually all-male faculty, male only social clubs where business was conducted, no varsity women's sports, and the struggle for athletes to be recognized. i had heard the story of the women's crew team previously, and their topless and successful -- finally! -- demand to get a changing room and showers. Gardiner Perkins -- through the voice of a student -- shows the struggle to get a field hockey team: students having to clean up a parking lot weekly after tailgates for playing space, no uniforms, no coverage in the Daily News, no hotel or food money for away games, then a single coach for all three women's spirts, do-it-yourself transportation etc. Shamed by a Princeton magazine article showing their hockey players in real kits, a university official borrowed blue and white skirts from a nearby public university so the Yale women didn't have to play in their cut-off jeans. She weaves a tale of allyship, activism, legal backdrops to finally overcome Brewster's years-long opposition to genuine co-education. a great tale of some laudable women, and a case study for all who are interested in making positive changes for equality.

Many, many unforgettable stories like these that show what a rocky road it was just a few years before I was there. i am glad to know these stories, now, and feel a debt of gratitude to the first coed classes. Bravo!

A Long Struggle

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Yale would allow female undergraduates into its hallowed halls. But, as Yale Needs Women documents in excruciating detail, every step of progress was hard-won, from establishing athletic teams for women to the shift from 1 in 7 female students to roughly 1 in 2 female students. There were no roadmaps for these pioneering women to follow, and they had to fight through competing priorities including Vietnam War protests and the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale in New Haven. Yale Needs Women honors the challenges faced by women in the first years of co-education at Yale by documenting the formidable forces they faced and, with grit and determination, overcame.