Yale Needs Women

More about the book

In the summer of 1969, 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 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. However, the experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale’s 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 account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.