Booked for Lunch: Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant

Join Wilton Historical Society for "Booked for Lunch" book talk via Zoom on Thursday, January 28, 12:30pm - 1:30pm

“Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant” with author Anne Gardiner Perkins

The news was so shocking that the New York Times ran it on the front page.

Yale, which had banned women undergraduates for the previous 268 years, was finally 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 would never have admitted women at all.  “Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant” will be the topic of a book talk by author Anne Gardiner Perkins on Thursday, January 28 from 12:30 – 1:30.  Part of the Booked for Lunch series on Zoom, the program will feature Ms.  Perkins and some of the students she interviewed for the book. The title recently won the 2020 Connecticut Book Award for Nonfiction.

“Yale Needs Women” tells for the first time the true story of the young women students who broke the gender barrier at Yale in September 1969. They came from all over the country: Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston, the Bronx. Few were prepared for what they found when they arrived. Based on five years of archival research and eighty oral histories, “Yale Needs Women” follows the story of five women students in particular—two black and three white—through the tumultuous early years of coeducation at Yale. 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.

 Suggested contribution is $10. Learn more HERE.