As a female graduate of Yale, I’d always assumed that the story of women’s admission to the college in 1969 was one of triumph ... But Yale Needs Women, Anne Gardiner Perkins’s lively and engaging account of the college’s first class of female students, shows that the reality was far more complicated... In absorbing detail, Perkins describes the organizing efforts of [the] early years ... Reading the book, it was amazing to realize that during my first days at Yale, in 1983, the gender quota had been abolished only 11 years before, and that women had been present for just 14. It’s no wonder, as Perkins notes, that there remains a considerable distance to go.
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