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In Her Own Words: Dr. Anne Gardiner Perkins’77, Author and Historian
Anne Gardiner Perkins ’77 grew up in Baltimore, and attended Bryn Mawr from seventh through twelfth grade like her mother Anne Scarlett Perkins ’55 and sister Ginny Perkins ’79. After graduation, she attended Yale and Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) before earning a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard, and a PhD in Higher Education from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Perkins says her family often teases her about the number of academic degrees she has, but it is fitting given that she has spent most of her life working in education. Before writing Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules at an Ivy League Giant, Perkins taught high school history, college-level writing, education policy at the graduate level, and served as the Associate Commissioner for Academic Affairs at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. Today, she lives in Boston with her husband, and has three adult children— Lily, Robby, and Mac. She is currently on the Yale Needs Women book tour, and will visit Baltimore in October. Read the New York Times Review of Yale Needs Women.
There’s a quote that I love from education researchers Rubén Donato and Marvin Lazerson, who observe that the decisions we make today “rest on assumptions about the past; they rest on the stories people believe about the past.” That captures for me why history is so important— we’ll never get where we want to go if we don’t understand where we’re starting from.
Seven years ago I went back to school to get my doctorate, and decided to write a paper about Yale’s first women undergraduates for one of my courses. I began reading, and was shocked to find that of all the histories written about this era at Yale, none had included the voices of the women themselves. I made a trip to the Yale archives, and found a beautiful collection of oral histories of students, faculty, and administrators from the exact period I was studying. But, of the 122 oral histories in that collection, only four were of women. I decided it was long overdue time to change that. Yale Needs Women is the result.
One of the most important gifts I received from Bryn Mawr was the encouragement to dive deep into issues and ideas that are important to me. My Bryn Mawr senior project on Maryland’s juvenile justice system was truly transformative, and the research skills I gained from that work are the same ones that helped me write Yale Needs Women.
I wanted to know what happened once those first women students arrived. Here was a college that had been all male for 268 years, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Historian Margaret Nash calls such moments “flashpoints” in history, times when the bright light of a sudden change illuminates all around it and everything, for a time, seems possible. In 1969, the U.S. women’s movement had just begun, the Black Power movement was changing how Americans saw race, and into that moment stepped the first women undergraduates at Yale. I wrote this book as the story of five of those first women—three white, two black—because I wanted to write a book that my daughter and niece would read, one where we came to know and care about the main characters as we might with a novel.
My favorite part of writing this book was having the opportunity to meet and interview some of the first women undergraduates at Yale. They are in their late sixties and early seventies now, and they are, to a one, remarkable. It wasn’t easy being in that first group of women. They were outnumbered seven to one by Yale men that first year because of a gender quota Yale put in place that gave preference to men. They were isolated—Yale divided them up across its twelve residential colleges so that the men would each have their own small cluster of girls. And while the phrase “sexual harassment” had not been invented in 1969, that didn’t mean it wasn’t going on. As I researched, I was struck by the courage and determination of these young women—most just teenagers—and by how much they were able to change Yale in their short time there.
The most challenging part of writing this book was doing justice to the stories of the forty African American women who were part of that first class. Feminist history has often been criticized for equating the history of white women with the history of women as a whole, and I didn’t want to repeat that mistake. But I’m a white woman who grew up in a white neighborhood and attended predominantly white schools (my graduating class at Bryn Mawr had just one African American student), and that was a handicap in telling this part of the history. I owe a lot to the African American women I interviewed, who taught me what it would be like to attend Yale if both your gender and race were in the minority.
Perhaps the most surprising thing that I learned was that Yale only admitted women students reluctantly, and did so for reasons that had more to do with marketing than equity. Through the mid-1960s, Yale watched in alarm as a growing number of students choose top-rival Harvard over Yale. Their reason? Yale men had to drive two hours to Smith or Mt. Holyoke to find a suitable girlfriend while Harvard men had merely to walk a few blocks to Radcliffe. By 1969, women were an amenity that top colleges could no longer do without. It wasn’t until Yale and Princeton went coed in 1969 that the coeducation taboo among America’s most elite schools was lifted, and a wave of coeducation changed U.S. higher education forever.
One piece of advice I have for girls headed to college is this: You are more powerful than you think you are. The world has been changed by girls just like you. Find a spot where what the world needs and what you love to do intersect, and throw yourself in. Senior year can be such a self-focused time: Are my SAT scores high enough? Who will write my recommendations? Did that interviewer like me? Leave that self-focus behind and look outward. The world needs you.
My Yale Needs Women book tour brings me to Baltimore on October 30, where I’ll be speaking at the Church of the Redeemer as part of the Enoch Pratt’s Writers Live series. I’d love to have some Bryn Mawr faces in the audience! In the meantime, follow me on Twitter at @AnneGPerkins, sign up for my quarterly newsletter here, or check out my website. My husband and kids also helped me put together a Yale Need Women playlist of 22 songs released between 1969 and 1972, plus a two-song prelude from 1967 (can’t forget Aretha Franklin’s Respect). You can learn more about each song here and listen to the playlist on Spotify.
Banner: Perkins signing books in Washington, D.C.
Top: Cover of Yale Needs Women
Center of page: Perkins (right) with mother Anne Scarlett Perkins ’55 (center) and sister Ginny Perkins ’79 (left).
Top: Cover of Yale Needs Women
Center of page: Perkins (right) with mother Anne Scarlett Perkins ’55 (center) and sister Ginny Perkins ’79 (left).
"You are more powerful than you think you are. The world has been changed by girls just like you. Find a spot where what the world needs and what you love to do intersect, and throw yourself in."
