**PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A VIRTUAL PROGRAM THAT WILL TAKE PLACE VIA ZOOM. Registrants will receive a link to access the Zoom Meeting via email.**  

Join Anne Gardiner Perkins for a presentation based on her acclaimed book, Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant. Enjoy a riveting account of how the first 575 undergraduate women admitted to previously all-male Yale University in 1969 found themselves doing battle with 268 years of entrenched male hegemony in an Ivy League setting. 

Anne will be joined by two subjects of her book -- Virginia Tyson and Betsy Hartmann. Both women arrived as first-year students at Yale in 1969, the start of coeducation, and will give us their first-hand account of what that experience was like. Virginia grew up in Houston but attended boarding school in Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley. Betsy came to Yale from a public high school in Princeton New Jersey, and is a long-time Massachusetts resident.

About The Book: 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. 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. To purchase a copy of the Yale Needs Women, click HERE.

About The Author: Anne Gardiner Perkins is an award-winning historian and expert in higher education. She graduated from Yale University, where she won the Porter Prize in history and was elected the first woman editor in chief of the Yale Daily News. Perkins is a Rhodes Scholar who received her PhD in higher education from the University of Massachusetts Boston and her master's in public administration from Harvard, where she won the Littauer Award for academic excellence and served as a teaching fellow in education policy. She has presented papers on the history of higher education at leading academic conferences and been a visiting scholar at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. Perkins lives with her husband in Boston.

Register directly on Zoom HERE. Sponsored by the Friends of the Tewksbury Public Library. Presented in collaboration with the Memorial Hall Library in Andover and Stevens Memorial Library in North Andover.