 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives. I'm Karine Porter, the curator for Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote on behalf of David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program, whether you are here in the theater or joining us through Facebook or YouTube. Before we hear from Ann Gardner Perkins about her book, Yale Needs Women, I'd like to let you know about two programs that are coming up soon in the McGowan Theater. On Thursday, October 10th at noon, author Nina Barrett will be here to discuss her new book, The Leopold and Loeb Files, an intimate look at one of America's most famous crimes. Then on Tuesday, October 15th at noon, bestselling author Harlow Giles Unger will tell us about his new biography, Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence. To keep informed about events throughout the year, check out our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside of the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. Another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The foundation supports the work of the agency, especially its education and outreach programs. Check out their website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about them and to join online. Rightfully hers, which is on view upstairs in Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery, commemorates the centennial of the 19th Amendment and tells the story of women's struggle for voting rights as a critical step towards equal citizenship. The exhibit explores how American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, and class advance the cause of suffrage and follow the struggle for voting rights beyond 1920. This landmark voting rights victory was made possible by decades of suffragists' relentless political engagement, and yet it is just one critical milestone in women's battle for greater equality and opportunity. Just as diverse women struggled to secure their place among men at the polls, women have fought for inclusion in male-dominated institutions and professions throughout the course of American history. And Yale Needs Women is one of those stories. In her book, Anne Gardner Perkins relates the experience of the pioneering female undergraduates who were the first to arrive on Yale's campus after the university finally opened its doors to women in 1969. Like the struggle for women's suffrage, Yale Needs Women is a story of women's persistence and courage in the face of ignorant opposition that continues to resonate today. Anne Gardner Perkins is an award-winning historian and expert in higher education. She grew up in Baltimore and graduated from Yale University where she won the Porter Prize in History and was elected the first woman editor-in-chief in the Yale Daily News. Anne is a Rhodes Scholar who received her Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She earned her master's degree from Harvard where she won the Littower Award for Academic Excellence and served as a teaching fellow in education policy and has spent her life in education from urban high school teacher to elected school committee member and has presented papers on higher education at leading conferences. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Anne Gardner Perkins to the stage. Good afternoon. My name again is Anne Perkins and what an honor it is to be with all of you today at the National Archives as part of their wonderful exhibit on American Women's Fight for the Right to Vote. I was in Washington at the end of June and so made a point to come see this exhibit. And I was really pleased to see that among the many women activists recognized was Lucy Stone, suffragist and an abolitionist from my own home state of Massachusetts. Lucy Stone lived at a time when the vast majority of U.S. colleges still denied entry to women. She grew up on a farm, the one of nine children in rural Massachusetts. But in 1847, Lucy Stone became the first Massachusetts woman ever to be awarded a college degree. Three years later, putting that education to good use, Lucy Stone organized the first National Women's Rights Conference in this history in this country. But she knew that the polls was not the only place where women faced barriers. And in 1856 at another women's rights convention, she stood before the gathered crowd and said, our demand that Harvard and Yale colleges should admit women, though not yet yielded, only waits for a little more time. Let's just call her an optimist. Or it took until 1969, more than 100 years late by Lucy Stone's calculation for Yale University to admit its first women undergraduates. And Harvard, I should add, took another six years after that. So the moment in history that we're going to explore together today occurs several decades after women finally won the right to vote in this country. But it is part of the same long battle for equity, a battle that continues today. So let me give you a brief game plan of our time together. You can think of it as a play in four acts. I'm going to begin by giving you some of the context both at Yale and beyond into which those first women undergraduates arrive. Then I'm going to tell you a little more about two of them in particular and share one story about the change that finally begins at Yale once those women arrive. We'll pause then to give you a chance to ask some questions. So be thinking of some good ones or even just a few things you might be curious about. And I'll close with one final story before we disband. Sound okay? People often ask me why I decided to write Yale Needs Women. I had never written a book before. And here's what I tell them. The women who go first, the women who speak out, help shape a better country for all of us. Yet all too often, their stories are lost. I was not going to let that happen to this one. Yale Needs Women is the story of the first women undergraduates today. And I should let you know that we are honored to have at least two of them in our audience today, Debbie Bernick and Joe, I forget Joe Brooks. Are there any other first women undergraduates here? Can you two stand so we can recognize you? Thank you. Thank you for going first. So Yale Needs Women is the story of women like Debbie and Joe. Women who arrived at Yale just 50 years ago to a campus that had been all male for the previous 268 years. Yale had only admitted those first women reluctantly as a way to continue to attract the nation's top men. The women were outnumbered seven to one by their male classmates. And yet of the dozens that I interviewed to write this book, I was struck again and again by their persistence and their humility. This is a story of change, change that happens and change that does not. And of power, power held in all its traditional ways and power created outside such boundaries. But above all, my book is the story of a group of young women, live in particular, two black and three white, and how they found their way during the tumultuous early years of undergraduate coeducation at Yale. So let's turn back to September 1969 when those first women students arrived. And to do this, I'm going to show you a brief two-minute video that my son's college roommate was kind enough to put together for me. And it's going to show you some pictures of Yale at the time set to clips from two songs. I will say for our online audience, you're not going to hear any of the audio because we want to respect copyright law. But I showed we had the world premiere of this video at the Wilton, Connecticut Public Library last month, and the audience there liked it. And I hope you will as well. So we could get the video. Confusion, the title of a temptation song released in 1970, captured for many college students at that time. What it was like to be in college. The world was churning. The Vietnam War and the protest against it was raging. The Black Power Movement was changing how Americans thought about race. The Stonewall riots had just laid there, the discrimination faced by gay men and women. And into that moment, stepped the first women undergraduates at Yale. The women's movement had barely started. And so let me give you a few facts to situate you. Just 7% of US lawyers were women. Just 3%, excuse me, US doctors were women. Just 3% of US lawyers. Just 2% of members of Congress. The word sexism was so new that when Time Magazine wrote its first major feature about the women's movement that November, it put sexism in quotes because no one had ever heard the word before. Discrimination against women, college students, faculty, and administrators was perfectly legal. None of the protections we have in place now were yet there. And if you think Yale was the only college that was turning women students away before 1969, think again. The list of US colleges that denied women entry up to that point in fact leads like an academic who's who. From Amherst, Bowden, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Dartmouth, Davidson, and Duke at the start of the alphabet to UVA, Wesleyan, Williams, West Point, and of course Yale at its end. Seven of the eight Ivy League colleges denied entry to women as did here in Washington DC, Georgetown University. Even two state universities at that time did not allow women to apply. And so when Yale made its surprise announcement that it was going co-ed, the news was so shocking that the New York Times published it on the front page. Yale's decision and Princeton's announcement a few months later finally lifted that co-education taboo in American higher education and in the years that followed a wave of co-education changed elite higher education in this country forever. But if Yale President Kingman Brewster had had his way, Yale would never have admitted women at all. Ten months later, those first women students arrived. So who were they? The New York Times called them superwomen, but most of them were just teenagers. They came from all over the country, from Los Angeles, Houston, Memphis, Cleveland, and Baltimore, from Washington DC, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring, Alexandria, and McLean, Virginia. They came from America's largest cities in some of its smallest towns, places so small that the students just used a rural free delivery number for their address. Some of those students were wealthy, but others had to patch together their tuition from financial aid jobs and summer work. Most were white, but 40 of those first women students were black, 13 were Asian American, and three were Latina. They were smart and they were tough. That's how Yale picked them. Women were four brothers, women who had traveled abroad, women who played a sport or had endured a difficult issue. Those were the women Yale looked for that first year. I interviewed one of the two administrators who chose that first class, and I'll never forget what he told me. There was no point in taking a timid woman and putting her in that environment because it could crush you. He knew what he was talking about. Yale might have called itself co-ed, but just 13% of the student body that first year were women, and here's what you need to understand. That gender imbalance did not happen naturally, but because Yale put in place a gender quota that gave preference to men, Yale saw its mission as graduating national leaders, 1,000 male leaders a year, to be exact. And because men are leaders and women are not, or so Yale's reasoning went, it decided to try to spend as few of its limited spots on women as possible. And so for the first four years of co-education at Yale, women were limited to 230 in each entering class, while Yale reserved 1,025 spots for men, that 1,000 male leaders plus a cushion of 25, in place someone in the admissions office had made a mistake. The fight to overturn Yale's quota on women became one of the defining battles of the early years of co-education. But in the meantime, those first women students learned what it was like to be one of the only girls in the room. As one of them wrote, when I raised my hand to talk in class, the guys turned to stare at me as if the furniture itself had offered an opinion. I thought, that always makes me so sad. And if you think of what it was like being one of those first women, students just 13% of the student body, think of what it was like to be one of the first African American women, just 1% of the student body, or scarce or still, one of the 13 Asian American women, or one of the three Latinas. This is, token status is not the only challenge Yale's first women faced. Women were isolated. Yale divided them up across its 12 residential colleges so that each group of men would have its own small cluster of women. They had few women mentors of Yale's 407 tenured faculty in 1969. Three were women. And while the phrase sexual harassment had not yet been invented in 1969, that did not mean it wasn't going on. But they were smart and they were tough. That's how Yale picked them. Yale needs women is based on six years of research in the Yale archives and on more than 80 oral history interviews. But when I sat down to write this book, I had two goals in mind. The first was, I wanted to tell this history from the perspective of the women who had lived it. And the second was, I wanted to write a book that my daughter Lily would actually want to read. And so to do that, I needed to not do what historians like myself are overly fond of doing, which is writing grand themes and analytical insights. Instead, what I decided to do was tell this story through weaving together the stories of five of those first women undergraduates. I wanted Lily, I wanted my two sons. I wanted readers of this book to come to know and care about these first women students as I had. Allow me to tell you a little bit about two of them. Connie Royster grew up in New Haven and she had been to Yale many times as a young girl. Her grandfather and older cousins worked as chefs and managers serving the Yale men in their fraternities and secret societies. And when there was a big event, the extended family would be called in to help. And Connie often did so. But lest you think of Connie just as the local girl who gets into Yale, which is partly who she was, let me tell you a little bit more about her. Her grandmother was one of the founders of New Haven's branch of the NAACP. And Connie was named for her aunt Connie, Constance Baker Motley, the first African-American woman ever to be appointed as a federal judge. Before Constance Baker Motley became a judge, she worked as a lawyer for the NAAC legal defense fund. And she was one of the lawyers responsible for enabling James Meredith to be the first African-American student ever educated at the University of Mississippi. Connie devoted herself at Yale to drama and the arts and community service. And at the end of the first year of coeducation, when New Haven and Yale erupted over a trial of a group of Black Panthers and thousands of demonstrators poured into the city, Connie experienced that event differently than her classmates. For Connie's cousin, John Huggins was a Black Panther and John Huggins' wife, Erica Huggins, was the leader of the New Haven Black Panthers and one of the Black Panthers on trial. So that's Connie. The other woman, and I wish I could tell you about all five, but we've got a little bit of a limit on time here. The other woman I wanna tell you about is Laurie Mifflin. Laurie grew up in a town outside of Philadelphia, a town that displayed its aspirations for its youth by the names that it gave to its streets, Harvard Avenue, Yale Avenue, North and South Princeton Avenue. But Philadelphia, for those of you who know it, is a sports town and everyone there played sports, including the girls. I'm gonna read you a short excerpt from the book and this is the moment at Yale when Laurie realizes that the challenge of being one of those first women might be a little more than she had anticipated. Laurie Mifflin was ready to play field hockey. She had played every autumn since she was 11. Many of the girls in her high school played too. The streets of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania may have been named for colleges that only men could attend, but the playing fields were filled each fall with girls wielding hockey sticks, smacking the ball down the field as hard as they could. As Constance Baker-Appleby, who introduced field hockey to the United States, wrote, being a member of a team gives you confidence and power. Laurie had brought her shin guards and a bag of balls to Yale along with her hockey stick. She just needed to figure out how to sign up for the team. Yale's orientation week schedule listed introductory meetings for a half dozen men's sports. There were 16 men's varsity sports that year, but it made no mention of field hockey. So after saying goodbye to her parents, Laurie set off for the other side of campus where the athletic office was. Where do I sign up for field hockey? She asked the man behind the desk. He looked confused. There were no sign ups, he told her. There was no team. There was also no women's soccer team, no women's basketball, no women's tennis or swim team or crew. Yale was not offering any competitive sports for women. Athletic girls did have a few options to choose from. Laurie could take classes in modern dance, ballet and something called women's exercise, which was a watered-down version of the fitness training offered to men. She could learn synchronized swimming from a part-time instructor from Southern Connecticut College. She could help exercise the polo ponies although girls were not allowed to join the team. And she could be a cheerleader, sort of. Yale's cheerleading squad announced that it would include four girls on the team that year, a limit that kept the nine men in the majority. And no girl-style cheerleading worn the cheerleading captain. We don't want rah-rah cheerleaders here at Yale. Yale was, cheerleading was manly, he said, full of muscle beach tricks like headstands and forward rolls. And while the guys performed in long pants, the girls would be bearing their legs in kool-ops. Laurie was not interested in cheerleading or any of the other options that were available to women. She wanted to play field hockey, just like she had ever since she was 11. Damn it, she said, I'm not gonna let them stop me. Before we move to the question and answer, I'm gonna tell one more story. I wanted to ground you in some of the facts of this era as part of this talk, but the power of history to me is the power of stories. Stories that teach, stories that inspire, stories that can reorient how we understand the world. And this is a story that touches at this theme of change and the questions that surround it. How does change towards greater equity happen? What stands in its way? This is a story about a man, not a woman. The final story will be about a woman. But I wanted to tell this one first because, while it's true that what villains there are in the first years of coeducation at Yale were indeed all men, many of the heroes were men as well. And Yale women would not have come as far or as fast as they did without the help of men who stood up as allies. And I like to tell this story as well because all of us every day are in the position to be allies, to step across the lines of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and class and affirm together our common humanity. Now the guy in this story really didn't have much influence at Yale at all. He was an assistant professor. His name was Keith Thompson and he served on Yale's admissions committee. The first year of coeducation, that first group of women coeds had been chosen by just two Yale administrators there hadn't been time for anything else because Yale's decision had been so last minute. But in 1970, when it came time to choose the second class of women, the women's admissions process was incorporated into the same process used as the men. That process began in the fall with recruitment and interviews and the collection of vast folders of information, but it was March when the decisions were made. And it was in March that the Yale admissions committee, 30 staff, Yale staff and faculty found that they had a little time for anything else. The schedule was grueling. They met from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, six hours on Saturday, another three on Sunday. And by March 26th, they'd been at this for three weeks. And now this was Yale. And so let me tell you a little bit about what those decisions sounded like, at least for the men who had applied. Admit, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject. Admit, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject. But because of that gender quota, the rejections came more than twice as often for women who applied. Admit, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject, reject. After three weeks of this, Keith Thompson had had enough. And so he wrote a letter to Yale President Kingman Brewster, decrying the discrimination that faced women applicants to Yale. And you need to understand this as an act of courage because as an assistant professor, Keith Thompson was not protected by tenure, and the tenured faculty members on that committee, those whose jobs were protected, remained silent. Thompson proposed a modest solution to President Brewster, free up just a hundred of those slots that were now reserving for men and open them up to women as well. Otherwise, he wrote, the admissions committee would be forced to reject exceptionally well qualified women in large numbers, and at the same time, except some ten percent of men who are relatively less impressive. Kingman Brewster read Thompson's letter and two others that followed in support. And then he did nothing. The gender quota remained in place. But two years later, Keith Thompson would write again. And that time, the letter made a difference. Okay. So I would love to have questions from you. And we've got some time for that. But you need to come up to one of the two mics that are on the sides of the room so that the online audience can hear you. But I encourage you, anything you're curious about, anything you have questions about. I'd love to hear your question. Yes, ma'am. I'm short, so I have to bring it down a little bit. I know exactly what you're saying. Jeff, right. My name is Juliette Wuer. And I was a freshman in high school when this happened, and I remembered it. But I also remember just the tumult in the United States politically at that time. Now, you alluded to it with the Black Panthers and other things. I'm wondering if you could go a little bit farther. The war in Vietnam is what I'm particularly thinking about. How did that manifest the people's students protesting that? Sorry, I have a problem with my memory. Protesting that. And what was the role in women protesting those things? It must have been a part of their life during their university time. It was a very different. Their lives were, I mean, they were doing something so special, but the whole world was on flame. Absolutely. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Sure. Absolutely. And it was particularly exploding during the very first semester those women arrived. So that October, as part of the moratorium on the war on Vietnam, there was a day of protests and campuses across the United States. And the women at Yale take part in that just as the men do. In November, there's a massive protest here in Washington, D.C. and the women at Yale get on the buses and come down to D.C. to protest just like the men do. So there was no difference in terms of feeling about the war. And when I speak with many of the women at the time for them, the Vietnam War was actually a more prominent issue than women's rights. The language, the understanding, the theory around women's rights and the women's movement really wasn't there yet for many of them. I would say probably the seminal event, though, was in December of 1969, that very first year of coeducation at Yale, the United States held its first draft lottery for the Vietnam War of who would fight and who would not in an attempt to at least mitigate some of the huge disparity that was sending disproportional numbers of poor and African-American soldiers to the war. And what the women will remember are two things about that. The way they did that lottery was they actually put all the birth dates into a giant fishbowl and then on television they picked the birth dates out one at a time. And if you were number one, the first birth date picked, you were going to Vietnam and if you were number 365, when you graduated from college, college students had to deferment until they graduated, you weren't going at all. And at Yale, because many of the students didn't have televisions and they got a lot of their news through the radio, what many students did was put their speakers up in their windows and so you could hear that night through the Yale campus the numbers being called out, you know, and the birth dates being called out, June 1st, September 17th. And for the women, I think it was a very mixed feeling because it didn't affect them, the men were the ones and so they were there in that role of support. But it didn't affect them directly and for many, I think it also felt like, well, whatever problems we're having here at Yale can't possibly be as important as the Vietnam War because at least we're not going to die. So I think that's a bit of the way it was affected. Any other questions? Oh, yes, hi. There you are. Thank you for waiting. Hi. I don't really so much have a question. I normally hate people who make comments instead, but I just want to say I was in the second class that arrived in September of 1970 when the percentage had inched up a little closer to 20%. And I just wanted to give an illustrative anecdote about how the imbalance pervaded every part of our lives. There was an outbreak of mononucleosis on campus my freshman year, the 70-71 year. And the university's announcement of how to deal with this and try to contain it was to require all the girls to show up for blood tests. We were just ordered to all show up at the same place and have our blood drawn because the announced theory was, if they could control the mono in the girl population, that would prevent it from spreading among the boys and infecting them. Which was not only extraordinarily sexist, of course, but also idiotic, because the boys were all still going to Vassar in Manhattanville and other places like that on the weekends. So it's not as though they were just dating in the college pool. And even though I and many of my friends considered ourselves feminists, at that time, nobody protested. We didn't see anything wrong with that. So we all just lined up. There were like the 200 whatever of us and had our blood taken. And then we were told whether we were positive or not. It was just typical of what was going on at the time. We were also all required to attend an assembly taught by a gynecologist on the med school faculty about sex. We had to go listen to this guy talk to just the girls about sex. And I will just close with this. One of my classmates liked to knit all the time and she was sitting in the front row as this male gynecologist was talking to us about female sexuality. And he looked at her and said, you understand that knitting is a substitute for masturbation, right? And she looked at him and said, Doc, you do it your way and I'll do it mine. Thank you for sharing those stories. The medical school professor that you referred to is a guy by the name of Phil Surrell. Yeah, it's not that. Yeah. And Yale was actually incredibly progressive at this time in terms of sex education. The women arrived at Yale at just the point that the sexual revolution arrives on college campuses. The pill had been around since 1960, but it really was until almost a decade later that colleges began changing their rules about whether men and women can be in the same room after 10 o'clock at night. And if they are in the same room, whether the door has to be open and whether anyone can be on the bed or not. But what Phil Surrell told me, I interviewed him and his wife, Lorna, who came together to Yale to found the Yale Sex Counseling Service, was that the recent Yale was willing to be so progressive on this and to provide birth control pills to any woman who asked for them. Was that they were terrified by the prospect of pregnant co-eds wandering the campus. And so that was their solution. I think I've got time for one. We can't hear you Debbie if you're not at the mic. So I'm going to. Student committee on human sexuality led by Phil Surrell and that first year we produced a book called Sex and the Yale Student. Not that we were real experts, but that summer a lot of us did research on birth control and other issues to put it in context. A single woman in Connecticut, it was illegal for her to have the pill at that point in time. Abortion was not legalized until after we graduated in 1973. So a co-ed campus, which was not like Smith College, which I had transferred in from, was a place where you needed to have information about birth control and other issues. And we were trying to fill that gap. And there was a course of about 1,000 undergraduates going on for several weeks at night. Men and women, and Phil Surrell and Lorna Surrell were involved in it. But also the students were involved. And this became so popular that about 20 or 30 other campuses had their own version of it, and it went out as a book nationally, The Student Guide to Sex on Campus. So at one point in my life I was a sex expert. Thank you. Doug, do you have one more question before we close or are you all set? Just wondering if you could explain who the woman was in the first photograph of your video. Yes, that is Brooke Shearer. And so I told you that many men at Yale worked as allies to women as well. And in 1969, Derek Shearer, who had just graduated from Yale the previous year, and had spent his career at Yale banging on Brewster from his position as what was then the head of student government about co-education, came back to Yale before the college opened and put that poster that you saw all over campus with the picture of his sister, Brooke, saying, please, Mr. Brewster, why can't I come to Yale too? And it was that poster that helped jumpstart the activism by male students that year that also helped push Yale to accept women students. And what was the relationship with Strobe Talbot? Brooke Shearer was Strobe Talbot's wife. Strobe Talbot was a good friend of Derek Shearer's. Met Brooke, who actually ended up going to college in the West and eventually married her, and sadly she died 10 years ago. But I'm told by both Derek and Strobe Talbot that Brooke was an incredible feminist and would love to have known that this story involved her as well. So let me close with one last story. And then I'm going to go somewhere and sign books. And I would invite, I'm sorry we don't, yeah, come ask me afterwards. Even if you don't want to book sign, please come up and say hello. Because I've been speaking all over the country the last month about this story. And my favorite part is the chance to talk to people one-on-one afterwards. So for this story, I'm going to bring you back to February 1970. Again, one of the first year of undergraduate coeducation at Yale. A thousand business-suited alumni had gathered for a white tablecloth luncheon in Yale's imposing university dining hall. Their wives in cocktail dresses beside them. It was the annual winter alumni gathering. Sliced roast beef would be served. Yale President Kingman Brewster would talk, awards would be given. But before Brewster could begin his remarks, 40 freshman girls broke in through a side door and began walking up and down those aisles of tables, carrying protest signs they'd hastily made the night before. Women, up from under, end women's oppression. As one Yale graduate student remarked later, it was a very un-Yale thing to do. Kit McClure, who's one of the five women whose stories I follow in Yale needs women, was there at the protest. Kit was a redheaded trombone player who came to Yale from a large public high school in New Jersey with the idea of starting an all-women's rock band. But she had never taken part in a protest like this before. It was scary, Kit told me, walking into that room full of important men, knowing you weren't supposed to be there. Kit's classmate Margaret Coon, 18 years old from a Pennsylvania public high school so small, there had only been 67 students in the graduating class, walked up to the podium as the girls had agreed the night before, approached President Brewster and asked him for the mic. Brewster, surprised but gracious, handed a tour. And Kit McClure and Margaret Coon looked out at that audience and began to speak. There are not enough of us, she told the stunned alumni, to accept just 230 women each year and 1,000 male leaders is not only sex discrimination, but bad education. When Margaret finished her short speech, the girls left as quickly as they had come and Kingman Brewster.