Sahitya's Reviews > Yale Needs Women

It was fascinating to me when I learned that until about a fifty years ago, many of the elite universities in the US didn’t allow women to apply, so I was very much interested to read this book and know the history of how Yale finally decided to allow women and what kind of challenges these young women faced in such an old all male environment.

The story here focuses mainly on five students but we also meet many other women and people in the administration who strived in their own ways to challenge the status quo and make the application process gender blind. I was very inspired by these women who took up this unprecedented challenge and made me a mark of their own. But it was also quite disappointing to see so many of the men in powerful positions including the president of Yale believe that the university’s goal of nurturing future leaders of the country didn’t include women, and that the minuscule number of them who got into the university should just be grateful for the opportunity. The numerous barriers they created and how unsupportive they were made me quite angry, but kudos to the women who believed in equity as a virtue and their own worth, and never gave up on their goals.

This is definitely an important piece of history and I would recommend the book to anyone who likes reading historical feminist works - because this is a great insight into the fact that gender discrimination was made unlawful only a few decades ago and we still have a long way to go. The audiobook is also narrated very well and kept me engaged throughout.