Anne Gardiner Perkins, a vibrant and engaging speaker, 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. Anne is a Rhodes Scholar who received her PhD in higher education from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She earned her master’s degree from Harvard, where she won the Littauer Award for academic excellence and served as a teaching fellow in education policy.
Perkins’ book about the entering classes of women at Yale just released in September, 2019, is receiving rave reviews from the New York Times, Forbes, The Washington Post among others. Yale Needs Women is based on five years of archival research and eighty oral histories. Yale Needs Women follows the story of five women students in particular—two black and three white—through the tumultuous early years of coeducation at Yale. 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.