The University of Virginia did not accept women until coeducation was introduced in 1970. This institutional transformation was made possible through the grit of its first class of women. Kate Byrne sits down with one of them, author Gail Burrell Gerry, who shares the inspiring story behind this historic milestone for UVA and the education systems as a whole. Gail talks about what it takes to challenge the status quo, the power of speaking up, and being comfortable with discomfort – even things that are considered taboo by most people. She also explains why there is no single path to achieving success in your journey and why you do not have to feel guilty about your accomplishments, especially women bombarded with constant pressure.
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True Grit: The Women Who Walked In: Coeducation And The Courage To Belong: With Author Gail Burrell Gerry
This conversation is with a true trailblazer in every sense of the word. Gail Burrell Gerry, who’s the author of Here to Stay, the story of the class of women who coeducated the University of Virginia. The punchline, this happened in 1970. Not that long ago. What I think you’ll find is that there’s such a parallel to what these women experienced through their coeducation of the university that is so familiar, oddly so, eerily so, with the workplace.
This coeducation moment didn’t just change the campus. It helped reshape the culture of leadership for generations of women to come, much as like what many of us are doing inside the workplace. What’s most remarkable about Gail and her classmates is not just the history they lived through. It’s the courage they continue to show again and again, whether they’re stepping into spaces where women aren’t welcome or using their voices to open doors for those who are coming after them.
In our conversation, we talk a lot about what it takes to challenge the status quo, the importance of grit, to speak up when it would be so much easier to stay quiet and to frankly stand up and to lead those conversations that others might consider uncomfortable or even taboo. As we’ll reveal and explore, progress almost always begins in the same way. Someone decides to speak. Tune in and stay to the end for my KB Takeaways. Let me know what you think. Let’s get into it.
I’m excited to share our guest, Gail Burrell Gerry, who’s the author of Here to Stay: The Story of the Class of Women Who Coeducated the University of Virginia. The punchline here, everyone, this didn’t happen until 1970 with the first coeducated class graduating in 1974. Extraordinary impact by amazing women. Gail, welcome.
Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
How A Group Of Women Paved The Way For Coeducation In UVA
Share the story so that people have an understanding of exactly how this coeducation came to pass such as the lawsuit, etc., so that they have a contextual understanding of the enormity of this.
It had been raised throughout the history. In 1920, there were women who were allowed to come in and study, but they would receive a certificate. Not a diploma. There were dispensations made for faculty daughters and sometimes spouses. By and large, there was huge resistance on the part of a lot of people, mainly alumni. Alumni were the biggest nut to crack. That’s because you go back to the tradition. “This is the way it was. This is the way I want it to be.”
Unfortunately, there’s an huge population in our country who thinks things were really great back then. I would say to them, “Ask your mother what it was like. Ask your spouse. Ask some of us who lived those good old years if they were that good.” The point is, there were lots of committees over the years that were formed and they would only get so far. Finally, at that time, Edgar Shannon decided he wanted this to happen.
He had daughters.
He had five daughters. I’ve had the good fortune to talk with his eldest daughter. She was in 8th grade when we came in. She had a pretty good feeling for it. The context to that is Charlottesville Schools were being desegregated. She was 12 years old or 13 years old and going through the turmoil of that. Her dad was bringing home stories of his work. She’s got some interesting perspectives of those times. She said, “It was a firm belief on the part of my dad that it could not be a great university without a diverse population.”
African-American males had been admitted fifteen years before in very small numbers. Numbers in 2026 still aren’t consistent with the general population. That continues to be an issue and clearly was one during my years there. However, he wanted this. He didn’t want it to be an edict. He put together a committee that had its own issues, including the Mary Washington reps leaving the committee. The committee chair spoke disparagingly about Jewish students and perhaps other things that the tenor was not great even on the committee. However, it became clear that things were moving in that direction.
At the same time, there were threats of lawsuits. Even though the General Counsel to the University said, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include higher education. If we were sued, we’d win.” Which isn’t likely. It turned out to be wrong on all accounts. In any event, four women and with the help of the ACLU, brought suit. At the same time, a committee was developing a plan that would kept women, at the highest would be 35%. They would be trickling in. They wouldn’t have started when we did. They may not have started for many years.
It was a very vague plan. They presented that to the judge during the lawsuit. He looked at it. At the same time, a man named Kevin Mannix, who was the student body president, had a minority report. Student council had originally voted against admitting women and then they shifted. He gave the attorney for the four women his report who gave it to the judge. When they showed it to the UVA representative, he said, “I suggest you folks’ figure this out because this is going to be embarrassing.”
Rather than rule against the university, they went back into negotiations and really accepted the whole plan of the first two groups of women would not displace any man. That created issues around overcrowding in the dorms and parking and all of that good stuff. There were repercussions from that particular agreement. However, it pacified some of the people who weren’t happy about women coming.
The Story Of University Of Virginia’s First-Ever Class Of Women
I’m diving straight in because my head still spins when about I think UVA not admitting women for such a late date. What readers also have to know, UVA wasn’t the only one. Yale and Princeton didn’t have women allowed in until 1969. It’s crazy. When UVA first became coeducational, what did it feel to even be part of that first class day-to-day inside an institution never designed with you in mind?
That was one of my purposes for writing the book. It was to get multiple women involved in telling the story. Over the years, there have been some essays, conferences, and convocations where a few women from my class spoke about their experiences. It was a diverse group of women that was admitted with the first class. We all came with very different backgrounds and some of us with limited expectations about being first women.
I became aware of it, as I tell in the book, because when I applied, I received admittance to Mary Washington. A few weeks later, I received a letter to come to UVA. One of my classmates said she didn’t recognize the limits of the women there, how limited we were in numbers, until we were walking to the first convocation during orientation. Even in our class, the first-year class, we only made up 18% of the student population.
You look at the classes beyond us. We were a minority. Many of us ended up in classes that were not the survey class because of the way the scheduling went. We would find ourselves as the only female in the class or one or two. Day-to-day, we were dealing with that. We were also dealing with the fact that we had come from a place where we were the top of our class. We weren’t necessarily the smartest or the valedictorians, but we had to achieve a lot to even be admitted.
All of a sudden, you’re surrounded by not only smart women, but motivated and academic women. There was pressure. I didn’t feel the competition among us. We all wanted to do well, but we wanted to make sure we did well because the men were all looking at us. There was this feeling that maybe we weren’t going to cut it. There was also this feeling that it was an experiment. If it didn’t work out, then we would get shipped off or nobody else would be admitted. There was that pressure. many of us experienced that pressure in our careers.
For example, I was a high school principal in a big district with twenty other principals. There was a single other female principal of a comprehensive high school and she was my mother’s age. I had a two-year-old and a five-year-old. If they would get sick, I would look at my husband and say, “I can’t be out. They’re expecting me to stay home.” I have to show them that they didn’t make a mistake by putting me in this leadership position. Many of the women I talked to said it was preparation for life beyond college.
The first week we were there, I would have to tell you, was extremely difficult. People have used the term zoo-like but everybody came to our dorms to look at us. By the time the upperclassmen came, they were very savvy. They would bring Facebooks and they would walk around looking for a particular woman in a particular room. It was hugely demoralizing.
We’d close our doors. We’d lock them. We’d tell them don’t come. They’d knock and knock. It was extremely noisy and invasive. Men were out between the dorms playing frisbee and drinking grain punch, which was my first experience, I might add. Not proudly, but it was a big party. Also, we felt included as someone to look at or someone to figure out like, “Let’s figure this out.”
Part of the entertainment.
That would play out in the first semester when we would date or have study dates or hang out with men during the week. On weekends, we would be by ourselves in the dorms because the routine was you would bring a female student in from, in those days, sister schools. Which were Washington, Mary Baldwin, Stanton, and some of the other schools that surrounded UVA. Initially, I would say it was extremely overwhelming because we were finding our footings. A lot of us weren’t used to the lack of privacy. There were urinals in the bathrooms reminding us every single day that this was built for men and not for us.
I speak in the book to the lack of lighting. No buses. We were in the dorms that were furthest from the academic classrooms and the library. It was a challenge to navigate all that. I heard this from some of my classmates, some of us weren’t good at directionality and would get mixed up. They were embarrassed to ask a man, “How do I get to Cabell?” Old Cabell or new Cabell, whatever, even though that would have been the logical thing to do. We wanted to show we could do it. That was a pressure. That eased after the first semester.
I don’t think we knew it at the time but we know it now that the female midterm scores were higher. Grades were higher for both the midterms and the first semester than our counterparts in our class, the males in our class. It had a lot to do with just working hard to prove ourselves. I don’t think it was a lack of ability on the part of men. I just don’t think they had that need to do what we felt we had to do.
It sounds as though there was this constant pressure to demonstrate enoughness and worthiness. I could see you referred to this trickling into future life, just professional life, and how that instills in you this constant, “I’ve got to prove. I’m so lucky to be here. I know I’m so lucky, but once I’ll move, it could go away in a heartbeat.”
We were reminded of that. In the less positive moments, men would indicate, even though this is factually untrue. We were accepted on top of the number of men accepted. That was part of the decree that for the first two years, no woman would take the place of one of the male students. That ended after two years and then women were admitted on a gender-neutral or gender-free basis.
Up until that point, when we heard, “You took the spot of a man who’s now in Vietnam.” That’s getting into your head because very few of us felt anything but awful about men who were serving in that war. It was universally unpopular. That was an added guilt when someone would say something like that to you because we didn’t know. We didn’t know that we had a special group of us.
Gail’s Drive For Writing Here To Stay
I have to ask. First off, that makes one’s head spin but I’m curious. What made you to decide to write Here to Stay when you did? Was there something that made you go, “Now’s the time?” The timing’s beautiful, but what was the impetus?
It’s our country now. It’s our country in 2016 and the lead up. I was devastated when there were signs calling the female presidential candidate names. It’s implying things about her marriage, things about her, talking about her clothes, talking about her looks, talking about anything but her competence, which far exceeded the candidate she ran against as we all know. The point is, I was so uncomfortable with how it was okay for so many people to be speaking like this when in fact I thought we were past that.
It started to trigger things. After the election, my younger daughter attended a NOW meeting. This was in Northern Virginia. She came back to me and said, “Mom, there was a woman at the meeting who started to cry and talked about being with the first class of women.” This election and all of the hubris around it triggering feelings from those days. I started thinking about that and I thought, “I need to read more about it.” I went to the archives. I went to the library online. I started looking for books. There wasn’t a book that had been written about the coeducation journey.
Here to Stay: The Story of the Class of Women Who Coeducated the University of Virginia
I’m a wannabe novelist. If any of your readers are literary agents and would like to read a manuscript, I would love to have someone step up. That’s a shameless plug. The point is, I’ve written before for my career. After a public education, I had a company where I did research and consulting. I’m very aware of and experienced in looking at data, looking at documents, interviewing people, and doing a lot of big evaluations. I started thinking, “Somebody needs to write this book. Maybe that somebody is you.”
I put together a proposal. It was a rocky start. I went through a couple editors at the University of Virginia Press. The academic review process is interesting because you have anonymous readers. People couldn’t figure out if this book was a history book or if it was multiple memoirs. It’s a hybrid. My goal was to tell the human side of institutional transformation. I wanted the stories. It took a while because when I got into the history, some of the history we knew at that time wasn’t accurate. I felt I had to go back and tell that story. It’s the story of the consideration of coeducation and the lawsuit.
Where I wanted to spend most of the book was with the stories of my classmates. That was not easy because it was very hard to find a lot of them. A lot of the emails I had were work emails. We were right at the point in our careers that some of us were retiring. A lot of it was word-of-mouth. I would do an interview with one classmate and she’d say, “You need to talk to my former housemate. I was able to get a lot of stories and a lot of different viewpoints. Hopefully, I would pull it together in a way that makes sense.
I want to touch upon those women because when you think about it, they weren’t trying to be pioneers. All they wanted was to get a stellar education. One that they knew frankly before getting there that they deserved. They had just as much of a shot in the fact that they had to fight so hard for it. How does history change when we tell it through that whole lens of lived experience?
I’ve been so immersed in researching and writing the book and then as it rolled out, talking about it as much as I can. One of the things that’s been surprising to me is there are so many people who don’t know the story, know the history, and are amazed. UVA was the last public university to go coed. The tradition of the Virginia gentleman is very strong. It continues to be strong. In some cases, tradition is just fine.
When the tradition is exclusive and when the tradition is a lack of diversity, which we know every healthy ecosystem, the healthier the ecosystem, the more diverse the ecosystem. A university or any organization is an ecosystem. Bringing that diversity, the other viewpoints, experiences, and backgrounds, clearly according to the men and women on staff and in the professorships that are still there or still alive and talking with me. It accelerated the academic tenor of the whole university. If you just have the numbers, it’s not going to tell the story of what that did to transform the university, and as some said, made it a new university.
Leadership Qualities Demonstrated By UVA’s First Class Of Women
I was just going to say especially to your point it was so few. How could so few especially this few who don’t look like us make any change? You did. One of the things I love about the story is it sits at the intersection of gender power and real systemic change. Were there certain leadership qualities as you wrote about your lived experience with these women that you all demonstrated? My bet is nobody called it leadership at the time. If they did, they might call you Bossy Bess or a few other ungreat words. Were there some leadership qualities that you saw or some comment through the lines?
Ernie Ern, who is still alive and attends a lot of the events with the women in my class. The women got together throughout the years, including the 50th reunion, which was in 2024. People have asked him over the years, “What were you looking for?” His answer was grit. If you read Angela Duckworth‘s work, which is far later than 1970. She says that’s the single most important characteristic of people who are successful. It’s other things that people think of like smarts.
Resilience.
Appearance even. We do research on what leaders and how they carry themselves. She said it’s grit. He defined it as resilience and persistence in the face of adversity. He said he knew when he was making the choices around who he would offer a spot in this class to. He knew that there were going to be a number, as they say, a vocal minority. It was vocal, who didn’t want this to happen. He knew we would face that. He wanted to see patterns in our high school life that would allow us when we were knocked down and get back up if our feelings were hurt. We’d go into a classroom and say, “Can I sit here?” They’d say, “No.”
That wasn’t pervasive, but it happened probably to most of us at some point. There was at least one or two and sometimes multiple occasions where you didn’t feel welcomed. The urge to belong, the need to belong is a human need. We found it in each other. Some found it in professors but there weren’t many female professors. If you were looking for a mentor who perhaps had experienced some of what we were experiencing, it was tough. With the exception of a few tenured female professors, the only female I had up until my third year were teaching assistants or were language teachers. In my case, it was Spanish.
Honoring traditions is fine. But if it causes a lack of diversity in society, we cannot gain a healthy ecosystem. Share on XIn my book, I show the administration. We walked into twenty people who were the top administrators, one female. She was the Dean of the Nursing School. In a book I read about Princeton, one woman said, “The only thing that changed was us,” after her first year. The following year, they admitted 450 at least. We don’t know the exact numbers. I can’t find documents to support this. By the lawsuit, it was 450 women plus some more transfers.
The one thing that the history has wrong is there were 301 transfer students that came in with the 367 women in the first-year class. The difference is they had already had a college experience. We were navigating our first college experience along these other social dynamics, if you will. That’s where being in the first class differed from the transfers.
It was a double whammy in so many ways. With this, you’re women, cohort partners. Often in the professional workplace, it’s one of those truths that is so frustrating and feels like deep betrayal when another woman doesn’t support another woman. We’ve all had that. Everyone, I would love it if we stop having that. Did you find that true? Given this us against this crazy world that you found yourself dropped into, did that still happen?
It might have. It didn’t happen with me. I felt more of a support than competition. However, I didn’t see graduate school after undergrad school at that point. I’m the second in a family of seven children. I would have never thought to ask my parents to help me with graduate school. I knew I was going to get a job. I was an English major. What I found out later is that many of the English majors were planning to go on to law school.
We had a significant number of women in our class who did go straight into graduate studies and into law school. That was never something I thought about at that point. I didn’t ever feel like I was competing to be the top of the class. I met a younger man but not that much younger, a few years later who went to medical school. Not at UVA, but he was applying to medical school. His whole experience was very cutthroat.
I didn’t feel that at all. I didn’t have women who expressed that to me either. I knew they wanted to do well. They wanted to make their family proud. In some cases, they were first generation. I wasn’t and my husband was. There’s that piece. Mostly my sense was of a real collaborative versus competitive experience.
How Women Should Deal With Being Embarrassed And Ignored
I would just imagine that you’re all, at any given time, looking at each other and asking each other’s anchors saying, “Is this even happening?” Being each other’s foundational pillar. We’ve talked about parallels between the workplace and here. From the form of resistance, which do you think would be the most familiar to folks who might feel this way when they’re trying to navigate leadership within companies and just their own professional pursuits?
It’s feeling left out, feeling embarrassed or humiliated. I’ve talked with a few women who said, “I never raised my hand because I was afraid my question was a stupid question.” When we were first year, we were counseled not to make ourselves visible, particularly with the older professors. There was a real paradox because in the surveying of the faculty leading up to coeducation, it was overwhelmingly positive. Yet when we got there, a number of the professors weren’t that thrilled about women being there.
Many women are afraid to raise their hands because of the fear of asking stupid questions. Share on XA lot of us sat in the back. It took a while for us to find our voice. It’s so hard because you want yourself to feel. That’s one of the qualities that women bring to the workplace and many men as well. This is not germane to just women. You don’t want to get hardened to the world around you. To say you’ve got to toughen up and you can’t let your feelings get hurt because they will and they will in the workplace.
You’re going to have experiences where you think you’re the best candidate and you don’t get the job. I know in my best interview I didn’t get the job. There’s a saying, “It’s not how many times you’re knocked down. It’s how many times you get back up.” That’s the grit. That’s the persistence and resilience. Truly, it’s the motivation to keep going. There was some of that with our class.
I will never forget coming out of an environmental science survey class with two of my suitemates. It was a multiple choice. They handed out the answers as you walked out of the midterm. My one suitemate looked at it and said, “I got a C. I’ve never had a C in my life.” You have to understand there’s lots of twists and turns.
You’re still going to get to a place that can be purposeful, can be satisfying, and can be happy. Life just has a lot of possibilities and you have to be open to that. There’s no one way to get to a destination. If you have a goal, you’re going to have to find workarounds or other paths if you find one that gets blocked. In my wise old years, that’s what I would tell younger people, “Don’t give up on what you want.”
How Higher Education Continues To Underestimate Women’s Long-Term Impact
If you don’t get it now, it doesn’t mean forever. It means there’s something else. Maybe this is just me trying to make a positive out of a disappointing situation. Sometimes what I’ve come to do is say, “Either I’m not ready for it quite yet, as hard as that is for me to believe, or they aren’t ready for me.” This is one of the things that you and your classmates brought to light. In what ways do you think UVA and higher education still underestimates the long-term impact of women?
There’s still this sense on the part of some that women go to college or to a university to find a husband. They aren’t going to be serious about whatever career path they may be envisioning in those formative years. It will get sidetracked if they choose to have a family or become a caregiver for a person in their family, which is often the women’s domain in our society. I don’t think women are still taken as seriously around their intent to be as academic as any other student.
That’s hard because again that puts pressure on you to prove yourself. Proving yourself can be exhausting. Many of us were in positions in our careers. Barbara Savage said it beautifully. She said, “When I was working in Washington after college and I walked into a room.” She’s African-American and walked in with all White men. She said, “I didn’t flinch. I’ve been there. I know how to navigate that.” That is the attitude you have to take. It’s like, “I may be the only woman in here or one of a few, but I know how to do this.”
Be Comfortable With The Uncomfortable Through Journaling
“They may make it a thing but I’m not going to.” That’s true for a lot of women who are mothers and professionally working as well. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your younger self aside from, “Don’t give up on your dream and your passion?”
A couple of things. When I wrote this book, I wished I had been more intentional about writing stuff down and keeping a journal. Fortunately, journaling seems to have become something that more and more people are doing. Not only to track what your life is like but to help you make sense of what you’re feeling, what’s going on around you and to provide yourself some hope on some of these bad days. I did keep a journal. The summer before my final year, I did a study abroad through University of Massachusetts over at Oxford.
It’s a wonderful experience. I found my journal not that long ago. It’s full of terrible poetry and a lot of angst. It would have been maybe easier for me to have written this book if I was able to go back and see some of what I was thinking and feeling. I will tell you, I was very fortunate. I moved twelve times. Some of the material in the book, some of the documents are things that I had scrolled away. I still had a copy of the Daily Progress from our first week there. It has some interesting things that added to the book.
I’m not encouraging hoarding. My daughter will tell you that there’s a lot of clothing that I should get rid off. I was exercising and I looked down at my shirt and it said 2020. The said to the young women next to me, “This is older than you are.” This was in October and she said, “I was born in August.” It’s keeping the memorabilia. The good news is that the archives will be doing a legacy exhibit in 2027. Women in my class and some classes following are encouraged to bring in some of the memorabilia.
Journaling not only helps you keep track of everything in your life but also makes sense of what you are feeling. Share on XJournaling would be one of them and also enjoying the journey. When you’re in it, it’s hard because you don’t see what’s ahead of you. You have to be comfortable with change because it’s going to happen whether you’re comfortable with it or not. Get comfortable with the fact that tomorrow is going to be different from today. You’re going to grow and learn. You’re going to make mistakes. What my daughters always tell me, “Be gentle with yourself.”
Isn’t it interesting how our daughters are the ones who tell us this? For the very reasons of this entire conversation, we so often aren’t because we feel that mantle of responsibility for literally opening the doors or keeping the doors open or kicking out a glass ceiling or all the things. I’m so appreciative of them reminding us to do that. Thank the Lord that you all have grit.
I have to tell you. When I first had my reunion, got in front of a group, I almost started crying because these are people who stayed the course. Some of them had much greater hardships than I certainly did, financial and others. Some of them thought they were going in one direction and ended up in going in another and weren’t as successful academically as they had thought they’d be because of previous high school experiences. A lot of successful, nice, and caring women. Dabney’s book said, “This class brought a greater commitment to service than we had previously seen.” I see that with my classmates. That makes me extremely proud.
In fact, it’s probably one of the responsibilities that comes with it especially after living, and I would say surviving through that. It would certainly instill in me, “I’m going to make sure to the best of my ability to clear the path so others don’t have to. They’re going to experience something of it, but I’m going to try and smoothen as many of the big bumps out and support them in any way that I possibly can.”
Some of the current students are finding the book and have done some projects around it and have been contacting me. That is very gratifying because they didn’t know the story. They’re interested, again, in some of the themes, some of the lessons, how you navigate. Young people are still navigating the world and always will have that as part of their challenge during their college years. That’s been exciting to me as well.
Learn to be comfortable with change. It will happen whether you are comfortable with it or not. Share on XI bet. What a great opportunity for these young women, especially to be able to say, “Thank you for making it so that I could go to this place in the first place.” They’ll continue to have great impact moving forward and influence as well. Gail, thank you so much. For those of you who are reading and who are in the DC, Virginia area, I’m having the great honor of sitting down with Gail and some other UVA students at the University of Virginia’s Women’s History Month Celebration on March 12th, 2026.
We’d love to have you there. In addition, also at the TomTom Festival, and later on in 2026 in October, date to come, at the Women Advancing Whole Women’s Summit. Keep your ears open. There’s going to be a lot of opportunity to get to learn more from Gail and others. Thank you for everything you’ve done and everything you continue to do.
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.
Until our paths cross.
See you then. Thanks.
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Discussion Wrap-up And KB Takeaways
Gail Burrell Gerry, what a story she and her classmates, the first women to graduate and coeducate the University of Virginia back in 1974. It’s not that long ago. Thank you one and all for your service on that front. Three key things stuck out for me. One, grit and grit being defined as resilience, plus persistence in the face of adversity. You’re going to get knocked down. Take that fuel. Use it as just that fuel to move you forward and prove just how extraordinary you are and show up.
Second, don’t for one minute ever feel guilty over your accomplishments. Be that getting into school, be that getting the promotion, and be that getting a seat at the table. You deserved it. You worked hard. You’re not taking it away from someone else. They have another journey moving forward for themselves. Lastly, speaking of journeys, there’s more than one path and one on ramp to what will become your journey. I know it’s scary when you have your heart set on something, looking, and turning up one way.
I am an old, wise croon. It does never cease to amaze me at just how it all works out in the end. I know that’s easy for me to say, but it really truly does. Think about these women who were the class of 1974 at University of Virginia and how their journeys turned out each of them a pioneer and extraordinary in their own. With that, thank you so much for reading. I appreciate it. Don’t be a stranger. Let me know what you think. Let me know who you’d like to learn from next. Let’s continue the conversation. Until next time.
Important Links
- Gail Burrell Gerry on LinkedIn
- Here to Stay: The Story of the Class of Women Who Coeducated the University of Virginia
- Kevin Mannix
- Angela Duckworth
About Gail Burrell Gerry
After graduating from the College, Gail Burrell Gerry worked in publishing before starting a 20-year career in public education that included stints as a high school principal, literacy director, and state-department leader of professional learning.
She then founded Research, Planning and Evaluation, Inc. As president, she provided organizational development and research services to numerous foundations, school districts and universities across the country. She also had long-term international projects in Jordan and Thailand.
Gail’s book, Here to Stay: The Story of the Class of Women Who Coeducated the University of Virginia was published by University of Virginia Press in Spring 2025. Gail was an English major at UVA and has finished her first novel. She enjoys swimming, reading, grandparenting, and advocating for children’s rights, social justice, and yes, world peace.