Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (2023) is a memoir by historian and educator Drew Gilpin Faust. It charts Faust’s coming-of-age during the turbulence of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. Growing up in a wealthy and conservative Southern family, Faust rebelled against her parents’ expectations from an early age and became involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The memoir explores the intersection of class, race, gender, and privilege, the connection between education and social awareness, and the impact of historical events on self-development.

This guide uses the 2023 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Kindle edition of the text.

Plot Summary

Faust grew up as a privileged white girl in segregated 1950s Virginia. Her family had been wealthy for generations, but economic changes following World War II affected their upper-class status. Her mother and father, who grew up accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, never adjusted to living within their means.

Throughout her childhood, Faust clashed with her mother, who adhered to specific notions of femininity. Faust resented the freedom given to her brothers and rebelled against what she saw as the “unfair” restrictions of girlhood. Her mother, despite growing up wealthy and privileged, had limited access to education and was expected to do nothing but fulfill her prescribed roles of wife and mother. The academic and tomboyish Faust wanted nothing of her mother’s insistence to turn her into a lady.

In Faust’s home, her family’s Black servants used the back door and separate bathrooms, something Faust never thought to question. However, one day, at nine years old, she learned about the effort to integrate schools on the radio, and it suddenly occurred to her that Black children were not allowed to attend her school. Faust was shocked and outraged by the unfairness of segregated schooling, and wrote a letter to President Eisenhower urging him to change the law. She felt segregation contradicted the American values she had always taken for granted, and she began “to see through the comforting illusions at the heart of postwar American culture” (131).

Faust began her teenage years “suffused with skepticism and even dismay about the path [her] life was expected to take” (135). However, she found comfort in certain role models from literature. Girls like Nancy Drew, Anne Frank, and Scout Finch offered her alternative expressions of girlhood that were absent from the women Faust saw around her. At 13, Faust moved to New England to attend boarding school at Concord Academy.

Freed from her mother's critical eye, Faust excelled in Concord’s academically- demanding environment. Her teachers empowered their female students and held them to high standards; however, they were still encouraged to be ladylike and to leave economic responsibilities to their husbands. Faust was also troubled by Concord's “overwhelmingly homogenous” student body. However, unlike Virginia, the white people around Faust openly discussed racial inequalities, creating possibilities for change. Faust even had the opportunity to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak at a neighboring school.

During the summer of 1963, Faust traveled to communist Eastern Europe with a small group of students. She visited East and West Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The trip was eye-opening for Faust. She learned that communism was not as monolithic and universally evil as she had been led to believe, and she discovered many subtleties that were excluded from discussions in the United States.

The following summer, Faust joined a trip to the American South. She traveled with a racially mixed group to support the civil rights movement and “enhance communication between whites and Blacks” (203). Although this goal turned out to be “astonishingly naïve,” Faust and her companions spent the summer traveling through Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama, talking with local officials and learning about the intense polarization in American society. The experience gave Faust a personal connection to the civil rights movement. When she began college at Bryn Mawr in the fall, she was torn about pursuing an education that felt irrelevant in the face of the urgency of the civil rights movement.

Although Bryn Mawr offered a rigorous academic program for women, which was still unusual in the mid-1960s, it still subscribed to many ideas of traditional gender roles. It didn’t encourage its female students to question their place in society. Few classes offered the kind of “relevance” that Faust sought, but she took advantage of term research papers to explore her political interests. She also continued to follow developments in the civil rights movement, and when she saw protesters being beaten on Bloody Sunday, she knew she had to act. Faust abandoned her schoolwork and drove with her boyfriend to Selma, where she participated in the iconic march for voting rights.

By the spring of 1965, Faust had also begun participating in protests against the Vietnam War. The draft affected many young men she knew from neighboring colleges, becoming a pressing concern for Faust and many of her classmates. However, as the war dragged on and frustrations rose, protesters became more militant, and demonstrations became more violent. Faust began to turn some of her energy toward “victories closer to home” (281). Throughout her college career, Faust served in student government. As the Sexual Revolution began, she led her classmates to fight for greater gender equality on campus.

When Faust graduated in the spring of 1968, “the world seemed to be coming unglued” (304). Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. The war in Vietnam was still raging, and student protests proliferated. Back in her childhood bedroom in Virginia, Faust cast her vote in the 1968 election for third-party candidate Dick Gregory. On the one hand, it was “a vote of futile protest” (316), but on the other hand, both the presence of a Black man on the ballot and Faust’s ability to vote as a woman represented significant social change.