Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

In Necessary Trouble, Faust describes a childhood full of frustration and anger at the injustices the author faced for being a girl. However, as Faust grew up, she realized that others faced far greater injustices. Throughout the book, Faust illustrates how the inflexible social categories of the 1950s required compliance from everyone, limiting and restricting the freedom of even the most privileged members of society.

As a girl, Faust was hyperaware of gender expectations. She saw her brothers being treated differently than her and being held to different standards. She recognized the “unfairness” of these socially-defined categories and constantly rebelled against her mother’s attempts to make her into “a lady.” However, as Faust grew up, she began to realize that privilege related to class and gender is not always black and white. While detailing her family history, Faust describes how the women in her family “could not evade the constraints that [their] era’s gender expectations placed upon [them]” (36). Despite their high socioeconomic status, her mother and grandmother defined themselves as homemakers, wives, and mothers, with her mother giving up her work upon marriage and her grandmother rejecting the opportunity to pursue a post-secondary education.

While the men in her family enjoyed greater freedom, definitions of manhood were no more flexible, demanding action based on “deeply held convictions about who they must be as men” (37).