Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Drew Gilpin Faust is a historian and the author of Necessary Trouble. Growing up in segregated Virginia during the 1950s and 60s, Faust struggled to conform to traditional gender expectations. She was intellectually inclined and tomboyish from an early age, causing friction between her and her mother. Faust’s mother expected her daughter to grow up to become “a lady.” As a young child, Faust was annoyed by the greater freedom her brothers enjoyed and couldn’t understand why she was treated differently. She embarked on a rebellious childhood, creating what she describes as “necessary trouble,” which allowed her “to survive amid the stifling silences that threatened to define [her] life” (113).

At nine years old, Faust experienced a racial “epiphany.” Driving home from school, she heard radio reporters discussing resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, realizing the truth of segregation. Faust was horrified by the injustice of segregation and disturbed by American hypocrisy surrounding the rights and freedoms of Black citizens. She felt as if she had been “misled” by adults and authority figures. This feeling increased as the Cold War progressed, and “the comforting illusions at the heart of postwar American culture” (131) began to disintegrate further.