Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“We were on a collision course from as early as I can remember. I needed to learn to be a lady, with the assumptions of decorousness, docility, and social position that destiny prescribed. I was not meant to become a woman, for that category carried dangerously sexual and sensual implications. It was a term that seemed almost impolite in its emphasis on the physical aspects of female identity rather than the acquired graces by which a lady was defined. Black people were women; I must be a lady.”

Faust describes her early conflicts with her mother and rebellion against the era’s gendered expectations. Her distinction between becoming a “lady” and a “woman” highlights the performative aspect of class and gender. Faust was expected to learn to play a role that would disguise or hide the elements of femininity that society deemed dangerous or inappropriate.

“Education has been so important in enabling me to examine my own life and alter its contours and possibilities; I cannot help but think that my mother’s lack of education and of capacity for systematic self-reflection did much to imprison her within a set of expectations that she could neither change nor realize.”

Here, Faust addresses The Important Role of Education in developing her sense of self and argues that her mother’s inability to do so can be traced back to the older woman’s lack of education. Without education, one cannot learn to recognize the systems and constructions of society, so they become bound to these expectations.

“None of these men was a military professional; all three had enlisted as citizen soldiers. Like so many of their male contemporaries, they were impelled by the inevitability of conscription, but they were motivated more powerfully by deeply held convictions about who they must be as men and about the existential link between manhood and war.”

Faust’s emphasis on her male family members’ involvement in various wars illustrates both the inflexibility of men’s gender expectations and The Impact of Historical Events on Personal Development. The men in her family felt compelled to serve in the military to uphold masculine ideals of bravery, strength, and security. Their service in these global conflicts shaped Faust’s family tree, defining relationships and changing lives.

“But even as her mental capacities began to fail, her performance as belle, as queen, as grande dame persisted.”

This passage describes Faust’s grandmother, Isabella. Like Faust’s mother, Isabella’s life was defined by the era’s gender roles and expectations for women of her socioeconomic class. Her sense of self was so intertwined with these expectations that she continued to “perform” the role she had been taught even when she began to forget basic facts like her family members’ names.

“But in my mind the most memorable of Dad’s maxims is ‘There is no excuse for being lousy.’ It illuminates in him both a great weakness and a great strength. You should be respectful to everyone, treat everyone well. Always act like a gentleman. But you need to bury your true feelings, show no weakness, be unflappable and, on some fundamental level, disengaged, distant.”

Here, Faust describes the role her father felt compelled to play as a man. Although being a man comes with many privileges, Faust illustrates how gender roles are restrictive for everyone due to their inflexibility. Her father is thus just as bound to them as her mother.

“Racial custom was carefully yet obliquely taught. It encompassed all the contradictions that had confronted white Virginians for centuries. Home of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the architects of American freedom and nationhood, Virginia was also the place where, beginning in 1619, American slavery first took root.”

Faust focuses greatly on the contradictions she began to see around her in 1950s Virginia. Although she was taught ideals of freedom, democracy, and Christianity, she soon realized that the adults around her were behaving in opposition to these values. Here, she describes how contradictions between freedom and enslavement are essential to Virginia’s history, going back to the founding of the United States.

“This thorough embrace of the Lost Cause was taken for granted among the white people in my community; it was passed along to us children as an explanation of our origins and a truth in our lives […] to a young white child growing up in Virginia in the 1950s, the relationship between Confederate legends and past and persisting racial inequality was obscured and all but erased.”

In this passage, Faust describes how white southerners romanticized the Civil War, downplaying the role of emancipation and celebrating the Confederacy as a heroic fight for states’ rights. This viewpoint erases the horrors of enslavement and the reality of white supremacy, helping to ensure the continuation of unjust social systems.

“World War II had accelerated the pace of change in many dimensions of American society, and race was central among them. The war with Germany had been waged against an enemy whose despicable racist ideology had challenged Americans to examine their own commitments to equality and human dignity.”

World War II brought to light many of the contradictions between American ideals of freedom and the realities of racial inequality. The United States could no longer champion democracy and equality abroad and continue disregarding the violence and discrimination that Black people faced at home.

“For many white southerners of my generation, a life-defining question has been how long it took us to notice the contradictions between the democratic and Christian ideals intoned in church and school and the patterns of injustice in which our lives were imbedded. When did the contradictions become troubling? When did they become unbearable? What was the moment of epiphany, the circumstance that made the inconsistencies undeniable?”

Until nine years old, Faust never questioned the unspoken rules governing interaction between races in her hometown. Hidden by the romanticization of history and deep-seated assumptions about white supremacy, these rules perpetuated injustices that undermined the Christian and democratic ideals that Faust was taught and adults around her openly embraced. Once she began to notice these contradictions, they were everywhere.

“But for me, the battle was about what girls couldn’t do that boys could. I grew up in a man’s world and a white world. Did I see a connection between the two? Did my finely honed sense of personal injustice translate into an empathy for injustices done to others?”

Ever since childhood, Faust recognized that she and her brothers were held to different standards and expectations. She frequently rebelled against what she saw as unfair treatment. When she learned about segregation and racial discrimination, Faust felt a similar sense of outrage at the injustice.

“‘Why be difficult,’ my father would come to ask me regularly, ‘when you can be impossible?’ I did not relish being difficult; I had no aspiration to be impossible. But I could see how the lives of so many around me had been deformed and diminished by the constraints of custom and conformity, as well as by the unjust social hierarchies that structured our world. I wanted to understand that world, to see it fully without distortion or illusion.”

Here, Faust claims she felt compelled to rebel against injustices from a young age. To her parents, this behavior made her “impossible,” but Faust argues that she only meant to understand reality better. Many of the unfair social hierarchies she saw around her survived because of silence and invisibility, and she insisted on bringing attention to them.

“Partly it was that youthful clarity and determination about doing the right thing. But perhaps even more fundamentally, it was necessary for me—necessary to enable me to survive amid the stifling silences that threatened to define my life. I had to make my own kind of necessary trouble.”

In this passage, Faust describes the significance of the phrase “necessary trouble,” a quote from the civil rights activist John Lewis. Her life threatened to be defined by society’s expectations and the many silences that held injustices in place. To survive and become her own person, she had to fight against these expectations and expose the injustices she saw.

“America was not what I had been told it was. It was not all-powerful, and it could not protect me. I had discovered that its racial injustices belied the ideals of democracy and equality that I had been taught defined it. Nor did the United States exert the unrivaled power to enforce these ideals in the wider world. Or even to protect its citizens from fallout and rockets and bombs.”

The Cold War revealed further contradictions in American society and increased Faust’s skepticism. The launch of Sputnik undermined the myth of American exceptionalism that Faust had always been told. These revelations enabled Faust to look at her native country with a more skeptical and critical eye.

“Fear and doubt might be mitigated or assuaged, but something even more profound was at risk. And that was trust. If so many things were not as they had seemed, who had misled me? Who and what could I believe? What could be taken for granted? I began to see that I would have to discover and define the world for myself […] to ask the questions that by the time of our adolescence would transform American society.”

This passage describes how the events of the 1950s paved the way for the social revolutions of the 1960s, reflecting The Impact of Historical Events on Personal Development. With the many contradictions of the idealized 1950s coming to light, children began to lose their trust in authority figures. Faust and many others felt they had been misled or even lied to, and young people of her generation started to ask questions to better understand the world for themselves.

“Discussions of women’s changing lives in the second half of the twentieth century often invoke the notion of ‘role models’ who have attained positions of power and influence and can thus help young girls envision themselves in similar circumstances. To see the accomplishments of someone who looks like themselves is to recognize possibilities that might not have been conceivable without that example and inspiration.”

From early childhood, Faust was an avid reader. In her immediate world, women became wives and mothers, and Faust lacked role models that could offer her other examples of female aspiration and experience. However, reading stories of women who broke free of traditional gender roles allowed her to envision other possible futures.

“And yet. She was no revolutionary and very much the product of her background and her time. Her father had been enormously rich—a ‘Wizard of Wall Street’—and she took for granted both her privilege and ours. She assumed we would never need to worry about making a living and would always enjoy material prosperity.”

This passage describes Mrs. Hall, the headmistress of Faust’s New England boarding school. Mrs. Hall and Concord Academy were progressive in many ways, valuing their female students’ intellect and giving the girls significant freedom. However, in many ways, Mrs. Hall continued to perpetuate conservative ideas of class, race, and gender.

“‘Freedom’ in my mind had meant exclusively ‘freedom from’: freedom from censorship, from restrictions of movement, from governmental dictates or oppression. It was a revelation for me to hear East Germans speaking of a ‘freedom to’: freedom to be educated, to get health care, to work […] Freedom began to seem a much more complicated matter than I had appreciated […] I had to confront the limits of my own thinking.”

Faust’s trip to Eastern Europe was eye-opening in many ways, illustrating The Important Role of Education and new experiences in changing ingrained thinking patterns. Here, she describes how her definition and understanding of freedom began to evolve as she spoke to communists in East Germany. Although the experience might not have changed her mind, it helped her develop greater empathy and understand the world with more nuance.

“In this setting, divisions of East and West, of communist and capitalist, faded in the face of far more complex allegiances. National identities dimmed as we made connections that transformed individuals into friends rather than Egyptians, Ghanaians, or Poles. My time in Yugoslavia upended many of the assumptions I had held about the polarizations of the Cold War […] It would be hard for me to envision the world in binary East/West, communist/free terms again.”

This passage also describes how Faust was forced to embrace more nuanced ways of thinking during her time in Eastern Europe. She realized that communism wasn’t the monolithic enemy she had been led to believe it was, but something more complex and human. Her trip helped her to understand that the world is not always black and white.

“Incidents like these illuminated for me what I should already have known: no one, white or Black, was free to violate the taboos that governed racial interaction in the South. Segregation circumscribed the freedom of both whites and Blacks—a reality I had not fully understood. Racial hatred and white supremacy were upheld by a great deal more than simply a set of laws that either courts or Congress could change.”

In this passage, Faust describes her summer in the South, learning about the civil rights movement. She explains how she was often persecuted for being in the company of Black people and argues that segregation limits the freedom of all of society.

“In some ways, the college and my mother shared a common outlook: both acknowledged that it was a man’s world. My mother’s conclusion was that I should accept the subordinate place that was my destiny. But Bryn Mawr, in contrast, intended to equip me with the individual strength and capacity to prevail in an arena that men had created and defined.”

Like Concord Academy, Faust found certain contradictions when she came to Bryn Mawr for college. Although the college created an academically demanding environment for women and took its female students very seriously, it still didn’t see them as equal to men. The institution didn’t encourage its students to question their place in society or change it.

“I didn’t have to decide how deep my pacifist commitments really were. In my opposition to the draft, as with my concerns about civil rights, I was in a position of privilege; I was not a direct victim of the injustice I sought to oppose […] I had received as a birthright the best and most absolute and permanent draft deferment.”

In this passage, Faust describes her generation’s growing preoccupation with the draft and reflects on the complexity of privilege and advantage. Although Faust faces disadvantages and injustices because of her gender, it also provides her with the privilege of safety, as she was exempt from conscription. Gender and privilege have a much more complicated relationship than is usually understood.

“If I decided to pursue further education, I knew it would be for graduate work in history. What had always captured me intellectually was the broad sweep of ideas and social forces. And having grown up in a changing and not-changing Virginia, I knew how those assumptions and circumstances exerted their power through time, often creating silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility.”

Faust describes how history has shaped her life, reflecting The Impact of Historical Events on Personal Development. The lingering legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and traditional gender roles attempted to define her childhood, enabled by the willful distortion of history. Studying history reveals these misrepresentations and helps to change unjust patterns.

“The upheavals in values and possibilities, the new freedoms and accompanying dangers, the intensity and engagement of our college generation, the specter of Vietnam and the draft—all conspired in a way that made coming of age as a thinking and feeling person in those years like walking on the edge of a precipice.”

Faust describes the struggle of coming of age during the turmoil of the 1960s. With constant change and social upheaval, Faust and others of her generation had many more options than previous generations, but she suggests that there were also more dangers and difficulties. Young people in the 1960s were walking into uncharted territory, with no one to help or guide them.