A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar
America.
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national
alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two
world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a
torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions--not only in global affairs
but in American society and Americans' lives.
To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was
to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race
and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the
acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved
intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill
the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found
resistance was the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s,
through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil
rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust forged a path of her
own--one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the
very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up
in.
Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a
time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman's life,
tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple
with today.
Includes black-and-white images
