A review by komet2020
Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury by Drew Gilpin Faust

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

 

NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury I found to be one of the most revealing and insightful memoirs that it has been my pleasure to read for quite a while. Faust, a former President of Harvard University, shares with the reader her family history from both the paternal and maternal sides, as well as her growing consciousness from being a child in a conservative, white, privileged family in Virginia during the 1950s that, as a female, her life was expected to conform to one not altogether different from her mother's. That is, it's a white man's world and a woman's role was meant to be that of wife and mother, while her 3 brothers were raised to live independent lives in a world largely made to accommodate men like them. This is what Faust's mother had tried to explain to her. Faust could and would not subscribe to this societal expectation. As a young girl, she "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."

In Necessary Trouble, Faust provides a unique portrait of the segregated South, and her experiences as a student and activist in both the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. It is also a book that gives the reader a palpable - and at times, vicarious - feel of how the events and changes wrought in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s shaped our society and impacted on Faust's own life, culminating with her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in May 1968.