Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

by Drew Gilpin Faust

When did the contradictions become troubling? When did they become unbearable? What was the moment of epiphany, the circumstance that made the inconsistencies undeniable? When did it become imperative to confront the legacies of slavery and segregation, to be honest with ourselves and one another and purge the untruths that, like malignancies, had permeated our society and our lives?

King would effectively appeal to thousands of Americans like me who had begun to recognize the contradictions between their fundamental religious and moral commitments and their participation in the South’s system of racial cruelty.

grew up in a man’s world and a white world. Did I see a connection between the two?

Penetrating the blindness and the taken-for-grantedness of the present and coming to terms with the real meaning of the misrepresented past would become for me work for a lifetime.

It was in many ways highly forward-looking of Life to offer such recognition to women and, more especially, to their discontent.

From the Brown v. Board decision in 1954 onward, Life demonstrated steady support for the emerging civil rights movement,

Between 1954 and 1956, Life published 46 articles about civil rights, filling 160 pages of the magazine.

Overwhelmingly, these chronicled the stories of Black efforts to advance integration and the ensuing white backlash of cruelty and violence—from racist schoolyard taunts and threats to bombings, beatings, and lynchings.

benevolent white paternalism and genteel racial harmony that I had absorbed since my earliest childhood.

civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s originated as a children’s crusade,

Growing up white and female in conservative, segregated Virginia, in a nation fighting a Cold War it regarded as essential to the future of global freedom, I found almost limitless possibilities for the moral combat that World War II’s legacy seemed to require.

From Sputnik to horror fiction.

America was not what I had been told it was.

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.

Developing a woman’s body meant being contained and controlled by girdles and bras.

menstruate was to have “the curse.” To acknowledge sexual feelings was the first step on the slippery slope to “getting in trouble.”

“Will you still love me tomorrow?” asked the Shirelles—

Rock and roll’s foundations in Black music offered a degree of liberation from the constraints at the heart of white 1950s culture,

We recoiled at what we regarded as the dishonesty and denial at the core of our parents’ existence. We were determined to find a way to live otherwise.

Books enabled me to explore other lives and to imagine myself into them, lives that went beyond the limited choices available to my mother and the women of her circle.

Perhaps it was Nancy Drew who persuaded us we could Have It All.