Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

In Necessary Trouble, Faust describes a childhood full of frustration and anger at the injustices the author faced for being a girl. However, as Faust grew up, she realized that others faced far greater injustices. Throughout the book, Faust illustrates how the inflexible social categories of the 1950s required compliance from everyone, limiting and restricting the freedom of even the most privileged members of society.

As a girl, Faust was hyperaware of gender expectations. She saw her brothers being treated differently than her and being held to different standards. She recognized the “unfairness” of these socially-defined categories and constantly rebelled against her mother’s attempts to make her into “a lady.” However, as Faust grew up, she began to realize that privilege related to class and gender is not always black and white. While detailing her family history, Faust describes how the women in her family “could not evade the constraints that [their] era’s gender expectations placed upon [them]” (36). Despite their high socioeconomic status, her mother and grandmother defined themselves as homemakers, wives, and mothers, with her mother giving up her work upon marriage and her grandmother rejecting the opportunity to pursue a post-secondary education.

While the men in her family enjoyed greater freedom, definitions of manhood were no more flexible, demanding action based on “deeply held convictions about who they must be as men” (37). Generations of men in her family were compelled to fight in wars; however, when the draft threatened young American men during the Vietnam War, Faust notes that her gender was “the best and most absolute and permanent draft deferment” (276), granting her the privilege of safety. These experiences helped Faust to realize the ways in which traditional masculinity could also limit and disadvantage men.

As Faust became aware of the construction of race in the United States, she understood a deeper level of injustice, adding further nuance to her concepts of fairness and privilege. She began understanding how she benefitted from white supremacy and felt compelled to challenge these systems. Like the restrictions of gender roles, Faust describes how “segregation circumscribed the freedom of both whites and Blacks” (225). As a white person, Faust was not allowed “to violate the taboos that governed racial interaction in the South” (225) and was subject to abuse while in the company of Black people. She argues that inflexible social categories oppress and limit society because everyone is compelled to uphold them. The “constraints of custom and conformity” serve to “[deform] and [diminish]” (113) individual opportunity and expression.

In these ways, Necessary Trouble explores how various forms of privilege and oppression can operate in different contexts, with Faust simultaneously facing disadvantages due to her gender and enormous privileges thanks to her wealth and whiteness. As she grows into adulthood, Faust learns to recognize how complicated ideas of oppression and privilege can be.