Book Talk with Drew Gilpin Faust - Necessary Trouble

 

Last month, on February 27th to be exact, I attended my second virtual author event of 2024! The following is a description of the event from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute's website:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Harvard Alumni Association welcome Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University president emerita; Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor; and founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, to discuss her book, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

Faust’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; and professor of history, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

I'm so glad I attended this virtual. It was amazing! After Drew Gilpin Faust gave a short reading of her memoir, she and Tomiko Brown-Nagin spoke in conversation about Faust's book. After hearing them in conversation, I'm now excited to read this book!

The summary for Drew Gilpin Faust's book, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, is as follows from the Amazon website:

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.

A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy 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 necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew 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.

I loved hearing Drew Gilpin Faust speak candidly about her early life and how her early life shaped who she became.