Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

In the Vietnam War, Faust recognized the same American hypocrisy that inspired her to stand up against racial injustice. As the winter of 1965 began and the conflict continued to escalate, Faust and some of her classmates from Bryn Mawr and neighboring Haverford began investigating the war's contradictory details, including the Tonkin Gulf incident that escalated US involvement. Following the University of Michigan’s example of “teach-ins,” students from around Philadelphia organized “marathon sessions of lectures and panels” (272) to learn about the history of Vietnam and US involvement, “mobilizing [their] intellectual resources in support of [their] politics” (272). By April of 1965, thousands of people descended on Washington to present a petition to Congress arguing that the United States had “abandoned its democratic ideals” (273) by invading Vietnam.

As the conflict increased and more young Americans were drafted into military service, Faust and her peers worried about the young men in their lives. Deferments were more difficult to obtain, resulting in tense discussions among Bryn Mawr girls. Neighboring Haverford College had strong Quaker ties; some students there could be excluded from the draft for holding pacifist beliefs, and Faust recalls many debates about whether their belief in nonviolence extended to every situation. Their conversations also touched on the ethical issues surrounding draft evasion, wondering if it was right to do so when “many less well-connected and less privileged individuals […] would have to serve instead” (276).

While Faust and many of the girls she knew were close with men whose lives were shaped by the draft, she also recognizes her “position of privilege” (276). Faust’s gender was “the best and most absolute and permanent draft deferment,” a bit of “unwarranted luck” that “haunted” her (276). As the war progressed, protests became violent, and several of Faust’s classmates were arrested at demonstrations. Faust felt ambivalent about the movement’s move away from peaceful protests, and she instead became involved with an organization bringing injured Vietnamese children to the United States. She first learned about the project after discovering a photo essay depicting wounded children. She cut out the photographs and created a bulletin board display in Bryn Mawr’s main building, creating “an uproar” (279). Students were upset by the graphic pictures, and the photographs were covered. Faust wrote an enraged letter to The College News and began raising money to bring more Vietnamese children to the United States.

Faust persisted, but the sense of futility surrounding the antiwar movement grew, and students began gravitating toward opportunities for change “in their own backyards” (281). Faust was involved in different aspects of student leadership throughout her college career, culminating in her role as head of Bryn Mawr’s Self-Government Association. As students across the country argued for “greater control over their own lives” (283), Faust advocated for her female classmates in the Sexual Revolution. Enabled somewhat by the development of the birth control pill in 1957, women of Faust’s generation began to look at sex as something “natural, a matter for joy, not shame” (284), and ideas surrounding traditional gender roles and family structures began to shift.

When neighboring Haverford announced it was lifting restrictions on women’s visits in male dormitories, Bryn Mawr had to respond. As head of the Self-Government Association, Faust called a student meeting to discuss the issue. The college’s president, Miss McBride, explained “that rules were established not to exert control […] but to ensure student well-being” (290-1), then the students expressed the “varied perspectives,” finally concluding that Bryn Mawr students should be allowed to sign out for overnight stays anywhere they liked.

Other issues, like dress codes, were addressed through continued debates and conversations. When the time came to argue their case to the board of directors, Faust and the other student leaders “talked as little as possible about sex and as much as possible about trust, rights of self-determination, and the educational value of the freedom to choose” (293). The directors agreed to remove curfews for a trial period that was eventually made permanent, marking the success of Faust’s “little Bryn Mawr laboratory experiment in participatory democracy” (294).

When President Johnson announced his withdrawal from the US presidential election on March 31st, 1968, Faust and her friends were delighted, sure that the war’s end was in sight. Set to the soundtrack of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967’s Summer of Love was a time of optimism for “the emerging counterculture of freedom and self-expression” (298). However, 1968 brought “assassinations, political turmoil […] [and] social upheaval,” creating a youth culture that was “increasingly embittered and alienated” (298).

The growing use of recreational drugs began to present an issue on the Bryn Mawr campus. In the spring of 1967, Miss McBride scoffed at Faust’s suggestion that drug use would affect the students of Bryn Mawr. However, before the new school year began in the fall, Miss McBride sent a letter announcing that students should “not plan to return” to college if they used drugs (199). As the head of the Self-Government Association, Faust was shocked by the president’s letter, and she “was determined that the college should abandon, not expand, any parental role” (299). Faust deliberated with the Self-Government board, deciding to intervene only if a student’s behavior threatened the larger college community.

Despite a commitment to maintaining student freedom and authority, the bad impacts of drug use were still felt on campus. More broadly, “logic and proportion were in short supply in the spring of 1968” (301). After Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4th, the country dissolved into violence and chaos, and Faust felt the loss as a “personal as well as public tragedy” (301). As she worked through the last few weeks of her senior year, “it was hard not to notice that the world seemed to be coming unglued” (304). Around the country, student activists were becoming “much more confrontational,” and “the power of mind was yielding to the power of force” (304).

Faust graduated on May 27th, 1968. Although her friends and teachers thought she would pursue law school, Faust was more interested in graduate study in history. She knew that the “assumptions and circumstances” of social forces from the past “often [created] silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility” (305). She felt a personal and professional commitment to addressing the past and ultimately became a historian.

First, however, Faust was unsure if she could find “sufficient relevance” in continued education and wanted to spend some time “in the real world” (305). 16% of Faust’s original first-year class did not graduate with her. She calls these women “casualties of the sixties,” claiming that “coming of age as a thinking and feeling person in those years [was] like walking on the edge of a precipice” (307). Bryn Mawr’s dean would later describe to Faust the many nights she spent bailing out student protesters or sitting in the college hospital watching over girls recovering “from a drug overdose, or alcohol poisoning, or a suicide attempt” (308). Several of Faust’s friends “disappeared” into the 1960s, lost to Vietnam, the civil rights movement, back-alley abortions, or the obligation to marry. She writes, “I had managed not to become a victim, and I was still struggling not to be an executioner” (309). Despite the turmoil of 1968, Faust “remained glad to have had a time when [she] had a reason to believe, ideals to strive for, a glimpse of a Beloved Community” (309).

Returning home to vote in the 1968 presidential election, Faust reflects on the phrase “free, white, and twenty-one.” It was a common refrain among Hollywood actresses of the 1930s and 40s and a way of “claiming […] entitlement” and “asserting […] privilege in the face of power challenged or denied” (314). Freedom had always been of great importance for Faust, beginning with her childhood obsession with fairness and the liberties her brothers were allowed. However, she had started to understand the idea of freedom with much more nuance. She understood that others “confronted far greater injustices” and discovered the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” (314). Faust’s freedom had granted her many advantages, but now that she was finally an adult and could live her own life, she wondered what she would do with that freedom.

The fall of 1968 was a “difficult” time “to determine a course for one’s life” (314). Violence continued to escalate across the country, and the presidential race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey held no great promise. As a form of protest, Faust chose to vote for write-in candidate Dick Gregory, a Black comedian and civil rights activist. Gregory received two votes in Faust’s county. Nixon won the county, while Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace nearly tied for votes. Faust suggests that this tally shows the “white backlash” as voters moved away from the Democratic Party in response to “the nation’s changing racial landscape” (318). Richard Nixon was the “law and order” candidate, suggesting that Virginians hoped for “a return to the denials and injustices of 1950s complacency” (319).

Although Faust’s ballot was a “waste,” she argues it represented something important. A few years before, casting a vote for a Black man in Virginia would have been “unimaginable,” and not long before that, Faust, a woman, would have been unable to cast that vote. Faust was “[t]he embodiment of one dimension of progress, intent on helping to overturn other forms of injustice and inequality” (319).

She recounts Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closing words at Groton when she was a student at Concord: “Lord we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was” (319). 40 years after Faust cast her ballot for Gregory, President Barack Obama would win Virginia’s electoral votes.