Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Faust spent her 13th birthday as a new boarding student at Concord Academy in New England. The academically rigorous school offered a “sense of liberation [that] was almost overwhelming” (159) for Faust. Free from her mother’s intervention, she wrote home weekly and called once a month, but her parents “had become almost irrelevant” (160).

However, Faust didn’t leave behind the contradictions of 1950s America when she left Virginia. Concord had many “complexities and contradictions” that were “embodied” by the headmistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Hall (160). During World War II, Hall enrolled in Radcliffe College as a wife and mother. She became a teacher at Concord and later headmistress, where she did everything from clearing brush with a tractor to using her woodworking skills to carve a plaque for the assembly hall. During assembly, students were captivated by Mrs. Hall’s talks, who urged them to think “seriously” about “Big Questions.” Students “were terrified of her, yet […] aspired to be like her” (163).

However, Mrs. Hall was also “the product of her background and her time” (164). She grew up “enormously rich” and “took for granted […] her privilege” (164) and that of her students. She urged the well-to-do girls who attended Concord to behave with the paternalistic noblesse oblige benefiting their social standing and encouraged her girls to be ladylike. She believed men and women “occupied different places in the world” (165) and suggested her students shouldn’t “think [they] were equal to [their] husbands” (165). However, she also set an example as a career-driven woman and acknowledged a woman’s need to have something meaningful in her life.

Since well-to-do women were not obligated to work, Mrs. Hall suggested that they could focus on the “idealistic goals” of “upholding ethics, defining and transmitting values, calling the world to account” (165). On January 20th, 1961, Faust remembers watching John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on her housemother’s television. The new president’s call to “ask not what your country can do for you” seemed to echo Mrs. Hall’s lectures on duty and responsibility.

While Faust thrived amidst Concord’s academic environment, the school was also “overwhelmingly homogenous” (168): Concord was comprised almost entirely of wealthy white Protestants, with just a handful of Jewish girls and no Black students. As the civil rights movement grew, some students at Concord began to push for integration. In Faust’s senior year, the school admitted a single Black student and invited Reverend John T. Walker to speak at the commencement ceremony.

Although Concord was “a stronghold of antislavery sentiment” (170) in the 1800s, it was no more integrated than Virginia. Despite Concord’s de facto segregation, the white people around Faust discussed the growing civil rights movement and racial inequalities, creating “a foundation for change and possibility” (170). In 1963, the headmaster of the neighboring Groton school invited Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak, and the Concord girls attended. During his hour-long speech, King explained the foundations of the civil rights movement to his young audience and called on them to resist “complacency” in the North and join the cause.

Outside of school, the Cold War escalated, the Berlin Wall was built, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. In the fall of Faust’s senior year, Kennedy was assassinated. Although Concord was “a bubble of privilege” (175), the outside world still made its way in. After hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, Faust learned about a summer opportunity for students to travel to Eastern Europe to meet and learn from Soviets living behind the Iron Curtain. Faust felt the trip was her opportunity to contribute to world peace.