Bryn Mawr Club of DC
Annual Luncheon with Drew Faust '68
Well-behaved women rarely make history. Join us in welcoming Dr. Drew Faust '68 for the Bryn Mawr Club of DC's annual luncheon, where we will get to hear her discuss her latest book, Necessary Trouble, Growing Up at Midcentury, a New York Times instant best seller.
Please note that the cost of the event varies by if you are a member or not of the Club. If you are not a member of the Bryn Mawr Club of DC, you can quickly become one online. If you aren't sure, please email Emily Lewis '07 at bmcdcmembership@gmail.com.
About the Author
Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard, where she served as president from 2007-2018. Faust previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2007). Before coming to Radcliffe, she was the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the author of seven books, including most recently, Necessary Trouble, Growing Up at Midcentury, published in August 2023. Her earlier book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” This Republic of Suffering is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled Death and the Civil War, directed by Ric Burns.
Faust’s honors include awards in 1982 and 1996 for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. In September of 2018 she was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. 
Book Details
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
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