International Womens Day 2020

The PPL Celebrates a Forgotten Feminist - Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott is known principally for her novel, Little Women, published in 1868, never out of print and loved by readers all over the world ever since. The story, an idealized portrayal of Alcott’s own family, traces the lives of a middle-class, if impoverished, New England family through the four March sisters as they grow from childhood to womanhood.

Much more than a cosy family story, the novel is also subtly subversive, particularly in the portrait of Jo March, who has become one of the most iconic and influential characters in literature – acknowledged by later writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, JK Rowling, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong and Carson McCullers as a seminal force in the development of their own work. Simone de Beauvoir commented that ‘…she [Jo March] was so much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books’.

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Educated by her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist philosopher with no aptitude for making money, Alcott became the family’s main breadwinner from her teens, turning out anonymous ‘blood and thunder’ tales which helped to keep the family financially afloat. Alcott never went to school but was educated by her father and mixed with his Transcendentalist friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau – men who left a permanent mark on American identity and values. Transcendentalism teaches self-reliance, intuition, civil disobedience, the importance of nature and self-knowledge and these principles were wholeheartedly absorbed by the young Louisa and can clearly be seen in her writing.

Both Alcott and her family were ardent abolitionists, courageously taking the role of Station Masters on the Underground Railroad; one of her earliest memories was the fugitive slave her mother hid in the family’s oven. Likewise her feminism was not simply a matter of words, it included actions too. Susan Bailey, an expert on Alcott writes: ‘Louisa’s feminism was based on autonomy – the right of every woman to be autonomous, the freedom for each woman to realize her true potential as a whole person’. Alcott actively promoted women’s rights, the right to want more than just to marry and have babies. She contributed to a women’s rights periodical in the 1870s and when Massachusetts passed a law allowing women to vote in local elections, Louisa registered immediately, becoming the first woman ever to vote in Concord.

Alcott, whose health was permanently compromised by the typhoid she contracted when serving as a hospital nurse during the Civil War died, unmarried, in 1888. Her strong, self-reliant and imaginative female characters live on in her works, speaking to all women today who still struggle against prejudice and repression.

Elaine Henderson

Read Louisa May Alcott: PPL Classic Fiction Collection has two novels by Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868) and Jo’s Boys (1880)