Little Women

In an interview on The History of American Women

Your first book is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

This is an iconic American text. It was written in the years immediately following the American Civil War. Alcott presents a portrait of a northern family of women managing on their own while their husband/father is serving as an army chaplain. This classic work contains a powerful message to young women, namely that they do not have to marry in order to achieve success. Jo is one of the first in a long line of what might be described as ‘plucky’ heroines who follow their own destiny. She doesn’t end up marrying her leading man in this book although she finally does in a later volume.

Nancy Drew is another series which follows in those footsteps. The book is all led by her. I think if one looks in the magazine literature it would be hard to find a similar character at that time. These were stories initially published in a magazine and then bound together as a book.

Alcott was one of the first professional women authors and she had a very interesting life herself having served as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War. Her father was a leading social innovator who joined one of the first social communities which didn’t last very long because, while the men were off thinking their thoughts and communing with nature, the women’s lives didn’t change at all!

How did you feel when you read this book?

What it meant to me is something I wasn’t aware of at the time, but later I came to recognise this ‘can do’ spirit which is terrifically American. As a girl growing up in New York in the 50s and 60s I absorbed this notion of enterprising activism, of being the leader rather than a follower. And I think that is what this whole genre of girls’ stories is all about: women and girls taking charge of their own lives.

In an interview on Being a Mother

Your first book choice dates to 1868. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. For anyone who doesn’t remember it from girlhood, please give a précis, and for the rest of us, please explain what the March family teaches about mothering.

Mrs March has four daughters and they all call her Marmee. Her husband is away serving in the Civil War. So, for most of the book, she’s the rock of the family.

In so many of the books I read as a girl, it was the dad that was the strong figure. I’m thinking of Caddie Woodlawn, Johnny Tremain and even a lot of the Jane Austen novels. The mother in Little Women was the strongest mother I came across.

Marmee is a character that really resonates for me. She’s obviously not Chinese, but she believes that integrity and hard work are the most important things in life. She holds her daughters to very high standards. She doesn’t sugarcoat much. She also reveals to her rebellious daughter Jo, the star of the book and a character loosely modeled on Louisa May Alcott herself, that she had a bad temper too when she was younger. That’s exactly what I did with my own daughter Louisa.

Marmee March’s mothering style is very different from the Tiger Mother archetype. She encourages play and creative expression, and allows the girls to make their own mistakes. What does this have to do with getting into Harvard?

She encourages her daughters to play, but it’s often within the home. A lot of the play takes place within the family, which is very much the way I was raised. My husband and I spend a lot of time with our kids — playing charades, jumping in bed, watching movies and most of all, reading together. So the picture of family life in Little Women looks a lot like my household.

The kinds of mistakes that Marmee allows her daughters to make are very similar to the kinds of mistakes that I allow my daughters to make. Marmee provides a lot of guidance, she allows them to experiment within a moral framework. So it’s actually not as different as you might think. 

Alcott’s parents famously studied their four daughters, taking notes since their birth. Did you do so too?

I didn’t even know that. I didn’t take notes with a book in mind, but I kept a long computer file of things that the kids said which I found adorable. Even when Sophia, my older daughter, was three years old I recorded all the funny things she said; and with my second daughter, I set down all the smart alecky things that she said. So when I started writing this, I did have a file of contemporaneously recorded stuff. Most of what I wrote down was them putting me in my place. If you read the book, you’ll see that my daughters are the heroines and they have all the best lines.