Little Women is so much more than a "girls'" book

The 30^th September, 2018 marks the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott-and I couldn’t be happier!

Once a much-loved favourite among girls and women of all ages, Little Women’s popularity has been in steady decline since the 1950s. Whereas near contemporary works of Alcott’s classic, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer remain on school library reading lists, Little Women has suffered the stigma of being a “girl’s book,” thus seemingly making it less important than books that feature male protagonists.

I was six years old the first time I read Little Women. I bought it for about 20 cents at a second-hand bookshop in 1986 or 87. The book was old, even then, the pages already yellowed and beginning to curl. I think that’s why I bought it. Growing up in a city where everything was shiny and modern, I liked the fact that it seemed to have some history to it.

 I knew nothing about Little Women or the context in which it was written when I first picked it up all those years ago, and there was much about it that seemed strange or confusing to me.  I didn’t know what the Pickwick Papers were, and had never heard of a garret before. And it wasn’t until years later that I realised ‘the war’ the girls refer to throughout the book was, of course, the American Civil War (being Australian, we weren’t taught it at school because it wasn’t part of our history.)

Even so, Little Women changed my life and had a huge influence on my personal development, as well as my writing. Like most bookish girls who didn’t want to be a princess or a ballerina, or some other hyper-feminine stereotype, I saw myself in the boyish, independent Jo March. Of course, I liked all of the March girls, but Jo was my favourite. Having very few positive female role models in my own life, I took my cues from Jo.

I wanted to be a writer, just like her. And from a pretty young age I knew I never wanted to marry or have kids either. What Jo did (until Alcott’s publishers insisted she follow the conventional path and get married), was to show young girls everywhere that there was another route they could take. That adulthood for women didn’t have to be all about marriage and kids. That was a pretty liberating idea in the post-second wave feminist world of the 1980s and early 90s. But when Alcott first published the book in 1868, it was nothing short of subversive.

And that wasn’t the only thing. Alcott’s deliberate blurring of gender constructs between Jo and Laurie was something most readers wouldn’t have experienced before. Jo is a girl with a boyish-sounding name who longs to be male, so that she can fight in the war, have more freedom and financially support her family, while her father is absent. She disdains traditional “girlish” activities, such as sewing, gossiping and getting all dressed up to impress others. She wishes she had brothers and is constantly admonished by other characters for being a 'tomboy' and 'un-ladylike.' She has strong opinions, is impulsive and clumsy, and her temper often gets the better of her.

Despite all this, Jo does have a maternal, nurturing side. She loves animals and she gets along well with children, who naturally warm to her. But her maternal instinct really shows itself in her dealings with her favourite sister, Beth.

Jo is fiercely protective of her shy, quiet younger sister, and is sympathetic to her needs, while at the same time gently encouraging her to socialise and meet people outside the March family circle.

Like Jo, Laurie also has an androgynous name. He prefers the gentler company of girls over boys, adores the arts, wants to be a musician and doesn’t like rough games, like other boys his age. However, Laurie’s real name is Theodore, and when the boys at school tease him by calling him Dora, he “thrashes ‘em.”

In giving Jo and Laurie a unique blend of both feminine and masculine traits, Alcott seems to be saying that gender is indeed a social construct, and that we all have both masculine and feminine traits within us to some degree. But society forces us to repress those traits traditionally associated with the opposite sex along the way, for fear we will be ridiculed or ostracised for them.

By doing this, Little Women sends a powerful message to both boys and girls who read it. Be yourself, it seems to say. Do what makes you happy, and don’t mind what other people say.

In a society where we are constantly talking about toxic masculinity, and how the media plays into that, Laurie is a positive male role model that boys can look up to. He treats the March girls like people, first and foremost. He’s respectful, kind and playful to the girls and has an almost reverential attitude towards the girl’s mother, Marmee. He’s the kind of man whom women want to be around, because he makes them feel comfortable.

Now I don’t want to have to resort to repeating that very well-known quote by Margaret Atwood (you know the one), but I really don’t think men truly get just how much women feel as though we need to be on our guard around them. All the freaking time. Or how often a seemingly innocuous exchange between a man and a woman can become rife with coercion, garden-variety misogyny and even violence, at a moment’s notice. As women, we are constantly on our guard around men, and in a perfect world, or even a fairer one, we wouldn’t have to be.

Much of this, as we know, has to do with socialisation, and the messages we give children, either overtly or subtly about the opposite sex. According to the writer, Anne Boyd Rioux, part of the reason for Little Women’s waning popularity over the years has been down to teachers and librarians dismissing it as a book that will only appeal to girls, and therefore, boys won’t want to read it. Before these boys even get a chance to read Little Women, they’re being told by the adults around them, that it’s a girl’s book, so they shouldn’t really bother reading it.

When we give boys the subtle, yet powerful message that they don’t have to worry about girl’s inner lives or experiences, or books that depict them because it’s something that’s not really relevant for them to know about, it begs the question: What kind of men will these boys grow up to become? I think the #metoo movement has shown us where this lack of empathy for all females that is drilled into boys from a young age leads to. 

 

 I also can’t help feeling it’s a bit hypocritical to expect girls to just accept that they must watch movies or read books that appeal largely to boys, and centre around the lives of male characters, and yet boys are actively discouraged or shamed out of engaging with anything where they might actually learn that, hey, girls and women are humans too. 

This is something Boyd Rioux touches on in her book titled Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy: The Story of LittleWomen and Why it Still Matters. You can read this brilliant excerpt from it at Lit Hub, in which she goes into detail about why more boys don’t read Little Women (spoiler: it’s not because they think it’s too girly.)

I can’t help feeling that Little Women and Louisa May Alcott suffer from the same stigma as Jane Austen’s novels. Essentially, you have two female writers who wrote primarily about the interior lives and lived experiences of women. As with any literature that becomes immensely popular, and appeals mainly to the female sex, it is disparagingly referred to as chick lit, which really makes me mad. Because I just find myself thinking: ‘Well, if it’s only “chick lit” -with all the pejorative meanings that term implies- then why have both of these novelists’ works endured for so long?’

The 150^th anniversary of Little Women and the subsequent re-examining of it only goes to show that its themes and influence are timeless. We can only hope that the celebrations of Alcott’s life and work this year will help to bring Little Women back into the classic literary canon where it belongs.

If you love Louisa May Alcott and all things Little Women, you might also love Susan Bailey's blog dedicated to all things Alcott. Find her at louisamayalcottismypassion