Little Women

Little Women

Coming of Age: Little Women

Little Women first published in 1869, is one of America’s most loved classics. The stories Louisa May Alcott wrote about are a reflection of the time she grew up in but also of her particular reality.   She was raised in a time of the cult of domesticity but her experiences were very different.   Her stories reflect the conflict in her life.   She was forced out of need to go to the world of work society deemed inhospitable to women.   Each character in her stories is a compilation of the female condition as defined by the day but also of Alcott’s personal trials and tribulations as she attempts to support and feed her father’s family while appear to be feminine enough.      
Louisa May Alcott can be seen as a vanguard of women in society. Reared in the cold, repressive, controlled style of the New England during the mid 1800’s, Alcott wrote about what she knew best; family. Louisa was reared during a time when men were expected to go out in the world and support a family while the mother remained home to care for the children and the tedious chores assigned to women; yet this was decidedly not her life.   Her father led the heady life of a man who mixed and mingled in social circles that included Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau but never managed to keep the family much above starvation and poverty.   In the time often referred in ladies magazines as “cult of domesticity” (Lavender) it was men who were to support the family, shielding the weak and delicate creatures called women from the rough and dangerous world.   This was not Louisa May Alcott’s life.   While her father lectured, “Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at the age of nineteen.”     (Alcott, 1)
Societal regulations were restrictive on women in the beginning of the 19th century. “The ideal of womanhood had essentially four parts – four characteristics any good and proper...