Louisa as Woman

In Louisa May Alcott's time, strict definitions and expectations of white womanhood permeated Louisa’s society and culture. Marriage and motherhood were the accepted roles for women; voting was inaccessible and illegal, education restricted, and earning a living through a career was limited. Louisa May Alcott defied gender expectations, sometimes through her acting as a way to embody a male character and through her dress, language, and active lifestyle. From a topsey-turvey girl to a self-made woman, she wore her own version of womanhood like a badge of honor.

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Transcript

Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m your co-host, Jill Fuller. Thank you for joining us for Episode 7:….“Louisa As Woman.” In today’s episode, we examine Louisa’s experience in testing the limits and redefining the possibilities of what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth century America. 

A note on terms:  for this episode, we will be discussing gender as Louisa experienced and understood it. Definitions and understandings of gender identity and sexuality have changed considerably since Louisa’s time. We use the terms “man” and “woman” in this episode as Louisa and her nineteenth-century contemporaries would have understood them, and do not include terms, such as “cisgender,” which were not in use in Louisa’s day. 

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If you visit Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts today and walk up the stairs to May Alcott’s bedroom, you will see an open trunk on the floor. Inside are a pair of brown, knee-high boots that once belonged to a teenage Louisa, boots she wore in the plays she acted with her sisters and neighbor friends. “We get up fine ones [plays],” Louisa wrote in 1850, when she was 17, “and make harps, castles, armor, dresses, water-falls, and thunder, and have great fun.” Looking back on her childhood years later, Louisa wrote, “Plays in the barn were a favorite amusement, and we dramatized the fairy tales in great style…In one I remember I took five parts and Anna four, with lightning changes of costume, and characters varying from a Greek prince in silver armor to a murderer in chains.” Louisa had a flair for the dramatic, always eager to blast aside “prim and proper” with a stomp of her boots. That didn’t change as she grew up. When she was in her twenties, she and her sisters joined the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company for the three summers her family lived in Walpole, New Hampshire, putting on comedies and farces at the Town Hall. The Alcott sisters were also founding members of the Concord Dramatic Union in 1857 in Concord, Massachusetts. Anna met her husband through the theater troupe, and Louisa forged her own friendships, including one with Alf Whitman, a boy who would become one of the inspirations for the character of Theodore Lawrence. Although a teenage Louisa wished to be a professional actress, she continued to stick to amateur productions in adulthood, especially when asked to lend her time and talents to performances for charity, such as the Concord Anti-Slavery Society.  

The outlandish, darkly humorous, and unconventional Louisa was perfect for the crass, comical roles she played with gusto, stalking and shrieking on stage until she brought the audience to gleeful tears. For Louisa, acting was freedom, allowing her to inhabit other roles, try on other identities, and imagine herself to other places. Stifled by poverty and the limited avenues open to gifted women, Louisa was sustained by her rich, vibrant mind. “Not only did acting supply an acceptable outlet for feelings that they [Louisa and her sisters] could not freely express otherwise, but it also was one of the first paths for Louisa’s literary imagination,” writes biographer John Matteson in his book, Eden’s Outcasts. 

Onstage, she was Count Antonio, Widow Pottle, Mrs. Jarley. On the page, she was Christie Devon, Tribulation Periwinkle, and, most famously, Jo March. In an era when women were expected to avoid public life and conform to specific feminine ideals, Louisa turned to the public arenas of acting and writing to express the multitudes inside herself more fully. The woman best known for writing a novel called Little Women spent her life redefining the possibilities of what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century America. Living at the crossroads between competing desires and responsibilities, Louisa was left to reckon with the limits of her gender; yet instead of rejecting her womanhood outright or submitting to society’s expectations, she made deliberate choices to expand the definition of what it meant to be a woman in a way that was true to herself, boots and all.

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In mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts, strict definitions and expectations of white womanhood permeated Louisa’s society and culture. Marriage and motherhood were the accepted roles for women; voting was inaccessible and illegal, education restricted, and earning a living through a career was limited. The forthright and unconventional Louisa “chafed at the restrictive feminine role,” Eve LaPlante explains in her biography Marmee and Louisa. In Victorian America, as it is now, gender was a social construct; the world of men was a forbidding structure designed to keep women like Louisa out of participation in everything from school to military service. From her vantage point on the margins, peering over the walls of this citadel, Louisa expressed her desperate desire to crash through the gate and experience life as a man. “I was born with a boy’s spirit under my bib and tucker,” she wrote in her journal, while she told a friend in a letter, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.” Louisa often referred to herself as masculine in her writings, calling herself the “man of the house” or her nephew’s “father” after their own father had died. Friends also noted her masculinity, remembering that she had a “boy nature” and “a masculine air.” Alcott family friend Clara Gowing remembered, “That she was not a boy was one of her great afflictions; her impulsive disposition was fretted by the restraint and restrictions which were deemed essential to the proper girl.” The decorum required of ladies was not her style; Louisa was often described as “breezy and snappy and using a lot of slang,” and “free and easy in her manner.” She delighted in speaking her mind and writing scandalous tales for the newspaper. “She was continually shocking people,” a friend recalled, “by her tomboyish, natural, and independent ways.” From a topsey-turvey girl to a self-made woman, she wore her unladylike demeanor like a badge of honor. 

The historical evidence has led to speculation among scholars and fans as to Louisa’s sexuality and gender identity. While it is certainly of deep interest, we won’t make any conjectures here, since the terms and nuances of gender and sexuality we know today would not have existed for Louisa. She was living and creating an identity within the more limited terms and constructs she knew. Regardless of her gender identity, her expressed desire to be a man was at the very least a response to her inferior position in society and inability to play the part of the meek, quiet, ideal Victorian woman. To not be female was to be male, and to be male was to be able to live freely as one chose. The challenge of Louisa’s life was how to expand the definition of what it meant to live freely as a woman within the boundaries imposed by society.

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The first arena where Louisa had to confront the social construct of femininity was in her own body. An active, strong child, Louisa played tag, climbed trees, swam, and ice skated, preferring outdoor activity over quiet games or the demands of housework. Comparing herself to a deer, Louisa recalled about her childhood, “No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences, and be a tomboy.” Her parents encouraged physical exercise and time outdoors; her mother even allowed her daughters to abandon the use of corsets, a progressive stance to take at the time. Louisa loved to move and she loved to be outside. She built fairy forts in the woods and learned the names of flowers from Henry David Thoreau. “Up at five,” she recorded in her journal once, “and had a lovely run in the ravine, seeing the woods wake.” Working in the garden, smelling the earth and touching the flowers, experiencing nature with her body and senses, “did her good,” she said. At the age of 12, she even had her first, and most memorable, spiritual experience while on a morning run under a canopy of autumn leaves. Watching the sun crest the hills, “it seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond…I felt God as I never did before.” Undoubtedly influenced by the Transcendentalism swirling around Concord at the time, Louisa found that in Nature, she existed beyond the definitions and expectations of her gender- here she was not defined as Woman or Girl, but as Soul.

Her love of physical activity continued into Louisa’s adulthood, long past the point when a woman of her social standing was expected to mark her entrance into adulthood and sexual maturity by “wearing her hair up, covering her hands with gloves…and refraining from running or talking openly to boys,” as writer Anne Boyd Rioux writes. During Louisa’s lifetime, and for many years before and after, a woman’s body was her most valuable asset. With their bodies, women were expected to fulfill their roles to society by bearing children, keeping house, and servicing their husbands. Louisa did not. Instead, she walked twenty miles to Boston, leapt across a stage, danced “like an ostrich”, nursed Union soldiers back to health, and wrote until her thumb was crippled. By remaining unmarried and physically active, at least until chronic illness took hold later in her life, she retained full control of her body, claiming ownership over what was intended to be a man’s property.

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Shortly after the publication and runaway success of Little Women in 1869, Louisa wrote in a letter that “Jo should have remained a literary spinster.” Due to requests from her publishers and her reading public, Louisa married off her alter ego to the kindly Professor Bhaer, although Louisa herself was not married. “Did she ever have a love affair?” childhood friend and neighbor Julian Hawthorne once wrote of Louisa. “We never knew; yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?” There are some references in the surviving written record to a few men who expressed interest in Louisa, though she tended to laugh them off as odd rather than entertain them as potential suitors. The one exception was a “little romance,” as she called it, with a 21-year-old Polish man she met during her first trip to Europe when she was 32: Ladislas Wisnewski. The two became fast friends and Ladislas, whom she nicknamed Laddie, joined Louisa and her companions on their sightseeing travels. The two even spent a week together in Paris, unchaperoned. While Louisa enjoyed their time together, wistfully writing “We had a happy life…” she seemed to have accepted that this romance was “a jolly amusement, fun and flattering perhaps, but in no sense serious,” according to Matteson. However, years later, Louisa scratched out part of the line in her journal about her romance with Laddie, noting “Couldn’t be” in the margins; her reasons for doing so (and what had been written there) are still a mystery.

In Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation of Little Women, a scene opens in the girls’ bedroom in Orchard House. It’s Meg March’s wedding day to John Brooke the tutor and Jo is distraught. She begs Meg to call off the wedding and run away, but Meg counters that she loves John and wants a family. “One day, it will be your turn,” Meg predicts, placing a wreath of flowers on Jo’s hair. Jo takes it off and tells her sister, “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.” This line, however, isn’t in the original novel. Louisa herself wrote those words in her journal in 1860, shortly after visiting her newly married sister’s new home. Instead of describing the visit, Louisa fervently declares her own choice to go a different route. “I love luxury, but freedom and independence better,” she said in another journal entry. Independence was a deliberate choice for the ambitious Louisa, one she did not seem to debate, even in her most personal writings. “No professional writer Louisa knew cared for children or a house,” LaPlante notes when discussing Louisa’s decision not to marry. “A man with a wife and children could write. A woman with a husband and children could not.” Louisa was not alone in choosing to stay unmarried. In late nineteenth century America, 13% of women were unmarried, the highest percentage of unmarried women in United States history up to that point. This was the era of the publication of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the intensification of the women’s suffrage movement, as well as the shifting of gender roles during and after the Civil War. While women’s rights had a long way to go (and arguably, still do), LaPlante argues this percentage demonstrates “women’s growing awareness of…inequities” between wives and husbands. Growing up, Louisa was surrounded by examples of independent women, which influenced her own development and gave her models of what a woman could aspire to be beyond the kitchen and nursery. The suffragist Lydia Maria Child, the educator Elizabeth Peabody, the Transcendental writer and journalist Margaret Fuller, and her own mother, Abigail Alcott, were part of Louisa’s world from the beginning. As we will see in a future episode, Abigail’s experiences and fervent beliefs in equal rights for women, including the need for female education and suffrage, infused Louisa’s identity. How could it not? This was a mother who said, “to all the dear girls, keep up, be something in yourself. Let the world feel at some stage of its diurnal revolution that you are on its surface, alive, not in its bowels a dead decaying thing…” As Louisa noted with shrewd insight, much of the philosophy in the house was not in the study with her father Bronson, but “a good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady thinks high thoughts and does kind deeds while she cooks and scrubs.”

Abigail’s experiences as a married woman had a profound effect on Louisa’s future. Abigail had hoped for a marriage of equals to the radical, idealist Bronson Alcott, but she was soon disappointed. Married to a man who could not earn a living, responsible for supporting a household and caring for four children, and unable to pursue her own dreams and talents, Abigail viewed her married life as “filled with trials.” As Louisa witnessed in her parents’ marital difficulties and later explored in her novel, Moods, passion and romance made good stories, but were not sufficient to relinquish control over her own life. In Moods, which Louisa wrote before Little Women, Louisa concentrated on what LaPlante calls “the conflict at the heart of her mother’s life:…how a woman can live in a world in which to marry is to enslave oneself.” After its initial publication, many critics and readers reacted negatively to Louisa’s portrayal of marriage, accusing her of advocating for Free Love. Louisa defended her book and her views vigorously, maintaining that she honored the idea of marriage, but that it was often entered into for the wrong reasons- with the burden resting on the woman, made vulnerable and powerless under the law. “Half the misery of our time arises from unmated pairs trying to live their legal lie decorously to the end at any cost,” she wrote almost word-for-word in two separate letters. According to Rioux, Louisa’s ideal relationship would be a companionate marriage, in which “husband and wife were… intellectual as well as romantic partners.” This was the marriage she gave Jo March, but knew she was not likely to find.

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Dealing with publishers, negotiating contracts and copyrights, tracking her earnings and investments- Louisa’s fiction may have centered on girls and women, but when it came to her career, she was adept at navigating the male world of business. In fact, her career allowed her entry into the world of men in a way denied to most women at the time. Yet still she faced roadblocks. Early in her career, she discovered she had been paid more for a story because the editor was under the “illusion” that L.M. Alcott was a man. After the mistake was discovered, Louisa refused to accept a lower payment, since she had “learned the worth of her wares,” she recalled. It’s arguable that her gender limited the arc of her career as well, pigeonholing her into the “respectable” genre of children’s literature. The writer who ached to write serious, lurid stories exploring human nature and the power dynamics between the sexes– themes that crop up in most of her adult works- certainly may have had more freedom to do so if she had been a man, not to mention if she’d had the opportunity to partake in any sort of higher education. It’s fruitless- but exhilarating- to contemplate the writer she may have been if she had had the status of a he.

Although passionate about women's suffrage, Louisa viewed her work as a form of advocacy for women’s rights, declaring “I am so busy just now proving ‘Woman’s Right to Labor’ that I have no time to help prove ‘Woman’s Right to Vote.’’” As she grew older and more successful, Louisa’s experiences in paddling her own canoe reinforced her belief that women were more than capable of depending on themselves. “Let us hear no more of “woman’s sphere,” she wrote in 1874. “Let the professions be open to her; let fifty years of college education be hers, and then we shall see what we shall see.” Louisa advocated for women’s suffrage and championed equal pay for women in the workforce, but the reality was that most women at the time did not enjoy independent control of their own money, property, or livelihoods. Louisa recognized this limitation and had lived it for much of her early life, yet still believed women had a duty and right to exert their influence, no matter how small their sphere or limited their opportunities. “The home-making, the comfort, the sympathy, the grace, and atmosphere that a true woman can provide is the noble part…” she wrote to a young fan a few years before her death. Louisa certainly had not been content to stick to home-making though. In her later life, it was only the combination of her wealth and status as an unmarried woman that gave her the freedom in the world of men that she had always craved. Although she was barred from voting in national elections, she had the authority and willpower to make her own decisions in the purchasing and renting of houses, hiring and firing of staff, the making of a will and the legal steps to secure her copyrights, and in decisions about the spending and investing of her fortune. Generous and deeply loyal to her family, she used much of her earnings to provide for her aging parents and sisters’ families. In that sense, Louisa fulfilled the traditionally female task of caring for her family, but she performed it in her own gender-defying way, embodying the roles of both the dutiful spinster daughter and the savvy businessman.

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On a Saturday afternoon in January 1868, Louisa went over to her sister Anna’s house to visit with her sister and youngest nephew, Johnny, who was two-and-a-half. Anna “is a happy woman,” Louisa remarked later in her journal, adding: “I sell my children; and though they feed me, they don’t love me as hers do.” Though she adored and doted on her nephews, Freddy and Johnny, choosing spinsterhood also meant choosing not to have children. Except for these brief notations, Louisa did not comment on this in her personal writings. Instead, she seemed to accept- and perhaps prefer- that she would labor and birth words and books, not children. 

In 1879, Louisa’s youngest sister May (the inspiration for the character Amy) died several weeks after giving birth to her first and only child in Paris, a girl whom she had named Louisa and nicknamed Lulu. Before the baby’s birth, May had stipulated that her child should be raised by her older sister if she didn’t survive childbirth. Louisa knew nothing of this until the unthinkable happened, so with May’s death and Lulu’s arrival in America in the spring of 1880, Louisa was surprised by motherhood at the age of 47. 

Despite her rapidly deteriorating health and physical strength, Louisa was an attentive and loving mother to Lulu. Like all new parents, Louisa found herself creeping into the nursery in the middle of the night to watch the baby sleep. She walked with Lulu, told her stories, nursed and comforted her through teething and croup. She played with her, down on all fours, her hair loose, roaring like a lion for Lulu’s amusement. Lulu was the last and greatest gift from May, and Louisa took her duty seriously, “more anxious to do my duty by her than if she were my own.” Unmarried, almost 50, and independently wealthy, here was Louisa, experiencing a fairly universal female experience at the time- motherhood- but in her own unconventional way. Louisa was now a mother, but she also needed to work and support her large family, including her sister Anna, nephews, and father. As working mothers have continued to do, Louisa faced the challenge of balancing motherhood and a career. “Mother is best, and that I must be, leaving pen, pleasure, society and rest to the good time that is so long a coming,” she opined when Lulu was 4. Luckily, she had help. In 1885, Louisa purchased a large house in Boston which she shared with her sister Anna, her nephews, her father, Lulu, and their servants, including a series of caretakers for Lulu. Even before this, the two sisters developed a dynamic that mimicked the traditional roles of wives and husbands: Anna primarily ran the household and helped care for Lulu and their father while Louisa wrote, often leaving home to do so, especially as her health and stamina declined. For example, in October 1882, she rented rooms at the Hotel Bellevue to write, saying “Missed my dear baby, but need quiet.” This action is reminiscent of her father Bronson’s decision back in the 1830s to leave his wife Abigail and their two toddlers (Anna and Louisa) so he could study and read in his own rented rooms in Philadelphia. Yet now it wasn’t the man of the house taking this step...it was the woman. 

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Since the publication of Little Women over 150 years ago, girls, women, (and men) have debated which March sister they identify with most: Meg, Jo, Beth, or Amy? In her famous novel, Louisa created four memorable female characters with unique personalities, interests, and dreams for the future that continue to captivate readers. Interestingly, Louisa chose to focus her “girl’s book” on the period of life in which girls transition into women, an awkward and difficult time, but one central to personal development. Anne Boyd Rioux writes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: Little Women and Why It Still Matters that by focusing on female adolescence, Louisa “complicated readers’ understanding of what it meant to grow up female.” In other words, Louisa showed her readers that girls and women were unique and complex, just like men, with the right to be their own person, to seek out options beyond waiting passively for marriage. They could paint, write, travel, act, make mistakes, and form affirming friendships with boys. They could “love and be love without losing one’s self” as Rioux writes, even after they found husbands. Personally, I find the women of Louisa’s Gothic thriller stories even more compelling. In these “blood-and-thunder” tales, Louisa created a range of dynamic and shocking female characters who used their wits and wills to take control of their own lives and escape or punish the men who tried to limit them. In her fiction, as in her own life, Louisa struggled to rewrite the script of what was possible for a woman of her time. In a world of strict and separate domains for women and men, Louisa tried to inhabit both, to exist in a duality of her own making without sacrificing her own sense of self. To be female, Louisa knew, was to contain multitudes. It was true then, as it continues to be now.

Stay tuned for our conversation but first… In the spirit of the Alcott’s strong beliefs and actions for social justice, each week we are highlighting an organization we believe in and asking for your support. For this episode, we are supporting the Sojourner Family Peace Center. The Center is the largest nonprofit provider of domestic violence prevention and intervention services in Wisconsin. It provides an array of support aimed at helping families affected by domestic violence achieve safety, justice and well-being. Learn more and donate at the links in the show notes or on our website, www.letgeniusburn.com. 

See you next week for Episode 8, “Louisa As Legacy.” Feel free to get in touch with us on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn. Before we go, don’t forget to check out and donate to EveryLibrary this week. You can find information and links to donate in the show notes or on our website. You can also find more information about Louisa and her world on our website at www.letgeniusburn.com. 

Statements like these have led scholars and fans to debate Louisa’s sexuality and gender identity. The dearth of concrete historical evidence one way or another means we cannot dismiss or ignore this possibility. Yet regardless of her gender identity, her expressed desire to be a man was at the very least a response to her inferior position in society and inability to play the part of the meek, quiet, ideal Victorian woman. To not be female was to be male, and to be male was to be able to live freely as one chose. The challenge of Louisa’s life was how to expand the definition of what it meant to live freely as a woman within the boundaries imposed by society.