In March Step

In my 2010 novel, The Sky Is Falling, I tagged a pair of characters as “a Jo” and “a Beth.” If you’re a fan of Little Women, you’ll get the reference. You might also assume that I had read the beloved American classic. I hadn’t. I consulted Wikipedia’s plot summary.

If this isn’t professional misconduct, it’s at least embarrassing. After all, I’m also a writer for children. When I confessed (or “fessed,” as the March girls would say) all this to a friend, she shrieked that she’d read Louisa May Alcott’s book ten times! In fact, it was the reason she became a writer. I countered with a declaration of loyalty to Anne. Why did I have to read Little Women when I’d read L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables ten times? No go. I’d been shamed into finally meeting the March family.

As even I knew, Little Women is about sisters. The first volume revolves around their childhood outside of Boston, their delightful games and “scrapes,” their impassioned quarrels, and, regrettably, the lessons they learn. (Later in the book, Jo meets a newspaper editor who tells her, “People want to be amused, not preached at, you know.” It’s advice that Alcott could have heeded.) Here you get the famous burned manuscript, the hair selflessly shorn, the bout of scarlet fever. The sisters’ equally famous personalities are on full display: Motherly Meg. Sweet, sickly Beth. Pretty, vain Amy, the artist. And plain, boyish Jo, around whom the novel revolves.

Jo’s boyishness is not just hinted at. When she complains that she likes “boy’s games and work and manners,” Beth replies, “You must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls.” With their father off serving as a chaplain in the Union Army, Jo declares herself “the man of the family now.” When he returns, he looks around for “the ‘son Jo.’ ” So emphatically “gentlemanly” is “fellow” Jo, I felt certain Little Women had to be on a Moms for Liberty hit list. And as in any novel published in 1868, “queer” and “gay” are sprinkled everywhere, as though to reinforce the point. How wonderful, I thought, that so many generations of kids whom we would see today as queer or trans, not to mention girls balking at gender expectations, have had Jo, unashamedly herself, loved and accepted by all the Marches!

Alas, in the second volume, the girls grow up and the novel becomes not a target but a poster book for Moms for Liberty. Meg gets married. Amy goes off to Europe and returns a wife. Beth dies, seemingly of saccharine poisoning. And Jo, who shucks her boyishness and now possesses “the natural instinct of a woman,” goes to New York, hoping to become a writer. Although she succeeds at “sensation stories,” she burns them when a German professor in her boarding house disapproves. Then she marries him.

It gets worse: “Jo renounced her old ambition, pledged herself to a new and better one, acknowledging the poverty of other desires, and feeling the blessed solace of a belief in the immortality of love.” She gives up writing!

As I slogged through the moralizing rest of it, wherein unmarried women are described as “sad, sour sisters” who “have missed the sweetest part of life,” I recalled one of my mentors, the late, great children’s book editor Sheila Barry. Children’s books don’t need to solve the problems of the world, she said. “But the book does have to suggest to young readers that hope is possible.” There’s little of it here for a kid who yearns to be anything more than a tradwife.

If you think it’s unfair to judge a nineteenth-century novel by contemporary standards, I point to Alcott herself, the model for Jo. Never marrying, she went on writing, including pseudonymous “sensation stories,” which she preferred. “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she confessed of Little Women in her diary.

The second volume appeared in 1869 (some British publishers called it Little Wives without Alcott’s permission), and the two parts were published as the single book we now read in 1881. What accounts for its enduring popularity? Considering the rollback of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, I began to suspect an ideological agenda at work. (Hysterical thoughts for hysterical times!) Selective memory is the more likely reason. In their love for “fellow” Jo, readers simply forget the diminished female she becomes. If you’re thinking of giving this book to a young reader, I recommend you tear it in half and throw away the second part. Better yet, choose Anne of Green Gables.