Little Women Critique

Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women OR Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), was a two-part book that told the story of four sisters and their family during the Civil War. The novel was geared towards young girls and the author drew from her own experiences to develop her characters and her plot. Madeleine B. Stern (1912-2007), author of Louisa May Alcott: A Biography, wrote that among the musings made by Ms. Alcott, while deciding what to write in her book, was one that “There was no trick in writing for juvenile readers. She must merely describe life as it actually was.” Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) wrote Little Women at the request of her publishers, even though she was not very enthused about writing a book for girls. This book is a primary source. The second book, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, by Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick (1969, 1975, 1996) is both a primary and a secondary source. The author used primary sources, such as archival material, to depict the struggles that women endured in their path to gain voting rights in the nineteenth century but Ms. Flexner also drew from her experiences and observations of her mother. Century of Struggle is a monograph.[1] I don’t think Little Women had a thesis; it was a book written for young girls to enjoy. However, through the use of the author’s own life experiences, the book has left an imprint of what life was like for many women during the Civil War. Century of Struggle, on the other hand, did have a thesis: “to survey the position of women during the colonial and revolutionary periods, before any movement may properly be said to have begun; to trace its development from scattered beginnings early in the nineteenth century of a number of different fronts--education, employment, trade union organization, the professions, the law, the franchise--down to then enactment of the suffrage amendment in 1920; to keep that struggle in perspective