Ennobling Womanhood

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

From Aesop to Beatrix Potter, the “town mouse” and the “country mouse” have met for comparison and contrast. In An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott, the “country mouse” is Polly Milton, a healthy, active teenager visiting her “town mice” cousins, the Shaws (Fanny, Tom, and Maud) in Boston. Alcott wrote this novel in 1869-1870, around the same time that she wrote Good Wives, the sequel to Little Women.¹

One of Alcott’s interests in her children’s novels is, what is the good life? How does one live it? Eight Cousins (1874) sends its orphaned heroine, Rose, through the households of an entire family, so she can study each way of living, and choose by whom she wants to be raised. Rose chooses a nontraditional family with her eccentric uncle who promotes exercise and a variety of life experiences. The Marches in Little Women quietly live a somewhat alternative lifestyle, commented upon by denizens of their society, yet they do not venture beyond the bounds of politeness. Alcott herself spent part of her childhood in the commune Fruitlands, the subject of Transcendental Wild Oats (1873).

Born to a philosopher and an activist, Alcott was not destined to have an entirely “normal” childhood. The Alcotts could hardly be called old-fashioned when they followed faddish new diets, advocated for radical social change, or arranged their family structure around Bronson Alcott’s experimental ideas regarding children’s education. Alcott continued to weigh these questions of lifestyle as an adult, especially in her children’s fiction.

An Old-Fashioned Girl opens with Polly’s descent upon Boston, and (like Little Women) the first half relates episodic escapades in the children’s lives. Through Polly, the Shaw children learn to appreciate their elders and find more to life than parties. All seems well with Polly’s old-fashioned values. The second half of the novel, however, resumes in the characters’ young adulthood. Polly has moved to Boston to live on her own, supporting herself by teaching music, and Fanny has entered adult society seeking marriage.

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott. Puffin Classics edition (1996).

“A Sustaining Satisfaction”

Chapter XIII, “The Sunny Side,” has become one of my favorites in all of Alcott’s writings. Fanny has won a wager with Tom that Polly would last longer than three months as a self-supporting music teacher, so she goes to see Polly. Polly takes Fanny to visit her friends, an alternative subculture of young, artistic women. Polly introduces Fanny to a sculptor, working on a model of “true womanhood;”² Kate King, “the authoress,” who “had written a successful book by accident and happened to be the fashion just then;” and more. The young women discuss “art, morals, politics, society, books, religion, housekeeping, dress, and economy.”

Fanny is “just in the mood to feel the beauty of this” gathering, as she grows dissatisfied with the “aimlessness” of her life:

It was a new world to [Fanny], and [these girls] seemed a different race of creatures from the girls whose lives were spent in dress, gossip, pleasure, or ennui. They were girls still, full of spirits fun, and youth; but below the light-heartedness each cherished a purpose, which seemed to ennoble her womanhood, to give her a certain power, a sustaining satisfaction, a daily stimulus, that led her on to daily effort, and in time to some success in circumstance or character, which was worth all the patience, hope, and labor of her life.

Readers of Little Women know that Alcott had little use for being an “ornament to society.” Womanhood, to Alcott, was not simply dressing well and receiving compliments. Alcott, whose Jo March likes “good strong words that mean something,” surrounded herself with good strong women who did things, at home or outside it. (This did not exclude her younger sister Lizzie, Alcott’s “conscience,” an invalid who died young.) When home life centered around meaningful connection and mutual improvement, Alcott loved it. But as she shows through the Shaw family, high society in her day distanced parents and children, and gave young women nothing to do but look pretty and get married.

What was the answer? For Alcott, it was “a purpose” that would “ennoble” the “womanhood” of her characters. It could be art, music, writing, political action, benevolence work—the possibilities were vast. There must be more to life than “parties, and flirtations, trying to out-dress my neighbors, and going the same round year after year, like a squirrel in a cage,” as Fanny moans to Polly. In this way, Fanny is a foil to Polly, standing in for a high-society heroine like Lily Bart, Gwendolen Harleth, or Anna Karenina, all of whom would have benefitted from having a purpose outside of dress, wealth, and male attention.

Polly’s life, not without its periods of loneliness and depression, shows a better way, and we glimpse what those heroines might have been: Fanny marries a man who is “learning to respect and love [her] better every day,” while her younger sister Maud “remained a busy, lively spinster all her days and kept house for her father in the most delightful manner.” Marriage, while a good and worthy goal to Alcott, was not a “sustaining satisfaction” in itself. A woman must be satisfied in herself and her own purposes.

“Affectionate and Frank Relations”

The Alcott family were radicals, living on the fringes of polite society due to their beliefs and actions. They believed in the abolition of slavery, offering their home as a stop on the Underground Railroad.³ Alcott followed her parents in supporting women’s rights, a movement mocked across the nation. Against certain leading minds of her day, Alcott believed that women’s capabilities matched men’s. She did not just seek legal equality; she sought social unity. In An Old-Fashioned Girl, Polly desires a mutually life-giving relationship with her cousin Tom:

…being brought up in the most affectionate and frank relations with her brothers, she had early learned what it takes most women some time to discover, that sex does not make nearly as much difference in hearts and souls as we fancy. Joy and sorrow, love and fear, life and death bring so many of the same needs to all, that the wonder is we do not understand each other better, but wait till times of tribulation teach us that human nature is very much the same in men and women.

Later in the paragraph, Alcott wrote that Polly “was not afraid to stretch her hand across the barrier which our artificial education puts between boys and girls.” Alcott showed here the influence of her father’s controversial education methods, in which boys and girls were educated as equals in the Socratic method. A natural relationship between boys and girls, Alcott believed, would yield better fruit. The highly sexualized nature of a society in which any interaction between single men and women could lead to marriage was not conducive to friendship. Alcott presented a refreshing, de-sexualized vision of male-female friendship based on the common ground of human nature.⁴

Will the “Old-Fashioned” Girl Please Stand Up?

The novelty of Polly’s lifestyle, and the radical social thought behind it, question what in Polly is truly “old-fashioned.” Certainly, her dress is not au courant. Her manners are unsophisticated. She cares not for the dissipation of the Shaws. Polly is subversive: she works so she can live independently, and her lifestyle and friendships make her suspect to Fanny’s social class.

Alcott and her family were eager to see a new day in the United States, one where Alcott and other women could vote, where Black people received equal political rights, where education was reformed. Yet, Alcott’s stories reinforced “old-fashioned” values like patriotism,⁵ respect for elders, hard work, and self-reliance, all of which Polly embodies. For Alcott, one did not have to give up these values while holding extremist beliefs on race, religion, and women’s rights.

Louisa May Alcott c. 1870. Wikimedia Commons.

Alcott’s social beliefs were provocative for her day, but they came from her moral beliefs, rather than a rejection of moral structure. She was conscientious about what she wrote for children, knowing that her audience was impressionable and would take her words to heart. She did not dilute her personal values,⁶ but leveraged them to persuade her young readers to reform their moral characters.

Perhaps what I find ennobling about Alcott’s vision of womanhood is her acceptance of tradition when it is good and helpful, and her leverage of it to reform that which is unhealthy. Alcott was both traditional and progressive, avoiding stark social binaries. Care for home and family did not inhibit Alcott’s artistic expression, world travel, and political activism in the long run.⁷ In her fiction, especially An Old-Fashioned Girl, Alcott shows that worthy old-fashioned values still serve in a new-fangled era.

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1. Since Little Women and Good Wives are most often printed together in the US, and considered as a single novel, I use Little Women to refer to both.

As the full text of An Old-Fashioned Girl is available for free online, I’m not citing page numbers.

2. “[S]trong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied. That is why I made her larger than the miserable, pinched-up woman of our day. Strength and beauty must go together. Don’t you think these broad shoulders can bear burdens without breaking down, these hands work well, these eyes see clearly, and these lips do something besides simper and gossip?” (Becky/Rebecca, the artist)

3. John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, 176.

4. However, it must be stated that Alcott marries off nearly everyone (except Maud) by the end of the novel. The male-female friendship that does not lead to marriage in this novel is Polly and Mr. Sydney (who seeks Polly’s hand first but marries Fanny). Another example would be Jo and Laurie’s reformed friendship in Little Women.

5. See especially “Tabby’s Table-cloth” in Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884).

6. A few examples: Marmee works outside the home in Little Women; Plumfield admits a mixed-race student, as Bronson Alcott did; Polly’s friend includes a ballot-box at the feet of the “true woman” statue.

7. Of course, it helped that her parents offered emotional support, and (in some ways) had more radical political beliefs than their daughter.