Alcott, Louisa May - Sarah Elbert (Essay Date 1984)
SARAH ELBERT (ESSAY DATE 1984)
SOURCE: Elbert, Sarah. "The Social Influence." In A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women, pp. 205-35. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.
In the following excerpt, Elbert places Alcott's work in the context of contemporary beliefs about gender and the burgeoning women's movement and connects Alcott's concerns about other social issues to her particular brand of domestic feminism.
The 1870s and 1880s witnessed a challenge to woman's rights in the name of science. The notion of woman's limited mental ability, supposedly the product of her specialized reproductive capacity, was never "more fervently held or more highly elaborated than it was in America after the Civil War."1 Alcott impatiently took up this challenge in the pages of Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and Jo's Boys. Women's minds, she insisted, were every bit as...
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