How Louisa May Alcott’s Mother Encouraged Her Early Writing

Every daughter intimately knows the abiding power of her mother. She thrives on her praise, and can wither under her censoring eye. Nancy Friday has written in My Mother/Myself: The Daughter’s Search for Identity: “My mother . . . was my first and most lasting model . . . whatever else happens to us in relationships to father, peers, teachers—the tie to the mother is the one constant, a kind of lens through which all that follows is seen.” Born to Dorothy Sewell May and Colonel Joseph May, Abigail May Alcott—known as “Abby” or “Abba” to her husband and brother and “Marmee” to her four daughters—grew up in a liberal, aristocratic Boston family that valued moral virtue and education. According to Sanford Salyer’s early biography of Abigail May Alcott (Marmee: The Mother of Little Women), her own mother was “a power behind the scenes, a gentle, pervading influence. She knew how to get inside the minds of her children, studied their failings and possibilities, and guided them with a calm wisdom.” Two of Abba’s favorite maxims were: “Love your duty and you will be happy” and “Hope, and Keep busy,” an instruction she tucked in Louisa’s journal in 1845 and which the March sisters adopt as their motto in a moment of family crisis in Little Women.

Duty, industry, and generosity bordering on self-denial, were three gender-specific virtues Abba learned in her own home and later communicated to her daughters. Compared to her older, beloved sister, Louisa May Greele, for whom Louisa May Alcott was named, Abba was in Salyer’s words “strong, forceful, moody and impulsive.” Louisa inherited her mother’s character traits as well as her dark eyes and hair; according to Eve LaPlante in Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott, she had a childhood memory of being told she was “the spirit and image of her mother.” Her father Bronson noted that “the elements of their beings are similar; the will is the predominating power.” Quick tempered, they both struggled to control their anger, a bond they shared; Marmee counsels Jo about this in Little Women: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”

In giving Marmee these words, Alcott expressed not just the condition of women then but what it continues to be in modern times as articulated by Friday: “We bear a burden of anger all our lives . . . society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.”

Although Abba was unable to attend Harvard like her brother Samuel Joseph, she borrowed his books and absorbed the ideas he brought home. Like him, she grew to be a women’s rights activist and abolitionist, who, with her husband Bronson, sheltered runaway slaves. She was a woman ahead of her time. Headstrong and intelligent, a natural storyteller, she once had aspirations of becoming a writer and certainly continued writing poems as an adult. Louisa recorded in her journal on Christmas 1843 “the piece of poetry which Mother wrote for me.” Abba defied her father’s wish that she marry a cousin, preferring to wait and marry, if ever, for love, and spent her twenties exploring her place in the world, not tied to a wife’s domestic duties. Her ambitions prompted her in 1819 to tell her parents, “I am not willing to be found incapable of anything.” She said, quotes LaPlante, that “No woman’s intelligence should be trammeled and attenuated by custom as her body is by fashion.”

Abba’s will and fervor regarding women’s worth and independence informed her ability over many years to shoulder the family’s financial burdens. The man she married, Bronson Alcott, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, implemented his progressive views of education at Boston’s Temple School, which Louisa attended from ages three to seven, until the school closed, but he was incapable of providing for his family as men were expected to at that time. Insolvency and transience marked Louisa’s childhood. While Bronson fostered an intellectual atmosphere at home when he was there, and apparently was a brilliant conversationalist abroad, he held conventional views of how girls should behave, and criticized Louisa for being undisciplined and willful. He much preferred Louisa’s older sister Anna who was blonde, sweet-tempered, and docile, who wrote about others in her journal, not herself. Leaving home at key junctures in Louisa’s life, to travel to England for a year and a half when she was eight and nine, or just take a room apart from the family in order to read and think, which he did for 18 months during her infancy, it fell to Abba to shoulder the duties of parenting and bread-winning alone.

“I encourage her writing. It is a safety valve to her smothered sorrow which might otherwise consume her young and tender heart.”

Over the years, even Anna and Louisa worked to support the family, taking in sewing and teaching to supplement Abba’s income, derived at various times from boarders in her home, social work, and requests to her brother for money. In her mother, Louisa saw a powerful figure, capable of acting independently of a man, indeed standing in a man’s position by way of supporting the household, and, at critical points when Louisa’s voice might have been silenced by cultural mores and values, in the ways Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice) and Mary Pipher (Reviving Ophelia) have cogently examined concerning girls’ development today, Abba gave Louisa the unwavering encouragement to follow her inclinations and talent.

Friday quotes child psychiatrist Dr. Sirgay Sanger: “There’s a crucial growth period from five to ten . . . when little girls’ passivity and underachievement is too often accepted as normal.” The ages five to ten were central to Louisa’s development. In “Recollections of My Childhood,” where she refers to herself as a tomboy, she credits her mother with giving her a sense of freedom, by allowing her to run freely outside and “learning of Nature what no books can teach . . . I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before.” Madeleine B. Stern reveals that when she was eight, Louisa wrote a two-stanza, rhyming poem, entitled “To the First Robin,” to which her mother reportedly responded: “You will grow up a Shakespeare!” She preserved the poem and urged Louisa to keep writing.

Although all the members of the Alcott family had journals, Abba especially encouraged Louisa to write about her life there; she often left notes in Louisa’s journal for her to read, telling her in one to “make observations about our conversations and your own thoughts. It helps you to express them.” In her book The Alcotts: Biography of a Family, Madelon Bedell notes that Abba wrote her brother: “I encourage her writing. It is a safety valve to her smothered sorrow which might otherwise consume her young and tender heart.” Bedell suggests that Abba may have been speaking from her own smothered sorrows. In any event, she understood that Louisa channeled her emotions into her writing, and that she was happy when immersed in imaginative work.

Evidently, Abba’s favorable response to her poem motivated Louisa to continue writing; when she was ten, she records in her journal giving her mother “a moss cross and piece of poetry” for her birthday. Urging Louisa on, Abba presented Louisa with a pencil case in 1842 on her tenth birthday, with a note quoted by LaPlante: “Dear Daughter … I give you the pencil-case I promised, for I have observed that you are fond of writing, and wish to encourage the habit.” Such acceptance from her mother combined with permission to pursue her talent informed Louisa’s early sense of herself as well as her ambition, which was large; an 1843 journal entry indicates that she wished to be as famous as Jenny Lind. Of course, in time, she became more famous.

Abba’s views must have counterbalanced the social tutelage she was receiving from her father and his friend, the English transcendentalist Charles Lane, who convinced Bronson that he should move his family to a commune they named Fruitlands during the family’s unhappy years 1843–1845. In a January 1845 journal entry (Louisa was 12), she recorded some of her “lessons.” Among the virtues she was striving for, according to her list, were the stereotypically female virtues of “silence” and “self-denial”; the vices she wished to surmount included “activity” and “willfulness,” clearly traits considered undesirable in a girl. In her book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Carol Gilligan says: “The notion that virtue for women lies in self-sacrifice has complicated the course of women’s development by pitting the moral issue of goodness against the adult questions of responsibility and choice.”

In Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls, Mary Pipher writes:

Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much; be polite, but be yourself; be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don’t comment on the sexism. Another way to describe this feminine training is to call it false self-training. Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become.

If this restricting socialization is true today, Louisa’s triumph over the more rigid rules governing girls in the 19th century is all the more remarkable. She managed to yoke female sacrifice or duty to her goal of becoming a writer. If she could earn money from her writing to take care of her family, she could fulfill her duty as a daughter and her wish for her independent, adult self simultaneously. These twin impulses were arguably fueled in part by well-channeled anger. Aware of her family’s relentless poverty, she wrote in “Recollections of My Childhood” that as a girl she’d shaken her fist “at fate embodied in a crow cawing dismally on the fence nearby—‘I will do something by-and-by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die.”

Louisa knew whom she could count on, writing in her journal at 13: “People think I’m wild and queer; but Mother understands and helps me,” and at 17: “I can’t talk to anyone but Mother about my troubles.” Discovering an encouraging note from Abba in her journal, she also wrote: “I wish some one would write as helpfully to her, for she needs cheering up with all the care she has. I often think what a hard life she has had since she married—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry . . . I think she is a very brave, good woman; and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her.”

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Adapted from “Ambitious Daughter: Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother” in Writers and Their Mothers. Used with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2018 by Gardner McFall.