Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante

Conclusion

    I Believe in Dreams
    F reedom was always my longing, but I have never had it,” Louisa wrote near the end of her life. She accepted her place beside Abigail among that “Sad sisterhood of disappointed women,” but never ceased hoping for the day when men and women could live equally and with mutual respect. Louisa dreamed of a world in which women would have the same public rights as men—to vote, travel, speak out, and run governments.
    In the end, Louisa May Alcott was her mother’s daughter. As willful, valiant, and loving as Abigail, she lived out her mother’s hopes and fulfilled many of her mother’s dreams. Neither woman achieved all she desired, but together they paved the way for modern women. Both wanted equal rights, but neither could find a way to live as men’s equal. Each chose at age thirty to avoid a traditional female role. Abigail married a reformer who seemed to share her belief in gender equality; Louisa decided to have a career and go off to war. This decision to become a “self-made woman” had disastrous consequences for both women. Failing to create an egalitarian or satisfying marriage, Abigail leaned on her daughters for emotional and financial support. Louisa’s decision to behave like a man in the world left her, ironically, lonely and dependent on her mother.
    Unable to find a partner who was her equal, Louisa found comfort in Abigail who, more than anyone else, understood and sympathized with her. With her vivid imagination, however, Louisa would doubtless have preferred the kind of love that Margaret Fuller found in Italy. In a betterworld, Louisa believed, women would have the opportunity to work and be heard in the world, to “try all kinds” of lovers, to raise families, and to share the burdens and pleasures of domestic life. In short, they would be equal to men.
    “There are plenty [of people] to love you,” Marmee tells Jo in Little Women , “so try to be satisfied with father and mother, sisters and brother, friends and babies, till the best lover of all comes to give you your reward.”
    Louisa’s alter ego replies, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee, that I’d like to try all kinds. It’s very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want.”
    In Louisa’s essay Shawl-Straps , written a few years before her mother died, she advised young women to explore the world, as Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century had advised young men. Abigail had also told her daughters: learn your own country and culture, and educate yourself further through travel.
    To Louisa, her lengthy tour of Europe with her sister May and Alice Bartlett had “proved,” despite “prophecies to the contrary,” that “three women, utterly unlike in every respect, [could travel] unprotected safely over land and sea . . . experience two revolutions, an earthquake, an eclipse, and a flood,” and “yet [meet] with no loss, no mishap, no quarrel, and no disappointment . . .
    We would respectfully advise all timid sisters now lingering doubtfully on shore, to strap up their bundles in light marching order, and push boldly off. They will need no protector but their own courage, no guide but their own good sense and Yankee wit, and no interpreter if that woman’s best gift, the tongue, has a little French polish on it. Wait for no man, but take your little store and invest it in something far better than Paris finery, Geneva jewelry, or Roman relics.
    Bring home empty trunks, if you will, but heads full of new and larger ideas, hearts richer in the sympathy that makes the whole world kin, hands readier to help on the great work God gives humanity, and souls elevated by the wonders of art and diviner miracles of nature. Leave . . . discontent, frivolity and feebleness among the ruins of the old world, and bring home tothe new the grace, the culture, and the health which