“I like the independent feeling; and though not an easy life, it is a free one, and I enjoy it. I can’t do much with my hands; so I will make a battering ram with my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.” Louisa May Alcott, Letter to her Father 1856
When we started planning our trip to New England for my graduation from WPI for my masters in May of 2018, my husband asked me what places I would like to see in Massachusetts. Without hesitation, I told him that we had to stop in Concord and see the Orchard House, the place where Louisa May Alcott wrote many books after she recovered from her near fatal illness contracted serving a nurse during the Civil War.
In the fourth grade, I checked out Little Women, at first from the school library, and then from the county library. I watched the cartoon version on TV and then the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn starring as Jo. My mom and dad bought me a hardbound copy of the book which I kept until just a few years ago, which I passed onto my niece. I read many of her other books over my formative years, and I enjoyed them all. Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Jo’s Boys, the list goes on and on. But it the life of the woman herself intrigued me as I grew older and became a woman myself.
I stood a little in awe at Orchard House, looking at the place where such afar ahead of her time woman lived and wrote. From an early age, she loved to write and act and was encouraged to do both by her mother Abby May Alcott. Her mother was an activist, a suffragette, and considered to be one of the first social workers in Boston, before the idea of a ‘social worker’ existed. The family were staunch abolitionists and leaders in the Transcendentalist Movement. The family often struggled financially but were surrounded but great thinkers of the time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathanial Hawthorn, and not the least Margaret Fuller.
On a trip such as this, one cannot help but indulge in buying books. We are only half-way through our trip at this point, and I am already wondering if we are going to need to purchase another box or suitcase just for all of the wonderful little treasures of literature we have picked up so far on this journey. One particular treat, which I will refer to often, I picked up while I was at Orchard House: Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters and Journals.
While I have read much on Louisa, this book was both inspiring and humbling at the same time. Possibly because of the point in life at which I find myself. As previously mentioned, I am on this trip right now, to attend my graduation. It has taken me four years (and a good chunk of my sanity) to obtain an online Master’s in Engineering in Electrical Power Systems. There was quite a bit of struggle along the way, and more than once, I was sure I was doomed. But here I am, in less than a week, about to receive my diploma. And now I read about a genius of a woman, who read Plato and Goethe while I still played with barbies and had to work as a seamstress or a governess just to get by and support her family.
“Sewing was her resource when nothing else offered, but it is pitiful to think of her as confined to such work when great powers were lying dormant in her mind. Still Margaret Fuller said that a year of enforced quiet in the country devoted mainly to sewing was useful to her, since she reviewed and examined the treasures laid up in her memory; and doubtless Louisa Alcott thought out many a story which afterward delighted the world while her fingers busily piled the needle. Yet it was a great deliverance when she first found the products of her brain would bring in the needed money for family support.”
I read this, and I am truly humbled. While yes, there is still much to accomplish to create equality for all, but at least I am able to support myself independently without worry. I am financially sound and am recognized as an expert in my field. What would she have accomplished if she were in my shoes and had the advantages that I complain about? What great things could she have written if she had a job such as mine? Am I doing everything I can to live up to the legacy that she and others laid down?
From Her Journal Entry in May of 1880:
“Thirty girls from Boston University called…Pleasant to see such innocent enthusiasm. Even about so poor a thing as a used up old woman.”
Later in her life she suffered from depression, overwhelmed by her fame. She became discouraged when young girls showed up at the house looking for Jo from Little Women and meeting her instead, a middle-aged woman, broken down from life, illness and worries. Sometimes she would even pretend to be her own housekeeper and tell people she was not home. According to the tour we took at Orchard House, she could vacillate between being highly social and then completely melancholy, using a pillow to signal that she wanted to be left alone.
I wish I could travel back in time and show her all I have accomplished, and all that I still hope to do. Most of all, I want to let her know that I probably could not have done it if she had not paved the way 150 years ago.
Quote on plaque at Northbridge:
“By and by there will come a day of reckoning, and then the tax-paying women of Concord shall not be forgotten I think, will not be left to wait uncalled upon…I devoutly wish that those who so bravely bore their share of that day’s burden without it’s honor, will rally around their own flag again, and following in the footsteps of their forefathers will utter another protest that shall be ‘heard round the world.’”
-Louisa May Alcott on Women’s Suffrage
Reference
Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters and Journals, J.S.P. Alcott, Edited by Ednah Dow Cheney; Originally Published in 1889, Applewood Books, Carlisle, MA
Thanks for reading!
I joined the Navy at 18 to escape a small town in the Mojave Desert. A diagnosis of MS disrupted my dreams of becoming a super spy. I made limoncello from my lemons and became an electrical engineer instead. My fascination with live high voltage drew me to Alaska. I came for the job, but stayed for the adventure. I enjoy blogging about my journey as a woman working in STEM, my experiences dealing with everything MS has handed me, and the wonder of the Alaska wilderness. My husband and I have undertaken the task of turning 30 acres of remote land into an off-grid retreat. I write stories about women in STEM who save the day and the hot guys who sometimes help along the way as well as historical fiction about the Klondike Gold Rush. I self-published my first horror novella, The Dark Land, on Amazon in May of 2020. I will release the sequel, The Devil’s Valley, in May of 2021. Both stories are set in the wilderness of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and draw on the Athabascan “Head Waters Peoples” legends of the Cet’ann, or “The People With Tails”.
