Women and War

Alcott had written plenty about slavery and race and, during the Civil War, about the war itself. In Little Women, however, the war provides the backdrop, but remains decidedly in the background. The father of the March girls, though not a combatant, is at or near the battlefield. The soldiers are known to be suffering considerable hardships. The girls’ mother works with the Soldiers’ Aid Society. The girls knit blue socks for the soldiers. The war never comes closer than that. Nor do the issues that ignited the war. But the war just looms in the background.

Slavery

In the years leading up to the war, Alcott had had plenty to say about slavery – she, like all her immediate circle in Massachusetts, were outspoken in the cause of the abolition of slavery; and if the issue of slavery was the ground for the assertion of the right of certain States to secede from the Union, no such right of secession could be conceded. In Little Women, there is no mention of either slavery or secession: neither word appears once in the entire book. It was written, it must be remembered, after the war had been won, when national reconciliation would have been seen by many Americans as vastly more important than rehashing the issues that led to the conflict.

A House Divided

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

There are, however, subtle parallels with the war. The country was divided, then reunited; the March family is divided (though not in the sense meant by Lincoln when he famously described his country as ‘a house divided’), then reunited. The country, North and South, underwent severe hardship, though during and after the war, angry recriminations were directed at some who made themselves rich through it; the March family endures an unaccustomed degree of hardship, but not all their neighbours do.

Little Women

The general tone of Little Women is, of course, cheerful and uplifting, with the March girls rising above their adversities to enjoy their Christmas parties, their home-grown theatrics, picnics, dances, and so on, but all is not all sweetness and light and the-boy-next-door. They do not always behave well. Their conflicts may be on a small scale, compared to a war, but there is lots of bickering, slights real and imagined, sisterly rancour; once (in the novel), the tempestuous Jo deliberately lets the younger Amy skate on dangerously thin ice. Always, an appeal to common sense and decency resolves the matter --

Written by Frank McGilly