00:00:27.200TD Easy Trade taps into that instinct.
00:00:29.480Because you are made to trade, and TDEZ Trade is made to help.1.00
00:00:48.240Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast.
00:00:52.600My name is Anne Foster, and today I'm joined by Alice Rutkowski.
00:00:55.960Alice is the chair and associate professor of English at the State University of New York,
00:01:01.360Geneseo. I think it's called SUNY Geneseo, but I wanted to explain what I was saying.
00:01:06.620And I connected with her actually through a friend of the podcast, Kit Haim, who was on
00:01:11.960just a few weeks ago talking about the trans Roman emperor Elagabalus. So, okay, I'll backtrack.
00:01:18.700So one of the members of the Patreon, whose name is Ali, and thank you so much for the suggestion,
00:01:22.960Allie, said that she had come across some writing or just some blogs about Louisa May Alcott and
00:01:29.140like a trans-affirming reading of Louisa May Alcott's life and work. And I thought, oh,
00:01:32.980that's so interesting. So I contacted Kit, a friend of the podcast, to ask if they had come
00:01:38.140across any readings that they would recommend on this topic. And Kit forwarded me this article by
00:01:43.560Alice Rutkowski and suggested that I get in touch with her. And so I did. And then here we all are.
00:01:49.120So I was so excited Alice joined me for this podcast because she teaches and she studies American literature and also various other things.
00:01:59.020So we're talking about Louisa May Alcott, who's famously the writer of Little Women, but also she famously lived during the Civil War era of America, which is like not a time period I know super a lot about.
00:02:10.160So Alice was really able to help put everything in context about Louisa's life and experiences,
00:02:15.580both in this kind of a queer reading of her life, but also just the American history of0.74
00:02:23.120I found it so fascinating and so interesting.
00:02:25.280So please enjoy this conversation with Alice Rutkowski about Louisa May Alcott.
00:02:29.680it. I'm joined today by Alice Rutkowski. Welcome, Alice. Thank you. Thank you so much for having
00:02:43.640me. Could you please explain to everybody what your historical specialties are? So I'm a faculty
00:02:51.220member at SUNY Geneseo for folks who listeners who are not in the state of New York. I'm just I
00:02:58.140I teach at a campus of the state, New York, the New York State public college system.
00:03:03.380I'm an associate professor of English and the chair of the department.
00:03:06.920And I specialize in 19th century American women writers, Civil War Reconstruction.
00:03:14.420And recently, because we may get to this in the podcast, also in the last 10 years, I've
00:03:19.240been working on trans identity and trans politics, both in the 19th century and the 20th century.
00:03:23.980Well, and that really explains kind of how the paper that I found that you had written that made me want to invite you on the show, which is about Louisa May Alcott, American writer who was involved as a nurse in the Civil War, and a trans reading of her life, I guess. Can you explain how you came to that topic?
00:03:46.040absolutely it is the case that i'm the first person to publish an academic article about this
00:03:52.440but a number of folks in kind of in popular culture in the last five years have been starting
00:03:59.260to move towards this interpretation of hers so it's it's not an unusual take i do quickly want
00:04:05.280to shout out another podcast that i hope um if people are interested in this episode they'll
00:04:10.060listen. There's this wonderful podcast also by a Canadian writer and journalist, Peyton Thomas,
00:04:16.160called Joe's Boys, and he's reading with guests. He's going through Little Women chapter by chapter
00:04:23.820and talking about queer and trans readings of every chapter. So I'm not the only person to
00:04:29.240think this. But Alcott has a lot of themes in her work, both what we might call her children's
00:04:36.580literature. And she wrote a lot of what she called blood and thunder tales for adult sensation
00:04:42.140stories. She has a lot of themes in across all of her writing that has masquerade and acting and
00:04:50.740disguise that previous scholars often read as feminist or as performance of gender. But with
00:04:58.060the new understandings in the last, say, 15, 20 years, we have vocabulary we have to talk about
00:05:04.740trans identities, different, more sort of expansive views of gender. So I had those
00:05:12.140earlier readings when I was younger as well, a kind of second wave reading of Alcott as sort of
00:05:17.400a feminist that's angry about not having male privilege. But the closer you read Alcott with
00:05:23.500these newer ideas and terms, newer to us that we have, the clearer it is to me that we're talking
00:05:30.080at least about in my article, I call it trans feeling. I'm a cis lady. I'm not comfortable
00:05:34.940saying Alcott was trans, right? She did not have access to that vocabulary. But so for example,
00:05:40.040the very first page of Little Women, which is probably her best known work that people are
00:05:43.820familiar with, Joe literally says, I cannot get over my disappointment and not being a boy.
00:05:49.160You know, that's pretty different than saying, I wish I had the freedom of a boy.
00:05:54.040And I do just want to clarify for the listeners, like the same way that you do in your paper,
00:05:57.840like we're using she, her pronouns for Louisa May Alcott. Other people can make other decisions,
00:06:01.580but that's, that's what we're doing. I'm so, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Yes. In the paper,
00:06:06.060I also say I've chosen to continue to use she, her pronouns. There's no indication that Alcott
00:06:11.040used other ones. The idea of changing pronouns. I know you've had an episode or two that talked
00:06:17.780about other folks in the past who were trans. It didn't seem to occur to Alcott that she could
00:06:23.960change her pronouns. Although she did, in her life, she went by Lou in the way that Josephine
00:06:30.600in Little Women goes by Joe. She did go by Lou, which is a kind of masculinized version of her
00:06:36.340name. But I use she, her pronouns for her. No, exactly. And I think it's really just being led
00:06:41.780by how Louisa referred to herself. Yeah, in that way. Yeah. So before we get into it, like what
00:06:48.460we're going to talk about today is kind of Louisa May Alcott's life in general. And I'm glad you're
00:06:52.840here as an American person with a specialty and all these things, because I know some stuff about
00:06:58.120American history, but not a lot. So you'll be able to contextualize a lot of things. But first,
00:07:01.860I just want to talk a bit about Little Women, because I think that's what I certainly know
00:07:07.600her most from. You know, there was recently the new movie about it. Like I grew up watching the0.82
00:07:12.340Winona Ryder movie about it, obviously the book. So just things that are in the book, you know,
00:07:18.580joe joe herself the character starts off saying like you know i wish i was a boy and things and
00:07:23.520then i'm more familiar i've read the book but i'm more familiar with the more recent movie just
00:07:28.900because that's what's in my head and you know they have saoirse ronan is wearing like a man's
00:07:33.120jacket and a man's hat like there's a lot of tomboy ish is how that can be described can you
00:07:40.140talk a bit about joe's character in little women and just kind of gender greta gerwig's movie is
00:07:46.500definitely plugged into these more these newer kinds of readings of both joe and laurie right so
00:07:52.600in the novel her best friend ostensibly is a boy a lot of people are starting to see him as
00:07:58.880transfeminine in various different ways the the history of the reception of joe is really
00:08:04.440interesting it's kind of the history of kind of feminist literary criticism of this period by
00:08:10.280which I mean sort of early second wave feminism in the 70s. Oh, I should back up and say Alcott
00:08:17.280is really interesting in that for 19th century American women writers, a lot of scholars have
00:08:22.880to do something called recovery work, meaning they have to like find novels that no one's talked0.91
00:08:28.000about in 150 years and then make a case for this person being important and needing to be read and
00:08:33.660also being good, right? There's ways in which women's writing from the 19th century is often
00:08:38.280been dismissed entirely. For Alcott, that's not true. She's never been out of print. And Little
00:08:44.220Women is the thing that kind of kept her there. Up until really the kind of 60s and 1960s and 70s,1.00
00:08:51.300she's still seen as a children's writer, sort of by both by sort of fans of her work, as well as
00:08:58.480academics studying her. Second wave feminism comes along. And Joe is often read right as a0.67
00:09:05.820kind of proto-feminist, tomboy, but tomboy. There are all sorts of reasons that a girl might1.00
00:09:14.100express herself in a tomboyish way, right? And some of those may have to do about discomfort
00:09:19.400in her own gender. A lot of them have to do with wanting access to male privilege, but it's almost0.68
00:09:25.340always framed as a phase, right? That's something that girls are allowed to do when they're girls,1.00
00:09:31.560but they have to grow out of it when they become women.1.00
00:09:36.160And so initially, she'll be read as a proto-feminist.
00:09:39.920These early feminist critics also have a good deal of discomfort0.99
00:09:42.460around the fact that Jo might not be straight,1.00
00:20:32.400So he's like best friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson,
00:20:36.220who is an important American writer, philosopher, poet,
00:20:39.860And Henry David Thoreau, who readers might know best as the author of Walden, where he decides that he's going to live entirely by himself in the woods by Walden Pond, this little lake in Concord, Massachusetts, build his own house, only eat what he's grown himself.
00:21:02.300and in the book, a lot of ways has been an inspiration for the modern environmentalist
00:21:06.820movement. Like people will still absolutely quote Thoreau before things about sustainability.
00:21:11.600And then they also, the family's also friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who's the famous
00:21:15.840American novelist who wrote Scarlet Letter amongst other things. And so Bronson is sort of
00:21:20.840part of this group of men who are thinking these big thoughts and wanting to think broadly about
00:21:27.720what it means to be American and what it would mean to be kind of an American philosopher.
00:21:33.460He's the least kind of financially successful of all of these people. By all accounts,
00:21:39.880he was a really difficult person to get along with. He did have some really
00:21:44.380radical, useful ideas that are still with us. He was among a group of people who
00:21:49.980had really radical ideas around the education of children, which now we think of as
00:21:54.800very normal. So the idea he believed children were born good and basically the best educational
00:22:01.700environment is just going to kind of put them in a supportive environment, which now we think of
00:22:07.940as education, but that is absolutely not the way children were educated in the United States in
00:22:12.160the 19th century. They were thought of as kind of mini adults. Everything was rote memorization.
00:22:17.420And so he did have some pretty radical kind of romantic ideas about the education of children,
00:22:21.780which have sort of stayed with us, but he had trouble holding down a job. For him, it was sort
00:22:27.060of always about principles, like sort of the gap between theory and praxis was really bad for sort
00:22:35.340of the people that depended on him economically. Abba, who's Marmee in the books, was almost always
00:22:42.540having to figure something out in terms of making money, keeping her girls fed and clothed.
00:22:47.320so for him principles were sort of more often more important than his family eating which is
00:22:55.140difficult to read now there are more generous readings of him that suggest he might have
00:22:59.880suffered from various kinds of mental illness that now might be able to be treated but he was
00:23:05.560a difficult he was a difficult person and he was not a great father yeah he like this is sort of
00:23:11.840like if you're gonna be a guy who like builds a house and lives in the woods and writes a book
00:23:15.740about it great but if you're a guy with like four children and a wife to support it's like maybe get
00:23:21.920a job and let people eat protein yes right yeah because they had this sort of like there was
00:23:31.800somebody else who did this i think it was percy shelley or lord byron one of them who were just
00:23:37.180like we're gonna be really um good people we're gonna only eat like bread like it was something
00:23:44.340about like, we're going to be vegetarians, but to them, it was just kind of like, we're just
00:23:47.140going to not eat anything with vitamins or sustenance to it. And anyway, do you know anything
00:23:54.140about the, I just, I came across this fact that he was just like, we're just going to eat a
00:23:58.180spiritual diet. Here we go. Let me see. They so assisted on bread and vegetables because he
00:24:03.740believed a diet not dependent on the sacrifice of animals purified them spiritually. Yeah. And
00:24:09.380here's like, so some of this sounds really heady, although there are important political aspects to
00:24:13.380So, for example, this the group of folks with this belief also refused to wear cotton, but that was because it was raised by enslaved people in the South.
00:24:22.040Right. So it's it's both maybe seems ridiculous, but then there are kind of some political principles in here.
00:24:29.020So Bronson and then actually a couple English dudes that he met, they made an attempt at a utopian sort of commune, which a number of people did in the 19th century.
00:24:41.160It's interesting. Thoreau actually didn't want to be on a commune. He just wanted to be by himself. But they made this attempt, which was Bronson and these sort of English thinkers and philosophers who were also men.
00:24:54.180And they brought along Abba and the girls. And they the men spent most of their time sort of sitting under trees and talking about big ideas.
00:25:02.340And ABBA ended up doing all of the work. If people are interested in a hilarious satire of this, Eloise May Alcott wrote a short story called Transcendental Wild Oats that I would recommend to anyone.
00:25:17.000And you can probably even just find it by Googling it. But it's hilarious in the way that it skewers these sort of male big thinkers and sort of leaving the work for girls and women instead of doing their part.
00:25:29.280right they wanted a self-sustaining farm but they weren't willing to farm yeah yeah wasn't there
00:25:35.420something about thoreau where like his mother was doing his laundry and cooking for him or something
00:25:40.760when he was claiming to be self-sufficient yeah like historians have definitely found that he
00:25:46.160was getting quote-unquote more help so it's the kind of thing where like because he was very very
00:25:51.640close with emerson and so you know he'd go to emerson's house and be like hey can i borrow an
00:25:55.540acts or people would invite him over to dinner or emerson would bring by food so it's not entirely
00:26:01.800i mean it's tricky right i think it's not sort of a binary where he's like either a slacker or a
00:26:06.860perfect person i mean his experiment in some in a lot of ways which were still really interesting
00:26:11.760this is my students always get he also wrote um what's the name of the the essay um where basically
00:26:18.140he goes to jail for his beliefs he's against the the war in mexico and he writes this essay from
00:26:23.720jail and my students are always like oh but but emerson bailed him out he was only there for one
00:26:29.820night and i like to say well but have you ever been to jail for your beliefs right it can be
00:26:34.360both and right he can have privilege but also have done a kind of scary radical thing like both are
00:26:39.860true at the same time yeah yeah it just i'm just like just my my lens of just like these guys
00:26:46.160sitting under the tree while abba has to do everything it's just like get it together you
00:26:50.480guys. So, um, eventually they went, wind up in Concord, Massachusetts. Why did they move there?
00:26:59.240Do you know? So that's where all the famous folks live. So I think, um, at very, they move sort of
00:27:04.940in and out of Concord, but at various points, um, Emerson is kind of helping them out or they move
00:27:10.640into Hawthorne's old house and the, the historical Alcott house, orchard house is still there if
00:27:17.200people want to go and visit the historic site. But so basically it's some of their famous friends
00:27:20.960are able to help them out. And so while she was living there, Louisa or Lou as a child was
00:27:26.400described as rambunctious, full of energy. Bronson thought that this was unfeminine and improper,
00:27:33.020but she liked to be able to run around. She liked being in nature. And this is where she met Henry
00:27:38.320David Thoreau, who this essay claims was her lifelong unvoiced love. Yeah. So, I mean, we can't
00:27:45.880like you can't prove the absence of things like that that strikes me as a completely untrue um
00:27:53.400yeah exactly it's just like yeah i mean she she's open that she prefers like again so it's it's not
00:28:01.060sort of openly she doesn't talk about romances with women um but she talks openly about kind of
00:28:07.460preferring girls over boys in terms of desiring them also recent scholars of thoro think that
00:28:14.940he might have been gay or at least um sort of gay and ace and it makes perfect sense that she
00:28:22.200would have found him so appealing because that's the kind of boy or man she she wanted to be right
00:28:28.060thorough is is sort of a model of independence and self-sufficiency so they absolutely they had
00:28:35.160a relationship where they like go pick berries together and stuff but this idea that she always
00:28:39.440longed for him romantically strikes me as wrong yeah what you just said is very interesting like
00:28:45.600the fact this essay was like yeah we're pretty sure she was secretly in love with him and never
00:28:49.100wrote about it but we think this is in her heart it's like what okay clearly they had this
00:28:55.500relationship she was inspired by him and she also liked being alone she liked being in nature like
00:29:00.360we see that we also see that some like it's unavoidable like joe like just as a character
00:29:05.920was just kind of like, oh, you're not feminine enough. You know, people were sort of seeing that
00:29:10.440in her as well. Well, and sort of, I was just going to jump in and also say like that description
00:29:14.600from the encyclopedia about her being, I'm forgetting like rambunctious, I don't know,
00:29:18.780was disobedient, but like, again, some of this seems to suggest some evidence. Again,
00:29:25.040I don't want to say what Lou Alcott was, but, but this idea that she's taping against these
00:29:29.800expectations, not only of femininity, right, which most of us women now who are firmly identified as
00:29:36.880women would have chafed against as well in the 19th century, right? It was awful. I think it
00:29:42.140goes further for her, right? It's not just, oh, I don't want to be this kind of woman, but she's
00:29:48.220being put in this box that's so restrictive, right? Even more restrictive than like her sisters who
00:29:53.280seemed comfortable as women, but didn't like the like limitations that patriarchy put on them.
00:29:57.860and we're gonna talk about her story with the italian siblings but that's because that makes
00:30:06.860me think about that okay anyway but so like in her writing like just these are some quotes from
00:30:11.360her journal like she like her father especially and presumably her mother and like society was
00:30:16.280just being like don't act this way try and be a better person and she tried right she says people
00:30:21.800think i'm wild and queer but mother understands and helps me now i'm going to work really for i
00:30:26.340feel a true desire to improve and be a help and comfort not a care and sorrow to my dear mother
00:30:31.340so yeah she wanted to like quote improve herself she wanted to be the sort of daughter that they
00:30:38.560wanted her to be but that's just not who she was and that's the struggle that people relate to
00:30:42.620that queer people relate to the trans people relate to cis people relate to it's just like
00:30:48.040yeah if who you are is at odds with who your parents want then that's hard that's rough
00:30:54.360then this says for the next several years as she bent the task of remolding herself her journals
00:30:59.660were blank so yeah yeah and and again i like your reading of that a lot right that it doesn't uh
00:31:08.000that i think that's because a lot of that does end up in the way that joe thinks about herself
00:31:12.960in the novel it often in the first volume is like all of the girls and in some ways little women is
00:31:21.520fairly conventional it's got some really um kind of subversive stuff some of it's hidden and some
00:31:26.720of it's not but all the girls are sort of working to be better people like to become little women
00:31:32.180right and that's the thing that for contemporary i think readers sometimes is a uh it seems like
00:31:38.820she's compromising or can't say what she thinks or something but for joe the things she's often
00:31:43.500work working to like get better about is her temper and certainly the idea that women and
00:31:48.880girls aren't supposed to be angry, right? I mean, you need to treat people well, right? I'm not1.00
00:31:53.960saying you should randomly shout at people, but the idea that that's not an emotion, right? That
00:31:58.620anger, right? Or annoyance is not an emotion that women should have because it's unladylike.1.00
00:32:03.920So that struggle in the novel, I think, speaks to what you're talking about, right? These sort1.00
00:32:08.740of feelings about being trapped and it comes out as anger and annoyance. Well, and that just reminds
00:32:14.300me too about another character from this era of fiction that a lot of people grow up
00:32:18.880really feeling a kinship to which is anne shirley from anne of green gables right who's also a
00:32:23.280little girl with a temper like little girls i think see these characters who are just i have
00:32:27.860so much feeling and it just spills over and you relate to that little boys like little anybody
00:32:33.780can see these characters and just be like i'm like that too you know like there's something
00:32:37.800so relatable about that yeah you know and i mean what to state to state the obvious like those
00:32:43.360like assumptions about the way gender should work in terms of emotions are still with us
00:32:48.140the sort of like boys will be boys stuff, right? Where like a child is misbehaving and treating0.77
00:32:53.920another child poorly, right? Which is what, you know, children don't know the rules yet, right?
00:32:57.560But the idea is you step in and you explain what the right thing is to do. And still for boys,
00:33:01.720they're often not parented in ways that remind them that they need to be thinking about others.
00:33:08.600And we probably go too far on the other way with girls where girls have to, even now, right,
00:33:11.920have to constantly be thinking about others, other, how are people looking at you? How are
00:33:15.800you affecting them? How can you, you know, take responsibility for other people's feelings,
00:33:20.120all of this really dangerous stuff. Well, and then that also lends to,
00:33:23.880and you get to this in your essay as well, Joe voices that she wishes she was a boy. And it's
00:33:29.460like, that could mean so many things. But one of the things it could mean is just like, I want to
00:33:32.860be able to be mad sometimes. It doesn't necessarily mean like I'm uncomfortable in my physiology.
00:33:37.580It could just mean like, I want to get to be like what the boys are like, which is also,
00:33:41.860which is, which it could be both. It could be both. It could be like, I'm uncomfortable in my
00:33:44.860physiology. And I want to be able to express anger sometimes. Like it doesn't necessarily
00:33:50.120mean dysphoria. Absolutely. And that actually brings me back because you asked an earlier
00:33:54.180question about tomboyism, because this is often the way the biggest descriptor that both popularly
00:34:01.100and scholarly write Joe as a tomboy. But I guess the reminder for me is that tomboy is a description
00:34:07.020of an expression of gender. It's not like it's not necessarily a gender itself. So as you said,
00:34:12.380girls and women might seek out that expression of gender for all kinds of reasons. It might be
00:34:20.020that they, oh, actually I'm a boy. And it might be, I'm going to settle into conventional femininity0.79
00:34:25.460because that feels right for me. Or it might mean, right, they'll end up as a kind of masculine0.60
00:34:30.440woman. But this idea that that says something fundamental about the person, again, there's
00:34:36.780too many interpretations, right? There's too many ways. What matters is the intention of the person,
00:34:41.120of the person um expressing their gender in that way well we see in louisa just in the sense of
00:34:47.020like these this time period where she just was trying to improve herself it's like this was
00:34:50.960something she herself struggled with she wanted to try and be a different a different kind of
00:34:55.420person a more socially acceptable woman than what her personality was i wanted to mention this
00:35:01.740because i found this interesting you mentioned like the forward thinkingness like bronson i feel0.96
00:35:06.260leg deadbeat dad piece of shit but there was like there's there's good things in this family and0.95
00:35:12.440there's good things in his philosophy um so there's a part where um abba so louisa she has a0.99
00:35:20.640sister named anna who's kind of the meg character and so the two of them help abba teach a group of
00:35:26.540black children to read because the city provided no schools for blacks is how this phrase is sorry
00:35:31.520I don't mean to use the word blacks. This is an old essay. And they were involved in the abolition0.88
00:35:38.280movement, right? The family was very, very progressive for a white family in America
00:35:45.400in this time period. Yeah. And there's a later, I think, again, I don't have the whole sequence of
00:35:51.100all of Bronson's various failed schools, but there's a later school, I think in the Massachusetts
00:35:57.400Maybe it's in Concord or Boston that he opens. That's meant to be progressive. And it's serving mostly, you know, sort of well off like white families with progressive politics. And they decide to admit one black student to that school, a free black person, and the school's shut down.
00:36:16.580so again this is tricky right this goes back to to bronson's kind of like theory and practice thing
00:36:22.660like that is the right thing to do right but it also means he can't support his family anymore
00:36:27.560like so to suggest there's some easy answer but again they they helped they helped black fugitives
00:36:34.280who had escaped from enslavement again i think often now at least in american history it seems
00:36:40.840really easy to be like oh of course that was the right thing to do this was still a pretty radical
00:37:14.980White people in the North could just kind of, they could be against slavery, but they didn't really have to think about it all that much. Like it didn't really affect them if they didn't want it to affect them. The law in 1850 requires basically law enforcement and judges in the North to help catch escaped people, fugitive people. And any person found helping them ends up with big fines and jail time.0.59
00:37:37.740So this is one of the things that gets us heading towards the Civil War, whereas, again,
00:37:41.820white people, if they didn't want to think about it before, they could kind of be anti-slavery.
00:37:44.700But like, I don't know, like someone posting something on their Facebook page, but not
00:37:47.920actually doing anything, people then sort of have to make a decision because it basically
00:37:51.880nationalizes slavery, even in places where slavery is not legal.
00:37:55.840So slavery is not legal in Massachusetts, but everyone is forced to help catch fugitive
00:38:02.280enslaved people and send them back to slavery.
00:38:05.620So that's really, I don't want to discount how major that was and how I keep using the
00:38:11.460word progressive, but it's just like this family was doing things in this era in the0.80
00:38:16.7001850s that people now in 2023 would be like, I'd rather just post a black square on my
00:38:22.460Instagram, you know, like they were stepping up in a real way.0.94
00:45:43.060Dude got caught because he didn't understand what a floppy disk was.
00:45:46.800We look for the stranger-than-fiction stories, like the case of Patty James, a killer catfish before the internet was even a thing.
00:45:53.140Or Howard Walmsley, a sentient wad of damp laundry who convinced his town he'd won the lottery, fleeced local businesses out of thousands, and then became a romance scammer.
00:46:03.340We've covered tons of cases you've never heard of.0.54
00:46:19.020No, this is like goals to a lot of people, what she's able to do.
00:46:22.980and she was supporting her family and so it what this how this phrase is it is she outgrew her
00:46:27.920position in the family as like the troublesome one and her earnings from the writings made her
00:46:33.040the glue that kept the alcots together like she really revitalized and kind of saved her family
00:46:38.240and so it's like oh she used to be the like black sheep of the family but now it's like she's the
00:46:42.100one who's like thank god for louisa which is an interesting and delightful turn after the way that
00:46:48.640she felt for so long you know that she was there's something wrong with her and now she's the one who
00:46:52.680saves the day. I do want to note, because we've been talking in recent episodes, I've been doing
00:46:58.500these Mary Queen of Scots episodes, and I've been talking about the importance of sewing and
00:47:03.840embroidery. She took in sewing to supplement her writing income. Good for her. You know, again,
00:47:08.440it's a skill that you have that people will pay you for, cash in on it. Okay, so then this is again,
00:47:16.560when the story gets similar to Little Women, I'm like, oh, I see where she got that from.
00:47:20.360So, so her youngest sisters fell ill with scarlet fever, which they caught from a charitable visit to a nearby family, which is what happens to Beth in Little Women.
01:15:24.900Which is good because she has this, you know, horrible arthritis and things.1.00
01:15:29.040Let's see. Yeah. So Lulu arrived here. It says, um, at year's end, whatever year this is, um,0.96
01:15:35.1201879, Louisa only had one publication, but finances were no longer pivotal. She had invested well.
01:15:41.640love it yeah again savvy savvy business person absolutely yeah so she was not only making money
01:15:48.280but she was like handling it very well which is great so elcott finally seemed happy to have a
01:15:55.420reason for living that did not center on making money i don't know but like raising lulu which is
01:16:00.900which is fair i think yeah again it doesn't have to be either or the i mean it does seem like she
01:16:06.440maybe was writing stuff that was less interesting to her at the end of her career but she'd been
01:16:11.200working so hard for so long that, um, you know, it's hard to sort of indict her for not writing
01:16:18.380different kinds of novels at the end of her life. Yeah. Well, no, it's like she deserves to not.
01:16:23.160Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. There's, this is a whole other conversation, but just like
01:16:26.680the still present societal expectation that everyone should be working all the time or else
01:16:33.260you're wasting your, no, you don't, if you don't need to work and you don't want to work, you
01:16:37.740shouldn't have to absolutely yeah so then you know lulu is is there with her it says here lulu
01:16:43.920was a happy and strong-willed child which i appreciate maybe there's a little bit of of
01:16:48.520lulu in lulu her father had a stroke he was paralyzed he couldn't speak and so uh louisa
01:16:55.660may elcott returned home to care for him and then began work on joe's boys so the last of the
01:17:01.800what became a trilogy about the march family and then she also set to work editing her letters
01:17:07.580and journals. So to publish some of her other writing. And that's like a lot of writers do
01:17:12.420at this point in their career, I think, just to be like, my collected writing. She's famous
01:17:16.340enough as a person, people are coming to her door. It's like, okay, here, I'll just publish
01:17:20.080my diaries. And then knowing her father's end was near, she traveled to Boston to visit him.
01:17:28.200The following day, she wrote her final diary entry. Better in mind, but food a little uneasy
01:17:33.760is part of what it says and then her father passed away on march 4th and then louisa passed away on
01:17:39.880march 6th age 55 yeah actually i mean yeah not not that old you figure her dad i forget how old
01:17:47.540bronson is when he's he died but a lot older than her so yeah so i mean she had this illness for
01:17:54.220so long as well yeah she left her family like well endowed so just so anna and the boys received0.98
01:18:01.360the bulk of the estate with a provision for Lulu, who was sent back to Europe to live with her0.93
01:18:05.620father. And so Orchard House became a museum and a memorial for Louisa May Alcott. Anna oversaw it
01:18:11.640until her death. And then the responsibility went to her sons. And I think at that point,
01:18:18.040like at the point where Louisa May Alcott became famous, like already there was sort of this
01:18:23.600public relations happening to not let people know that she was secretly this kind of like cranky0.84
01:18:30.080asshole and then i think anna like i say with all love i appreciate that about her um and i think1.00
01:18:36.600anna and the trustees of the estate also just like orchard house it's where little women like1.00
01:18:41.140they knew that this is what people want yeah wanted to be this like oh this nice lady who's1.00
01:18:44.980kind of like mother goose who wrote this nice story not this kind of like cranky opinionated
01:18:50.940person so this sort of authorly persona persisted well and i like i like your phrase of public
01:18:58.960relations too because this idea again um that the woman most famous writing the most famous
01:19:06.700american book about girls like maybe didn't want to be a girl right that's maybe a little bit off
01:19:13.760public relations um and and this is not unusual to happen to um american writers who um send off
01:19:22.140queer vibes in some way like so she's going to get made over into what they call the children's
01:19:26.580friend but someone like walt whitman the probably the most famous american poet who was absolutely
01:19:31.540gay um he's his biography is going to get sanitized as well by historians and critics
01:19:38.520are just like no that can't be true he was he's in love with a woman like this that and the other
01:19:43.740thing and he's turned into the good great poet i mean so i i think you're right about like making
01:19:48.720the estate seem sort of more coherent right the her sort of intellectual property but also uh the
01:19:55.680other thing that's interesting about Alcott and Whitman is they're, they're writing all these
01:19:59.900kind of revolutionary things, like right before the birth of modern psychology and like what,
01:20:04.100what, uh, what they call sex, sexology, like where they kind of invent the categories of
01:20:09.340these sort of binary categories of straight gay. And so they're kind of writing in these ways that
01:20:14.540later are going to get pathologized. So when people are sort of poking into their papers in
01:20:18.920the early 20th century, it's like, Oh no, like they can't be that right. That would ruin them.
01:20:23.740well i'm just thinking about like okay for instance that just a position like you said1.00
01:20:29.140that she's uh a woman so she's 55 when she dies but like a woman of that age like she was a
01:20:34.800spinster when she was 25 like she was a woman who never married and that to society at the time was
01:20:39.520like that's weird so to sort of retrofit that and to be like oh she was just this kind of nice late0.66
01:20:45.720like to like you don't want to be like oh oh it's because she was queer oh it's because whatever it's
01:20:50.160just like, she's a nice lady who never married. So I've been recently watching Miss Marple,
01:20:55.980the TV movies about the Agatha Christie character. And what was really interesting to me,
01:21:00.920these are versions from the early 2000s and Miss Marple, who is this like canonically like old
01:21:07.700lady who never married. And in these TV series, they're like, oh, but she did have a love in World
01:21:12.860War I. And then they had to part. And I'm like, why are you putting this in here? Why do you have
01:21:16.660to be like, she's not gay. Don't worry about Ms. Merkel. She was in love once. Exactly. And in 18,0.96
01:21:23.680in 1860, you might not have had to say that that isn't to say people didn't desire people of the
01:21:28.580same sex in 1860, but we didn't have those categories in the same way by 1900. You're
01:21:34.460absolutely going to be like, not gay, not gay, not gay, not gay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So just to0.97
01:21:39.700have Louisa May Alcott as a, I don't know. It's also interesting too. I did, I interviewed a
01:21:43.880woman a bit ago about her novel about Lucy Maud Montgomery. She's also like beloved author of a
01:21:50.040beloved property and she did marry and she had children, but she was very unhappy and it was kind
01:21:54.420of a really challenging marriage. So just, I don't know, just the, the real life of the authors of
01:22:01.340these books that are so, that are children's books. So like, of course the children's books
01:22:04.740aren't going to reflect the like mental health status of the author because they're meant to be
01:22:09.840nice stories, but just the fact that people then conflate to assume that the authors were just like,
01:22:14.240do, do, do, everything's great. I'm the author of children's books. Like I never had to struggle.
01:22:18.500It's interesting. Absolutely. So I just remembered that I haven't given you a heads up about this,
01:22:25.220but we need to score Louisa Malcott on the scale with which I end every episode of my podcast.0.52
01:22:30.920And I'm interested to see what you say about this, because she's a different sort of person
01:22:34.160from who we have often talked about. So there's four categories and it's all a scale of zero to
01:22:39.72010. So I'm gonna just as the expert, I will let you take the lead. So the first category is
01:22:47.140scandalousness, how, and this is like, how scandalous was this person seen by people at
01:22:54.140the time. So as an example of somebody with high scandalousness would be like, I don't know,
01:23:01.040Cleopatra, or somebody like that, who was just like, Oh, my gosh, look at what she's doing.
01:23:04.220So Louisa May Alcott, like not married, doing the like, you know, her family abolition, like, so there was some stuff that people just be like, what's this person doing? So like, on a scale of zero to 10, where would you put her?
01:23:16.320Yeah. So that, that sounds maybe like mid, like the, I think the politics stuff would, would be, I don't know, maybe get her to a four or five, but like her, her, her personal life was made like the way she lived her life was maybe less radical than some of the characters she wrote.
01:23:35.680if that makes sense uh because it you know she you know dressed in women's clothing most of the0.69
01:23:42.540time went by her feminine name worked on women's causes um probably because options other options
01:23:48.160were not available to her but i know you're interested you're interested in class on this0.99
01:23:51.820podcast too and part of this is like it other options that sometimes are taken by other scandalous1.00
01:23:57.500women is they have the option to be scandalous because they've gotten resources but so yeah1.00
01:24:02.920maybe not super scandalous. I don't know what you would say.
01:24:06.040I think, I think a five is where I would put her. I think for sure. But I'm just,
01:24:10.540something you just said, you said she dressed in women's clothes most of the time.0.74
01:24:13.600What did she do the rest of the time? And what were those times?
01:24:16.880Well, this is the sort of like those situations where there's more leeway. So if you're going to
01:24:21.200go for like a big long walk through the woods, right. Or she's performing in amateur theatricals,
01:24:27.420or she still was sort of taking opportunities to wear men's clothing in places where it was
01:24:35.360possible. Yeah, no, but you're right. The classing is such a part of it. And that's why I have like
01:24:39.580these different categories. So people can score highly in different places. Cause there are who
01:24:43.760like, I don't know specifically if it's at the same time, but in the 19th century in Paris is
01:24:49.380there's like George Sand and there's like authors who like are living this very outre
01:24:55.180like pants wearing life but that's a different place and that they don't yeah and you need and
01:25:01.860you need money to do that yeah and you don't have to be the person like the single breadwinner for
01:25:06.560an extended family and aging parents like she yeah louisa did what she could the next category and
01:25:12.460i'm going to define it for you so it's scheminess which doesn't necessarily mean like haha an evil
01:25:17.240scheme but just like a person with a plan who knows what they're doing and does it on purpose
01:25:22.020so it can also be sort of yeah just someone who like has a plan for their life and executes it
01:25:27.320and it does well and I think I think she did that actually with her writing and the savviness yeah
01:25:32.320I'd rate her pretty high for that I mean how many of us have a dream as a preteen to be a famous
01:25:38.420author and then they become one like that's pretty schemey well and the fact that she she's like okay
01:25:44.240I got this story published but like oh but if I wrote it like this then I could maybe get $20
01:25:48.540for it instead of 10. Like, oh, if I wrote a children's book, I'll get like, she did it in a
01:25:52.680very deliberate way, which I respect. Yeah. And I'm going to go back to her as a sort of a savvy
01:25:58.220author who was good in many genres. Like one of the things critics like to argue about is which
01:26:01.940stuff, which of her writing counts as her real feelings, right? The, the, the scandalous stuff
01:26:07.200is just for money, but little women is real. Little women is just for money, but the scandal1.00
01:26:11.100stuff is real. What if it's all real? What if like, what if she's just a really good writer1.00
01:26:16.300and can write in lots of different genres.