Kickass Women in History: Louisa May Alcott and Abigail Alcott

This month’s Kickass Women is also a book review (Grade: A!). In Marmee and Louisa, we learn of a well-known kickass woman, Louisa May Alcott, and one much less well known – Louisa’s mother, the amazing Abigail.

Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother, is a biography that focuses on the relationship between Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women) and her mother, Abigail May Alcott. It is a wonderful book – carefully researched, well-organized, very “readable,” (not written in High Academic-ese), and full of affection for Louisa and Abigail. However you should be warned that thanks to the fact that it could easily and accurately be subtitled “Bronson Alcott was a Useless Parasite,” you will periodically want to throw the book across the room. Clear the area of valuables and supply yourself with the soothing food and beverage of your choice before you begin.

The biography begins with the birth of Abigail, who was born in 1800 in Boston. The Mays (Abigail’s maiden name) were proud of having supported the American Revolution. She was very close to her brother, Samuel, who tutored her from his own textbooks when his schooling diverged from hers (because of her gender). She was a talented writer and believed she was as capable as any man, saying, “I am not willing to be found incapable of anything.”

Abigail made a strategic decision to stay single until she met Bronson Alcott and changed her mind. She married him in 1830 and proceeded to have four children who survived infancy, all girls. She also had one stillborn baby, a boy. Bronson, who was supposed to supporting, or at least helping to support, his four kids, was a Transcendentalist Philosopher who said, “As to money, I take no second thoughts about it…it only needs for me to be faithful to my principles, to reap not bread nor shelter nor raiment alone but, what is better, a useful name and a peace of mind.”

Well, OK, then.

The books goes on to talk about how Louisa grew up, how close she was to her mother, her mother’s work as a social worker, teacher, and activist, and Louisa’s efforts to save the family from their constant poverty and debt by writing. Abigail always encouraged Louisa to write and imparted her values of equal rights for both men and women, regardless of race. Louisa was loud and active, and thus Bronson Alcott’s least favorite child. However, she was devoted to her mother and they were very much alike in their stubbornness and quick intellects.

Because the book is tightly focused, there’s a minimum of information about Louisa’s relationships with her sisters, but what information there is, is poignant, especially as it relates to Louisa and her oldest sister, Anna. The women are shown to exist as part of larger communities of women, sharing resources and often raising the children of others for months or years at a time. When Anna’s husband died and Anna and Louisa’s sister, May (an acclaimed artist), died, the two sisters moved in together and co-raised May’s daughter and Anna’s sons.

This book hits the sweet spot of well-researched readability, a spot that lies between too dry and too speculative and simplified. My pet peeve in biographies is speculation about the subjects’ inner life, as in “She must have thought…” and similar uncertain phrases. This book is able to let us feel like we are inside Abigail and Louisa’s heads by backing everything up with quotes and observations from primary sources instead of guessing. I felt as though by the end of the book I knew these women, as though they had become my close friends.

I warn the reader that neither Abigail nor Louisa led easy lives and much of this book is deeply sad, infuriating, and harrowing. Louisa contracted typhus while serving as a nurse in the Civil War and was treated with mercury, which may have triggered lupus. The descriptions of medical practices she endured are upsetting and I found her struggle with pain and fatigue to be immensely painful to read. A lot of things that happen in this book are so fucking unfair.

The book is emotionally and intellectually gripping. In her final years Louisa wrote, “Freedom was always my longing, but I have never had it.”

After Louisa died, obituaries and biographies tended to erase the importance of Abigail in Louisa’s life and work, instead crediting Bronson Alcott for having educated her. This book rights a great wrong in bringing Abigail’s life and accomplishments to light, as well as by presenting Louisa, in her mother’s words, as “having a nature too noble to curb, too lofty to bend.”