Feminist Criticism has metamorphosed over the years from revisiting works by male authors to overlooked works by female writers. Some feminist focused on language and the way meaning is produced, deciding that language was developed in the male realm. Because they deem language as privileging masculinity, they believe that women have to either speak out in male language to be heard or that women will not be heard at all. American Feminist analyzed literary texts rather than philosophizing about language, contemplating the portrayals of female characters in the male dominated literary history, and revealing the patriarchal ideology implicit in their works, while others examined the female literary tradition to discover how great women authors have understood themselves, felt, and visualized reality. Other feminist distinguished themselves by avoiding what they deemed to be an overemphasis on texts and an under emphasis on popular art and culture, regarding their criticisms as more political and historical in nature, emphasizing their preoccupation with promoting social change.
Today these approaches have synthesized, tending to characterize a work by whether the kind of woman is the focus or whether the sexual difference encompasses other differences in identity. They stress that all women are female, but their conflicts and goals distinguish them from others. In short, feminism encompasses both the woman's view of a male author's written and lifestyle attitude toward women and the woman's world, and the woman's perspective of a female author's need to be heard, in the context of a previously male dominated world of female silence.
This essay describes the crises of womanhood in the context of Little Women, while confronting their seeming contradictions, and seeking to show that there does not always have to be an either/or solution. Some women were able to find a good balance between their own identity and family life; others found them incompatible. The later sought an escape route on the road to personal fulfillment, much like the character of Jo in Little Women; while the former found a merging of the two roads, like the personality of Marmee. Little Women helps us to see the patience and faithfulness of these women, but also shows us their steadfast determination when they feel they have something to say or contribute to their world.
Women like Louisa May Alcott and many others have sought to establish their own authoritative identities among the myriad of women, who through the centuries have struggled for their independence in a man's world, having had to fight their way into publication and credence in the world of male authors. The voices of womankind have been crying out for the freedom of the written word in the quest for personal identity in a culture that expects women to suppress their own thoughts, feelings, and desires while submitting to male domination. In a recent movie version of Little Women this resonates in a scene where Jo tried to submit her stories to a publisher who told her his magazine didn't publish fairy stories, but that she could go to one of the ladies magazine publishers. Much of women's writings reflect this kind of rejection in their search for independent identities, along with their efforts to find a place in that culture for women who think for themselves, even when tied to the apron strings of marriage and motherhood.
The book, Little Women, chronicles the lives of the March Family; Father, Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and it details the struggles of the March women, especially Jo, to find sustenance for their family and identities of their own in the culture of a masculine society. When Mr. March lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend, the two oldest girls begged to be allowed to do something toward their own support. The March parents consented, “believing that they could not begin too early to cultivate energy, industry, and independence” in their girls(51). Meg, the oldest daughter, hired out as a governess, while Jo hired out to Aunt March as a companion. But Jo's desire to be a successful writer and to support her family had long been cultivated in her strong and independent mind. Jo toiled at the confinement of being companion and then a governess, but her imagination could not be confined to the quarters of her mind. Write she must, and write she would, until she was good enough to earn her bread, as she tells us in one excerpt, “I'm so fond of writing, I should go spinning on forever if motives of economy didn't stop me. . .”(441). Jo's conviction that she should provide support for her family was bound up with her desire to become a fluent and financially independent writer. With her consolation for Meg's discontentment, she comforts “Poor dear, just wait till I make my fortune, and you shall revel in carriages, and ice cream and high heel slippers and posies and red headed boys to dance with”(50). She was determined to give her sisters the little luxuries life had denied them for the most part.
