Women Issues in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

Abstract

In the last century or so, women’s issue and feminism have nearly reached a pinnacle, though, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminism was only a neglected theoretical perspective that challenged the mainstream patriarchal conventions. The inquiry of this extended essay is set on the events that Louisa May Alcott created in her novel Little Women which made debates and discussions, stray demands for women’s rights and were raised here and there, and a small number of women in various countries around the world may have risen to very high positions of power and authority, but there was no consistent and dedicated writing to support women’s causes until the last decade of the eighteenth century. Through a close examination of Louisa May Alcott’s contributions to providing the necessary philosophical-theoretical support and literary justification to feminism during its formative period in America, my intention in this paper is to examine and evaluate her achievement.