Word: alcotts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...buried in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are interred...
...ROSE IN BLOOM, Alcott describes the societal pressures on a woman to be ornamental. Rose, an orphaned young heiress, is pressured by her aunts to join society and to use her wealth to attract suitors. Instead, with the aid of a sensible uncle, she learns to manage her money wisely and to devote herself to philanthropic affairs -- not by conducting bazaars or charity balls, but by constructing and maintaining low-income housing in the poorer sections of town. She marries in the end, of course, but she marries the professor who respects her, not the handsome dandy who admires...
Perhaps it could be said that Alcott was an innate feminist. Although the late-19th century moral style at times makes any of her stories too tepid and saccharine for the grown-up little girl, there is much to recommend her philosophies and attitudes and her ways of incorporating them into an internally-consistent thesis. Her respect for women is basic and sound, and it pervades all of her works...
...element of Alcott's writing that makes it most difficult to get by her style and to her content is precisely that which makes her most valuable as a model for writers who wish to drive home points about the equality of women. Alcott is subtle. All of the conflicts she describes are buried deep in her characters and in the society she so realistically describes...
...Alcott's writing there is none of the "pseudo-liberal horseshit" that characterizes so much of today's writing by and for women and little girls. She never cries out "I am a woman, respect me, give me my rights." She goes farther than that. Her unconscious feminism grows out of a basic confidence. Her women can be feminine with integrity. They become what they want...