Women You May Not Know

Black and white photo of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

1832 - 1888

Biography

Beloved Little Women author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) spoke wryly of her father’s early experiments in “plain living and high thinking,” but his transcendental ideals, spurred by friends Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, impoverished his wife and daughters. Alcott thus supported her family as a governess, seamstress, and sometime maid.

Despite their poverty, the Alcotts housed a fugitive slave in 1847; the next year, Alcott was inspired by the “Declaration of Sentiments” and became the first woman registered to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

Alcott wrote melodramas under a pseudonym early on, but won critical acclaim for Hospital Sketches, an account of her service as a nurse during the Civil War. Articles for the abolitionist paper The Commonwealth and novels featuring resilient, outspoken women soon followed.

Alcott never married, but fostered her deceased sister’s daughter in her last decade of life.

By Jen Hawkins