Louisa M Alcott and Bronson Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 to Bronson Alcott, a teacher and philosopher and his wife Abigail May. Her father was a big influence on her lifestyle. Bronson was a leading member of the American Transcendentalist philosophy movement. This was a mixture of Romantic beliefs in the primacy of the individual…that individuals are at their best when self-reliant, and that society tends to corrupt. They believed in individual liberty and were usually anti-Slavery and also they believed in the goodness of people. Bronson was also a proponent of women’s rights and he favoured a very liberal method of educating the young. He rejected punishments and was at odds with traditional social beliefs. He took several jobs as a teacher but ended up in conflict with parents of students and soon found himself unemployed. His Abolitionist beliefs and his insistence on having an African American child in one of his schools led to more disputes. He had married in 1830, and had 4 daughters and a son who died at birth. The 4 daughters (Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and May) were the models for Louisa’s famous children’s novel Little Women. In 1840 the family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, near to Boston. Bronson was not a practical man. He tried an experiment in communal living called Fruitlands which went bankrupt in a few months, partly because much of the land was not arable. The community refused to use leather, and they would not wear cotton silk or wool on the grounds that they were the products of slave labour. Abba, increasingly unhappy at her husband’s lack of practical sense, threatened to leave with the children. When the experiment failed, the family returned to Concord. Bronson tried to publish his philosophical writings but the truth was that his thoughts were mostly silly, and the book did not do well. He farmed a small tract of land, then Abba came into some money, which gave them modest financial security. They lived again in Boston and then returned to Concord. They went on supporting the Abolitionist movement in the years before the Civil War. Louisa grew up in this high minded but materially poor atmosphere….and while she absorbed some of her father’s idealistic thoughts, she was distressed by the family’s poverty and feared that their problems would split the family apart. She longed for some financial security.