The Alcotts and what they did for America

Orchard House - Concord, Massachussetts

Today on my way home from work I stopped for a spontaneous tour of Orchard House, the home where Louisa May Alcott lived and famously wrote Little Women. Like so many others, I have read the book, loved the movie, cried every time poor Beth dies….

But I didn’t realize until today just how extraordinary the whole Alcott family was. Louisa’s parents were both social reformers in their own right: Bronson Alcott kept getting fired from his teaching jobs because the establishment thought his ideas about recess, educating girls, and refusing to publicly humiliate a child were quite simply absurd. Abby May Alcott became a women’s rights advocate at the age of 15 and remained so all her life. Both Bronson and Abby were passionate abolitionists, and their home was part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. Bronson was known to tutor anyone who came to him, including runaway slaves. Today I stood in that very study. 

Louisa was not only a (gasp) female writer who (gasp) made enough money during her relatively short life to pay off her father's debts and finance her sister's art education in Europe, she was also a strong believer in the importance of physical exercise - which for a Victorian woman was seen as distasteful, scandalous even. Additionally, she worked as a nurse during the Civil War and was known to treat both Union and Confederate soldiers. Because though she was a fierce abolitionist, she was not a “heathen.”  

May Alcott, the youngest sister (depicted as Amy in the book), was a very talented artist. Thanks to her sister's profitable writing career, May was able to study in Paris, Rome and London, and actually achieved some critical acclaim amongst the Parisian artists of her day, including that of her friend Edgar Degas. But the story that nearly inspired tears at the end of the house tour was this one: 

A young man was failing his courses at MIT because all he seemed to want to do was sculpt. His parents despaired and hired May Alcott to tutor their son in his artistic expressions since he didn’t seem to be good for anything else. She quickly saw that he had a talent that far surpassed what she could teach him, so instead she introduced him to other talented sculptors and gave him her own unused sculpting tools as a way to invest in his talent and encourage him to pursue it. This young man’s name was Daniel Chester French, otherwise known as the man who went on to create this: 

Anecdotal history has it that Chester French carved out space on the backside of the Lincoln statue, placed there May Alcott’s tools that she had given him, and sealed it up again as a symbolic gesture of what her encouragement had meant to him. 

Are you not inspired!?!?!

Abby Alcott died before women were granted the right to vote, but without her championing the cause for so many years, who knows how much longer women would have had to wait to be recognized as legitimate voices in the democratic process! 

Bronson Alcott died before his ‘absurd’ ideas about education became normalized in the American school system, but without his perseverance, how long would it have taken this self-proclaimed “greatest nation on earth” to champion the education of females and slaves? 

Louisa died at the age of 55 after chronic sickness caused by mercury poisoning. During her service as a Civil War nurse, she contracted typhoid and was treated with medicine containing mercury, and her health was never the same after that. Even so, she was quite the formidable woman... America's Jane Austen? 

May Alcott died at the age of 39, six weeks after giving birth to her only child. She never reached the peak of her career as a painter, but she was the encouraging force behind the man who gave us one of our most precious national monuments. 

Oh to be a person who is willing to put up with being ridiculed because I have vision for a future that doesn’t yet exist. Oh to be a person who nurtures and encourages the school dropout who ends up gifting an entire nation. Oh to be such a social reformer who thinks and lives beyond herself; who lives not extravagantly, but generously and expansively. 

Today, I am inspired.