the high point of my childhood was getting picked to play third base, which I did with more zeal than skill—I think my lifetime batting average was .078.) If I had anxieties about school, love, or friendship, not to mention my temper, vanity, or the terrifying ballooning of my breasts when I turned thirteen, no one around me cared.
My parents lived five miles outside the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and the hours I didn’t spend in school were at home, cleaning the house, doing dishes, acting as de facto nanny for my youngest brothers. Every Saturday, from the time I was seven until I left home, I did a baking for my father and brothers. My brothers were allowed to borrow the family car but I was a girl; I belonged at home. As a result, I grew up in an isolated world, one where I longed both for the intimacy of a lover, and the intimacy of a friend. The March sisters, with their Pickwick club, their nature walks, their attentive mother, had a life that I envied, and idealized.
Little Women also presented me with something less positive: a seduction into womanly self-denial. Among the novel’s subtexts is the notion that women have, or ought to have, a self-sacrificing nature, that they should subdue their ambitions to domestic responsibilities. Beth is depicted as a household saint, the embodiment of this negative ideal; one might say that’s what kills her.
Jo, who is a projection of Alcott herself and has the novel’s leading voice, exemplifies that self-sacrifice in a more subtle fashion. Jo is a writer. At the end of Part II, she is married, with two sons, running a boarding school for boys in Aunt March’s old mansion.
She and her sisters are discussing the dreams of being artists they had had in adolescence, and Jo says, “The life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now. I haven’t given up the hope that I can write a good book yet, but I can wait . . . .” Amy, who paints and sculpts, responds that she still longs to create great original work, despite the importance of her domestic duties.
The conflict both sisters express was present in Alcott’s life, in a deeper, more tormented form: her writing supported her family, including her father, who was aloof from such commonplace activities as making money. While in one sense Alcott fulfilled the artistic life Jo only aspired to, her artistry in a perverse way was a further enthrallment to domesticity. Her very words, that is, her inner-most self, were sacrificed to meet the needs of her family.
There’s no evidence that Lizzie, the sister on whom Beth was modeled, was a domestic saint. Unlike the other three Alcott sisters, however, she did stay home, and she did die young, probably of anorexia exacerbated by an addiction to laudanum. (Anorexia was often praised by Victorian writers as the ultimate sign of a womanly self-denying nature.)
I was drawn in an uneasy way both to Jo, and to Beth. I’ve never met another lover of Little Women who admired Beth, but given the circumstances in which I lived, it was perhaps not surprising that I was attracted by an ideal of self-immolation. I was an angry, restless adolescent, wanting what I was told I couldn’t have, but I also kept trying to lose my sense of self in high ideals of service.
The larger society in which I came of age didn’t offer much in the way of a competing vision for girls. In Kansas during the fifties, in a society where everyone had a defined place, where everyone knew right from wrong, and what happened when you forgot, girls often saw limited horizons in their future.
I grew up in a world where white, Republican, Protestant male decision makers (“deciders,” as we have recently learned to call them) were so much the norm that any questioning of this standard produced an aggressive reaction. Nowhere in the country, not even in Berkeley or Madison, was the reaction to the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement, or the anti-war movement as violent as it was in my home town.
For a fifteen-month span in 1970–71, there was a fire-bombing every day, often more than one. Student protestors set off some of these bombs; Minutemen and other right-wing groups carried out other attacks. The Minutemen were one of the earliest of the armed militias which are now widespread throughout America, particularly in rural states (Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, had trained with a right-wing militia in rural Michigan). In 1970, the Minutemen tried to capitalize on student unrest in Lawrence by creating an atmosphere of fear great enough for the town to welcome an authoritarian government. To the town’s credit, this did not happen, but the discovery that prominent local citizens were behind some of the attacks did cause the police to investigate rather charily.
I had left Lawrence for Chicago by then, so I don’t know how widely or deeply the anti-war, pro Civil Rights movements altered institutions at the grassroots level. When I was in school, we had mandatory daily Protestant prayers. Every Easter, the high school held a religious revival in the school auditorium; again, attendance was compulsory. In 1964, when a handful of brazen protestors (which included me, three Catholic girls, and one boy) claimed First Amendment protection against attendance, we were locked in a small room next to the principal’s office during the revival service. What they would have done in event of a fire, I don’t know—maybe rejoiced in the destruction of the heathen.
My school barred black students from college-track courses, while the town made sure they couldn’t swim in the public pools. Realtors followed unwritten zoning proscriptions, consigning blacks and Jews to parts of town where houses often had dirt floors and no running water. My parents opted out of this world by buying an old farmhouse outside town, but they also became active campaigners for open housing.
The sexual politics of the fifties meant that abortion was a crime, and unmarried women had no access to contraception. Still, we were brought up to think that only bad girls had sex outside marriage—whereupon they reaped the inevitable punishment of pregnancy. Today, it is alarming to see that the triumphant religious right is proving very successful in returning us to that era.
My family was not unique in seeing my future as limited. What was unusual was the isolation and constraint in which I grew up. My parents were highly educated, and highly literate. Education and devotion to the written word were perhaps their highest values. My father, who was a research scientist, could read Greek, as well as German and Yiddish, and my mother was deeply and widely read in fiction and history.
But while they borrowed money to send my brothers to expensive schools far from home, they told me that if I wanted a college education, it would be at my own expense, and, further, that they would not permit me to leave Kansas. I was a National Merit scholar, but they had so inculcated in me my low self-valuation that I acquiesced in both strictures. When I finally started graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1968, my father told me not to be surprised if I failed, since it was a first-rate school and mine was a second-rate mind. There are still days when that criticism starts to sink me, and I lack the energy to rise above it.
My parents probably needed a kind of nurturing that neither had received as children. My grandmothers were essentially orphans: my mother’s mother died giving birth to her, my father’s was sent to New York from eastern Europe after her own father was murdered in a pogrom when she was twelve. She became a mother at fifteen, and raised her children far from any support network—indeed, she never saw her own mother or most of her siblings again; they perished in the Holocaust.
These two women, my grandmothers, stumbled through maternity as best they could, but my parents went into family life without having much to give each other, let alone their five children. I’ve thought in my own later adulthood that my father and mother both wanted a mother so desperately that they tried to make me assume that role in their lives. When my mother used to visit me in Chicago, she would sit in the car, calling to me, “Pick me up, carry me inside; I’m just a helpless little girl.”
In the larger world, they actively worked for social justice—my father brought Asian and African-American graduate students to his department at the University of Kansas in those segregated times; my mother supported the city’s first African-American school teacher in his quest for decent housing.
Inside the home, my parents were insatiably needy, both too much to help each other. Their early years together were filled with witty conversation, dinners with interesting visitors from around the world. Later, sadly, drunkenness, blind rages, squalor, and worse horrors began to replace shared story telling, sports, jokes, and candle-lit