Little Women has been one of the most widely read novels, noted by Stern from a 1927 report in The New York Times and cited in Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays.[58] Ruth MacDonald argued that "Louisa May Alcott stands as one of the great American practitioners of the girls' novel and the family story".[59]
In the 1860s, gendered separation of children's fiction was a newer division in literature. This division signaled a beginning of polarization of gender roles as social constructs "as class stratification increased".[20]: 18 Joy Kasson wrote, "Alcott chronicled the coming of age of young girls, their struggles with issues such as selfishness and generosity, the nature of individual integrity, and, above all, the question of their place in the world around them."[60] Girls related to the March sisters in Little Women, along with following the lead of their heroines, by assimilating aspects of the story into their own lives.[20]: 22
After reading Little Women, some women felt the need to "acquire new and more public identities", however dependent on other factors such as financial resources.[20]: 55 While Little Women showed the regular lives of American middle-class girls, it also "legitimized" their dreams to do something different and allowed them to consider the possibilities.[20]: 36 More young women started writing stories that had adventurous plots and "stories of individual achievement—traditionally coded male—challenged women's socialization into domesticity".[20]: 55 Little Women also influenced contemporary European immigrants to the United States who wanted to assimilate into the middle-class culture.
In the pages of Little Women, young and adolescent girls read the normalization of ambitious women. This provided an alternative to the previously normalized gender roles.[20]: 35 Little Women repeatedly reinforced the importance of "individuality" and "female vocation".[20]: 26 Little Women had "continued relevance of its subject" and "its longevity points as well to surprising continuities in gender norms from the 1860s at least through the 1960s".[20]: 35 Those interested in domestic reform could look to the pages of Little Women to see how a "democratic household" would operate.[7]: 276
While "Alcott never questioned the value of domesticity", she challenged the social constructs that made spinsters obscure and fringe members of society solely because they were not married.[7]: 193 "Little Women indisputably enlarges the myth of American womanhood by insisting that the home and the women's sphere cherish individuality and thus produce young adults who can make their way in the world while preserving a critical distance from its social arrangements." As with all youth, the March girls had to grow up. These sisters, and in particular Jo, were apprehensive about adulthood because they were afraid that, by conforming to what society wanted, they would lose their special individuality.[7]: 199
Alcott's Jo also made professional writing imaginable for generations of women. Writers as diverse as Maxine Hong Kingston, Margaret Atwood, and J.K. Rowling have noted the influence of Jo March on their artistic development. Even other fictional portraits of young women aspiring to authorship often reference Jo March.[61]
Alcott’s novel is often celebrated for Jo and her narrative arch in which she becomes a self-determined woman with a career. However, framing this novel as a success solely for Jo’s accomplishments portrays it as a “traditional ‘lone genius’ patriarchal narrative” in which only women who are “categorized as ‘exceptional’ or particularly ‘worthy’” are celebrated.[62] Little Women awards all its women worth despite their status as conventional or unconventional—not just Jo, who is the obvious exception to societal expectation. Alcott’s novel celebrates the agency of women, the four sisters and their mother, to choose their path in life. Meg makes the decision to marry and have children and though it is the traditional pathway, she makes the choice for her own happiness. Thus, reducing Alcott’s novel to just Jo’s experience as an exception promotes it as a patriarchal narrative and erases her careful work to portray a matriarchal narrative rich with female agency and voice.
Alcott "made women's rights integral to her stories, and above all to Little Women".[7]: 193 Alcott's fiction became her "most important feminist contribution"—even considering all the effort Alcott made to help facilitate women's rights".[7]: 193 She thought that "a democratic household could evolve into a feminist society". In Little Women, she imagined that just such an evolution might begin with Plumfield, a nineteenth-century feminist utopia.[7]: 194
Little Women has a timeless resonance which reflects Alcott's grasp of her historical framework in the 1860s. The novel's ideas do not intrude themselves upon the reader because the author is wholly in control of the implications of her imaginative structure. Sexual equality is the salvation of marriage and the family; democratic relationships make happy endings. This is the unifying imaginative frame of Little Women.[7]: 276
