It can't, of course, be true, and wasn't, that all or even most slaves and women rebelled openly, let alone successfully, against the legal and social limitations put upon them. Moreover, resistance takes a variety of forms, not all of them straightforward, some of them not even conscious. Strength, too, has more than one face. Today's feminism understandably disparages Marmee's kind of power, but that doesn't change the fact that it existed. For writers to impose twentiethcentury formula feminism on narratives set in the 1860s only ensures that their readers will not learn what readers of Little Women learn about the structures and strategies of nineteenth-century society.
Formulas deny the complexity of human experience and often the reality of it as well.
Most people are, by definition, not exceptional. Such stories suggest that people of another time either did understand or should have understood the world as we do now, an outlook that quickly devolves into the belief that people are the same everywhere and in every time, draining human history of its nuance and variety. But people of the past were not just us in odd clothing. Even if human nature is much the same over time, human experience, perhaps especially everyday experience, is not. To wash these differences out of historical fictions is not only a denial of historical truth, but a failure of imagination and understanding that is as important to the present as to the past.