How Jo March Became a Girlboss
By: Madeline Leung Coleman
Tags: Movies, Little Women, Greta Gerwig, Feminism, Books

If you want to take stock of where the last decade of mainstream feminist discourse has hit a snag, Gerwig’s film is a good place to start. If every generation gets the Little Women it deserves, it makes sense that 2019’s feels like it was created by an algorithm. It’s an unrisky chunk of lovely suggested content, sprung from prior consumption of Atlantic think pieces, Mormon Instagram moms, “cool bride” content, and a membership to The Wing. In the New England the Marches inhabit, memories of the sisters’ past take place only at golden hour; the movie’s lighting is 80% strawberry blonde, and so are 80% of the March women. There are flower crowns and whirling skirts and anachronism galore. Gerwig has the characters deliver expository speeches on the state of women’s property rights in 19th-century America, saying things like, “I suppose marriage has always been an economic proposition, even in fiction.”

The Jo played by Saoirse Ronan is the Jo of a post-Lean In America: a spunky, white heroine with incredible hair whose self-actualization takes place at the negotiating table as she lobbies her publisher for a higher cut of her royalties. Her loss of a sister is what finally allows for her pivot to memoir; she puts aside the unfeminine genre fiction she’d been writing before in favor of milking her own experiences. Of course, this book about her family is what finally makes Jo a success. (In a departure from Alcott’s telling, Gerwig also titles Jo’s book Little Women.) Jo finds love with a hot young professor who encourages her to write from the heart, and she uses an inheritance to open a school. In the last moments of the movie, the happy author and benefactress sashays through her spacious home wearing a linen sack dress and carrying a layer cake, as her husband, pupils, sisters, and mother gambol about on the lawn. Turns out there is at least one woman who can have it all.

This Jo March lends herself well to the idea that, for ambitious women, work should be braided into your identity, and financial success is a sign of your commitment.

Little Women has been adapted so many times — this is its sixth time on the big screen — that faithfulness to the original book seems almost beside the point. Alcott was writing what she could sell to her publisher, Jo’s marriage included; we know that she wanted Jo to end up as a “literary spinster” like herself. Past directors, including Gillian Armstrong in 1994 and George Cukor in 1933, made films that left Jo’s marriage intact, and so does Gerwig. Cannily, though, Gerwig upends the chronology and pulls liberally from Alcott’s own letters and life — which are much saucier than what Alcott wrote in the novel — in order to pull the Marches a little closer to the present. Gerwig’s interpretation of Jo shows how palatable this character remains, and how bad we are at imagining anything more radical.

Alcott was urged to write the original Little Women by a Boston publisher who wanted something he could market directly to little girls. Alcott had been writing all her life, and occasionally getting paid for it since her teens, selling splashy short stories to magazines like the Atlantic and various illustrated journals. She was reluctant to refocus on a genre that she’d later call “moral pap for the young.” (“Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,” she famously wrote in her journal at the time.) But she agreed to give it a try, fictionalized her own childhood, and turned out an unexpected hit. Little Women sold so well that Alcott — who was supporting her family, plagued by her parents’ debt — felt she had no choice but to keep churning out more.

Alcott never considered the book her masterpiece; many scholars agree that she didn’t really care about it at all, aside from the money it made. She was blunt in a response she sent to a young fan in 1878: “Little Women was written when I was ill, & to prove that I could not write books for girls. The publisher thought it flat, so did I, & neither hoped much for or from it. We found out our mistake, & since then, though I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well.” Alcott was politically engaged and incredibly prolific — publishing two dozen novels and over 300 stories during her lifetime — but these “moral tales” are her legacy. Shortly before she died in 1888, she wrote to a reporter, “I yet hope to write a few of the novels which have been simmering in my brain while necessity & unexpected success have confined me to juvenile literature.”

It’s been 150 years since Alcott completed Little Women, and every new adaptation has renewed the debate over what it’s supposed to mean to us now. (Two separate reviews published two decades apart — one by Stephanie Harrington in the 1970s, and one by Mary Gaitskill in the ’90s — were titled “Does ‘Little Women’ Belittle Women?”) Now, in a twist Alcott never could’ve predicted, Gerwig finds in Jo a perfect vessel for our times. Jo lends herself well to the idea that, for ambitious women, work should be braided into your identity, and financial success is a sign of your commitment. This view of the working woman is not about recognizing her labor; it’s about elevating her hustle. (And, if you’re doing it right, beauty surely won’t be far behind.) To that end, Gerwig spins Alcott’s most famous commercial compromise into a parable about a hungry young creative — and retroactively assigns that opinion to the author herself. Even the Alcott quote used as the movie’s epigraph seems to take this view: “I’ve had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.” Given the patness of the story to follow, this feels almost like an excuse for not pushing things further. (Alcott’s unspoken addendum: “So I could pay the damn rent.”)

The trick of Little Women — the secret of its studio-executive appeal — is that it may have been written for girls, but feminist upheaval is not in its DNA.

Jo has always been most loved by girls who long to write; she’s just one example of a long-standing tradition, in which writers put more energy into the depiction of writers, going out of our way to foreground our own “special” lives. The Jo of Gerwig’s imagining also feels like the direct product of a decade during which a certain kind of feminist media claimed space in (white, liberal) America. The 2010s started with Hanna Rosin’s infamous essay of white-feminist hubris, “The End of Men,” gave runway to outlets like Jezebel, the Hairpin, Feministing, Rookie, and the Cut, and bumped along on the book sales of Sophia Amoruso and Sheryl Sandberg and Sally Rooney and Jia Tolentino, with a brief, violent bout of Ferrante fever along the way.

These writers don’t all agree with one another, but they brought the concerns of the lightly woke, coastal, content-creator woman to the fore. (And, as has been pointed out, the final accounting tends to leave out queer perspectives and those of women of color.) In a recent article about The Wing — a chain of co-working spaces that is the physical embodiment of this line of thinking — the writer Linda Kinstler quotes a professor at the London School of Economics on the enterprise’s politics: “They’re empowering women to be better economic subjects within capitalism, empowering women to network, to get a raise, to address the pay gap. Those are real things, but they are really tied to capitalist logic.”

In both her acting and directing choices, Gerwig has made a career by plumbing the depths of the white, middle-class, straight woman. The work of black and queer writers may have been crucial to this decade, but you won’t see that reflected in Gerwig’s work; from her role in Frances Ha (2012) to her directorial debut Lady Bird (2017), Gerwig channels a specific kind of white-girl-next-door angst. The characters she writes want more than anything to be somebody. In a recent profile of the actor and director in Vogue, Gerwig herself is posited as a kind of modern-day Jo: just as decades of readers have taken inspiration from Alcott’s creation, Chloe Malle writes, “a generation of wide-eyed, post-collegiate women found in Gerwig a similarly powerful avatar.” Gerwig tells Malle how much she identified with Jo growing up, and how important it was for the character to be seen holding her own book at the end of the movie. “I had the idea that if I could make Jo publishing a book at the end the thing you didn’t know you needed to see, it would be the way you want people to end up together in a movie.”

There’s no denying that women writers and filmmakers still tend to be underappreciated; it’s an unhappy part of the landscape we live in. When Gerwig was nominated for a best director Oscar for Lady Bird, she became only the fifth woman ever to receive the distinction. She was thought to be a shoo-in for this year’s Golden Globes — but when nominations were released earlier this month, not a single woman was nominated for best director. Similarly, women authors get fewer reviews; their books are even priced lower. Predictably, the situation’s even bleaker for women writers of color. Did Gerwig temper her vision, just like Alcott before her? Was there a version of her Little Women that was braver than this? If so, the time for that kind of hedging has passed. We know what happens to the moderate woman candidate.

The trick of Little Women — the secret of its studio-executive appeal — is that it may have been written for girls, but feminist upheaval is not in its DNA. Literal sisterhood does not solidarity make, and that kept the book, and Jo’s passions, safe for its times and ours. In its misguided loyalty to a 19th-century character arc, Gerwig’s update is built on a conservative core, but pats itself on the back for saying women have brains. The film’s vision of what it means to succeed is a deeply individualistic and ultimately obedient one: Jo gets her book, along with her husband, her money, and her domestic bliss. It’s all a treading of water, a celebration of an unradical norm. In other words, Gerwig’s Little Women is what’s usually called “a triumph.”