Jeff and Rebecca gather around the hearth to discuss Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel about girlhood, family, ambition, and what it means to live a good life. They talk about why Alcott was reluctant to write a “girls’ book,” Little Women's unique combination of moral instruction and domestic realism, and how the March sisters each model a different way of being a woman in a world with narrow choices. Along the way, they explore why Little Women was long dismissed as minor literature, how it became one of the foundational texts of American womanhood, the book’s complicated relationship to marriage, class, and gender, and why Jo March remains a lodestar for readers more than 150 years later.

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