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“WANTING TO BE RORY, BUT BETTER”

Little Women and Girls’ Stories Today

WHEN I GAVE my daughter Little Women on her eleventh birthday, I wondered if it would matter to her as it had to so many girls before her. Did her generation still need Jo and the other March sisters as models and guides? They were being told they could accomplish anything they set their minds to. Girl power seemed to be all the rage. Meanwhile, however, girls were telling journalists and researchers that they endure persistent sexist comments from boys at school but don’t want to say anything for fear of being labeled “feminist” or “bitchy.” And they try not to appear too smart or assertive for fear of alienating boys. As they mature, they learn to attract boys by walking the line between being sexy and being taken for a whore.¹ It would seem that Alcott’s fable of growing up female hasn’t grown less relevant after all. Jo’s example as a nonconformist is as vital as ever.

Little Women isn’t exactly on girls’ radars, though. A survey in the U.K. in 2003 indicated that only 3 percent of children had read the novel and that 66 percent had never even heard of it. But when adults are surveyed, Little Women still ranks highly. That same year, the BBC’s Big Read ranked Little Women at number 18 among British readers’ most-loved novels—not just children’s novels. In 2007 it was at 11 overall (and number 7 among women) in a list of the “favourite books,” and in 2014 the Guardian placed it at number 20 on a list of the hundred best novels in English. In the United States, a Harris Poll in 2014 put Little Women at number 8 among Americans’ “favorite book[s] of all time” and in 2016 at number 9 on a list of Americans’ favorite books from childhood. Yet, when kids themselves are asked what they are reading, Little Women doesn’t even register.²

INSTEAD OF GROWING up with Jo March, girls are growing up with a host of new literary heroines who are clearly descended from her. Before the age of ten, girls encounter an awful lot of princesses, most of them created by Disney. Fortunately, they are not nearly as passive and insipid as those my generation grew up with. Belle from Beauty and the Beast, created in 1991, was the first Disney princess who did not simply wait around for the prince to come and rescue her. She had her own interests (especially books), rejected a persistent suitor, and tried to rescue her father. Then, of course, she fell in love with the Beast, who turns out to be a handsome prince, but Belle was still a revelation. Her creator, the screenwriter Linda Woolverton, has explained that Jo March was her inspiration for Belle—or, more precisely, Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of her.³ Subsequent princesses got increasingly bold and unconventional until finally a prince was unnecessary. In 2013’s Frozen, the first Disney film directed by a woman, the prince turns out to be the villain, and it is sisterly love, not “true love’s kiss,” that is magical. Elsa’s anthem of liberation, “Let It Go,” became not only a girl-power anthem but also a rallying cry for young feminists and LGBT teens.⁴ Although ostensibly about Elsa’s inability to continue hiding her fearful power of freezing everything she touches, the song is really about growing up, breaking away from authority, and accepting yourself.

There are also plenty of spunky heroines in picture and chapter books, if you look for them. But what happens when girls start choosing their own books to read, say in the middle-school years from ages eleven to thirteen? By that point, girls are choosing a lot of fantasy and dystopian literature, particularly Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, two of the best-selling series in recent years, which also happen to feature direct descendants of Jo March. J. K. Rowling, who, as I mentioned earlier, has identified Jo March as her favorite literary heroine, created a bookish heroine to stand alongside her titular hero. Hermione, who is admired for her smarts, not her looks, uses her brains to rescue the wizarding world from evil—not just her family from poverty, as Jo does. And Hermione’s untamed locks are as potent a symbol of her unconventionality as Jo’s chopped mane.

Katniss Everdeen bears an even closer resemblance to Alcott’s creation. Like Jo, she is primarily concerned with providing for her family in her father’s absence and especially looks out for a younger sister who needs her protection. She also has a close male friend, Gale, whom she thinks of as a brother but who wants to be more than friends. It’s also interesting that romance is imposed on Katniss as it was on Jo. In The Hunger Games it is the expectations of the fictional audience in the text that force her to pretend to be Peeta’s girlfriend, whereas in Little Women it was the book’s actual audience demanding that Jo fall in love. In both texts, we also see the tomboy heroines make the uneasy transformation into wives and mothers. It’s just as jarring to see Katniss as a mom at the end of the series as it is to meet Mrs. Jo in Little Men. Whether or not Suzanne Collins felt she had to marry off Katniss, it is true that fans were as obsessed with who Katniss would choose (Gale or Peeta) as Alcott’s fans were about who the March sisters would marry. Before the final novel of the trilogy was published, fans joined “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale,” and today there are numerous online quizzes you can take to see which team you are on. In the end, Katniss didn’t pick her close friend but instead the more steadying influence, Peeta. Not everyone has been happy with her decision. Sounds familiar.

Hermione, played in the Harry Potter films by Emma Watson, is one of the bookish, unconventional descendants of Jo March. (RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

The character of Katniss from The Hunger Games, played in the films by Jennifer Lawrence, bears many similarities to Jo March.
(RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Perhaps it is Jo’s likeness to her more popular successors that has kept her alive in readers’ minds. In a poll for World Book Day in 2016, respondents chose as their favorite heroes or heroines Hermione at number 3, Jo at number 6, and Katniss at number 7.⁵ (Two other Jo descendants, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables and Matilda Wormwood of Matilda, were also in the top 10.) Nonetheless, a book like Little Women is facing an uphill battle with most young readers today, who struggle with its old-fashioned language and style. The slang of one era, however fresh it was at the time, may not translate well to another. The book’s language is much less formal than that found in most nineteenth-century novels, though.

An even greater drawback is the novel’s supposed preachiness, the death knell for any work hoping to gain the attention of young readers. As a friend’s daughter told her, after reading Little Women on her mother’s recommendation, “I don’t like books that tell me who I should be and what I should do.” Lessons have hardly been banished from children’s and young adult literature, however. (My personal favorite is when Harry Potter is racked with fear that he will become like Voldemort until Dumbledore teaches him that it’s not destiny but the choices he makes that will define him.) Ultimately, I don’t think the lessons Marmee teaches her daughters are the problem—things like it’s better to marry for love and respect than for money, home is happier when everyone chips in rather than living for themselves, and everyone is better off when both parents participate in raising the children. The problem seems to be that it’s the mom who is doing the teaching. Moms of tween girls are quite familiar with the eye roll directed at them whenever they try to provide advice. Today’s girls are giving Marmee one big eye roll.

The main obstacle to Little Women’s continued popularity, though, is that young readers are interested in a fundamentally different kind of literature. Girls want adventure, not domestic drama, and they are much more interested in fantasy than realism. I learned this from my own daughter and her friends as well as the girls I visited with at the Louise S. McGehee School in New Orleans, an independent school for girls training to be future leaders. The seventh graders I met with were a diverse and well-off group of articulate and well-read girls. Although a number of hands went up when I asked who had read Little Women, only two had read the book all the way through. The others said they had started it but not finished. “Nothing much seems to happen,” one girl said. “There’s no story,” another chimed in. “It just seems like real life.” Young readers are used to getting sucked into a story, something today’s authors are very good at doing. Most of the girls who had not finished the book admitted that they had given up after only two chapters. Many more never picked it up at all, despite receiving the book as a present or hearing about it from their teachers, because it looked too long. When I told them that it’s still published in two volumes in the U.K., they said, “Oh, it should be here too. Maybe then I’d read it.”

Most of what the girls at McGehee and elsewhere seem to be reading for pleasure are dystopian, paranormal, and fantasy books that feature girls with magical powers or special gifts—girls as witches, warrior princesses, or hunters. They were interested in extraordinary girls and adventure plots, in which girls are put into extreme circumstances, fighting for their family’s survival or trying to save the world. Romance was still a draw, though. Girls want it all in their stories: romance and quest plots. Often they are intertwined, as in Veronica Roth’s popular Divergent series. Sometimes, though, girls are more interested in the romance. The Fault in Our Stars and Twilight both came up in our discussion. Their teacher told me later that in recent years her girls had all been reading a trilogy by Jenny Han that began with The Summer I Turned Pretty. “That’s more or less what it’s about,” she told me, horrified that they were drawn to such vapid stories. The heroine, whose name is Belly (short for Isabel), is just shy of sixteen and beginning to realize that she is pretty. She is enjoying her new power and the way the boys look at her. Belly is much more Amy than Jo. The book centers on her summer at the beach with the boys she has known since childhood, one of whom she has always had a crush on. But now they see her differently and, well, you can imagine the rest. Perhaps I’m not being entirely fair. One reviewer online, a mother, described it as a pretty realistic book about the awkward age for girls: “[Belly] feels a nearly constant conflict between wanting to grow up and be a little reckless, and wanting to stay in her comfort zone and do what she knows is safe.” She recommended it for mother-daughter book clubs, to talk about issues like whether to drink at a party and what to do when a boy kisses you.⁶ It’s true that girls are more likely to encounter these dilemmas than, say, deciding whether to volunteer in their sister’s stead for a fight-to-the-death game broadcast on national television.

The Summer I Turned Pretty falls into the popular category of what one critic has called “chick lit jr.,” or YA novels that adapt the chick lit genre—novels by women, for women, and about women, in a contemporary, realistic setting—for a tween and teen audience. Like its older cousin, chick lit jr. garners little respect and can deal with some pretty superficial issues, such as which lipstick to wear to school, but it also takes on more serious ones, like when to lose one’s virginity. Because these novels also address growing up female in a more recognizable world than the most popular YA texts, they may be the true successors of Little Women. Books in this category include Megan Cabot’s Princess Diary series, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequels by Ann Brashares, the Gossip Girl novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, and the humorous novels by Louise Rennison. Although such novels owe a lot to Little Women (a genealogy acknowledged by Rennison, who wrote an introduction to Little Women for Puffin Classics), these novels differ from Alcott’s in the way they have erased parental role models and familial bonds. Today’s heroines look to their inexperienced peers, rather than their parents, for guidance. Perhaps as a result, these novels tend to focus on external appearance, sexual experience as a marker of womanhood, and male validation. A British reader summed up the difference in her online review of Little Women when she said that although most contemporary novels for teens were all about “how to Get The Guy,” Little Women was “really about becoming a person you can respect.”⁷

But most troubling to parents and other observers in recent years is the popularity of the so-called “mean girl” books rife with conspicuous consumption, casual sex and drug use, recreational eating disorders, and rampant teenage cruelty. The queen bee of this subgenre of chick lit jr. was the Gossip Girl series, which rose to number one on the New York Times children’s paperback bestseller list in the mid-2000s and ran to thirteen books in all. These were also the most popular books at McGehee in recent years, I was told. Although ostensibly for readers fourteen and up, the Gossip Girl series also attracted much younger girls, promising them access to a world of privilege and seemingly adult behavior. The first novel begins, “Welcome to New York’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live and go to school and play and sleep—sometimes with each other. . . . We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.”⁸

Naomi Wolf identified the way this series and its imitators turned Alcott and Austen on their heads by promoting the idea that a girl’s value is determined solely by her wealth and beauty. Even more troubling, she noted, “These novels reproduce the dilemma [girls] experience all the time: they are expected to compete with pornography, but can still be labeled sluts.” In the series, girls are shamed when their sexual exploits become public but deemed prudish if they aren’t willing to give it up in the dressing room at Bergdorf’s. Unlike the ball scene in Little Women, where Meg’s transformation into a “doll” becomes an opportunity for her to learn what kind of woman she doesn’t want to be, these novels have nothing to say about their characters’ sexual objectification and exploitation. The series’ lack of morality is intentional, according to the author, Cecily von Ziegesar, who said in an interview, “I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don’t sweat, they tell their mothers everything.”⁹ Intentionally or not, von Ziegesar wrote an anti–Little Women (ironically, published by the same firm as Alcott’s novel—Little, Brown) and girls loved it. Fortunately, the world of literature and entertainment for girls is large, and Gossip Girl represents only one distressing corner of it.

Another popular early twenty-first-century story of girls growing up is a clearer successor to Little Women: the television series Gil­more Girls. Although the series ended in 2007, it ran in syndication for many years and was available on DVD. Then Gilmore Girls was given new life by Netflix, which began streaming the full series in 2014, igniting the nostalgia of twentysomething women eager to reflect on their adolescence when they were growing up with Rory.¹⁰

The series has some similarities with the world von Ziegesar was writing about: The main girl character, Rory, attends Chilton Prep School, where the kids, unlike her, have money and want nothing more than to be popular and get into Harvard and Yale. But Rory holds herself apart from that world as much as she can, and the main action takes place in the quaint New England town of Stars Hollow, which has more in common with the setting of Little Women than with most of twenty-first-century America. No wonder Gilmore Girls has been criticized for being “too precious.” Some critics can’t believe that “people like this exist.” In other words, the characters don’t reflect the gritty reality that television (or literature) is supposed to portray. Nonetheless, the show became, in the words of one critic, “a cultural touchstone for millions of women.”¹¹

Gilmore Girls has a lot more in common with Little Women than any of its chick lit jr. counterparts. At its heart is the relationship between Lorelai and her daughter, Rory, who are really more like sisters due to the closeness in their ages. Lorelai ran away from home when she got pregnant at sixteen and raised Rory on her own. Thus their relationship mirrors both the one between Marmee and her daughters and those between the March sisters themselves. Thirty-two-year-old Lorelai is a far cry from Marmee, however. She still has a lot of growing up to do herself. But she resembles Marmee in being a single mom who is always there for her daughter. The cozy scenes in Little Women where Marmee shares her dreams with Meg and Jo or helps Jo decide what to do about Laurie are echoed again and again in the series as Lorelai comforts and consoles Rory throughout her adolescence and young adulthood.

The mother-daughter/sister bond is at the center of the show, which is dominated by female relationships—including those Lorelai and Rory have with their best friends and with Emily Gilmore, Lorelai’s mother. These relationships sometimes turn sour, just as the March sisters’ did when Amy burned Jo’s manuscript, but they are strong at their core—unbreakable in fact—while their relationships with men come and go. The show includes plenty of male characters, but again they seem to be on the outside, always trying to get in, like Laurie looking through the Marches’ window. Even when Rory’s dad, Christopher, is around, he exists as much in the shadows as does Mr. March.

In the television series Gilmore Girls, the relationship between Lorelai and Rory, played by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, echoes that between Marmee and her daughters in Little Women. (AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

As I contemplated the legacy of Little Women and Jo March (and listened to my daughter binge-watching the Gilmore Girls in the next room), I realized that Rory is today’s Jo for many girls. While my daughter’s most all-absorbing reading experiences have been the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series, it is Rory who is helping her navigate young womanhood. The show’s creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, has described her conception of Rory in a way that echoes Alcott’s Jo. Sherman-Palladino was interested in portraying a novel type of girl on television: a girl who did not “look longingly at the group over by the soda fountain with good shoes,” who did not define herself through her relationship to boys or how popular she was, but through her interest in academics.¹² Quite simply, books matter to Rory more than boys. She wants to grow up to be a writer, specifically a journalist. Her idol is the foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour. And Rory, like Jo, is supported by her family in her aspirations, which in Rory’s case extend much farther than Jo’s ever could—all the way to Harvard, although she ends up going to Yale.

Ultimately, Rory serves a similar function to the one Jo served for generations of girls: she validates their sense of individuality, their ambition, and their difference from feminine norms. She is happy in her difference, content just to be herself. Although the actress who played Rory, Alexis Bledel, was always supremely beautiful, her character never worried much about her looks. She and her best friend obsessed over music rather than their wardrobes. They were nerds rather than “it” girls. As a result, Rory became as real to the girls who watched the show as Jo was for generations of young readers. Girls grew up with Rory, watching her navigate school politics, academic challenges, spats with her mother, and relationships with good boys and bad boys. Then they returned to the show as adults and understood it on a new level. Gilmore Girls was also an experience that mothers and daughters shared. They watched it together every week when it first aired or shared it in reruns or on DVD, just as mothers have read Little Women with their daughters or given them the book when they were at the right age.

Yet Rory is also like Jo in the way she has evoked confusion and disappointment from her fans. If Jo ends up becoming a more conventional woman in the end, Rory also seems to lose her way—but even more thoroughly, becoming more and more dolled up in cosmetics and designer clothes as the series progresses. She also becomes absorbed by the ultra-wealthy, class-conscious world of her grandparents, even joining the Daughters of the American Revolution. Worse than that, she has a major meltdown and leaves Yale when her boyfriend’s father says she doesn’t have what it takes to become a journalist. After some spectacularly poor choices, including stealing a yacht, she sucks it up and goes back to Yale to finish her degree. But our confidence in her has been shaken. As one woman who grew up with the series says about Rory, “The only way to be truly inspired by Gilmore Girls is to watch it and want to be Rory, but better.”¹³

In 2016, Netflix aired a four-episode, six-hour revival of Gilmore Girls titled A Year in the Life. The sequel picks up ten years after the series ended, and fans were dying to know how Rory’s life turned out. Sherman-Palladino and her co-writer husband had been unable to reach a contract agreement for the show’s final season, so this revival was her chance to end the series the way she had wanted to. The new finale has the same effect as the final chapter of Little Women, allowing us to jump forward into the future to see what has happened with the characters. We find a thirty-two-year-old Rory, whose career as a journalist has not panned out the way she had hoped. After some success, she has been unable to get a steady job and returns home to Stars Hollow. But as the revival approached, fans were most worked up about the question of which boyfriend—Jess or Dean, the stable one or the unpredictable one—Rory would finally end up with. (No one seems to have wanted her to reunite with the spoiled rich kid Logan, whom she dated at Yale.) Sherman-Palladino was not happy with the rampant speculation. Sounding a bit like Alcott, resenting her fans’ desire to see her characters paired off, she said, “It’s just such a small part of who Rory is. I don’t see people debating ‘What newspaper is Rory working for?’ ‘Did she win a Pulitzer yet?’ It’s all about Dean and Jess.”¹⁴

Although Little Women probably only indirectly influenced the original Gilmore Girls series, it clearly inspired aspects of the finale, which references the novel as well as Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film. Like Jo, Rory is struggling to make it as a writer, producing what the market wants, until a male friend playing the role of mentor comes along and gives her writing advice. Jess, echoing Professor Bhaer, tells Rory to write what she knows and what only she can write, so Rory decides to write a book about her life growing up with her mom. And like Jo, Rory is motivated to write from her heart after the death of a loved one, here her grandfather. As Rory thinks back over her life, she sees and hears flashbacks from her life (and from the earlier series) just as Winona Ryder’s Jo does near the end of Armstrong’s film. Rory calls her book The Gilmore Girls, but Lorelai suggests she drop the article, aligning it with the title of the series, just as in Armstrong’s film Jo writes the book Little Women.¹⁵

The ending of A Year in the Life also brings the series full circle when Rory becomes pregnant—ostensibly by Logan, whom she has been seeing on and off even though he is engaged to someone else—and apparently decides to raise the child on her own, as her mother had done with her. Meanwhile, Jess hovers around the edges. In his last shot, we see him looking through the window at Rory, just as Laurie stood on the outside looking in at the Marches. Although there is no mention of Jess and Rory getting back together, the possibility is suggested. Previously, Rory had run up to Jess to show him the manuscript of her book-in-progress, suggesting that he could be involved in its publication, as Bhaer was in the publication of Jo’s book in Armstrong’s film. But that is where Sherman-Palladino leaves things. Unlike Alcott, she did not feel compelled to marry off Rory in the end.

What has troubled most viewers, however, is that the show seems to finalize the death of Rory’s dreams for a career in journalism by making her pregnant. The new finale causes the same conflicted feelings about Rory’s life choices that readers have long had about Jo’s—although Jo has more of a choice, whereas Rory is almost a victim of fate. Throughout the series, fans were disappointed when Rory chose boys over her own pursuits and relieved when, in the 2007 finale (not written by Sherman-Palladino), she rejected Logan’s offer of marriage and headed out on her own to start her first job as a reporter. She seemed destined to become the world-traveling journalist she always wanted to be. She even met Amanpour in that final episode. Now, it seems, that wasn’t how Rory’s life was supposed to end up after all. It was supposed to be derailed, as her mother’s was, by a baby. It’s worth noting that Rory never mentioned a desire for children; nor do we learn how she feels about her unplanned pregnancy after the finale’s closing words. The message seems to be that whatever a girl/woman’s dreams, her body is still her destiny, that ambition is at odds with a woman’s relationships. The two can’t coexist.

The extensive discussion online of where Rory ends up was every bit as urgent and complex as the endless analyses of Jo March have been—as if these characters’ plots are more than just stories. Rory appears destined to settle down into a life very much like her mother’s, and this outcome is just as disappointing for many as when Jo got married and had kids. However, Jo’s companionate marriage and chance to run a school are an advance on her mother’s life. Nearly 150 years later, in Gilmore Girls, Rory got the education her mother didn’t, but it wasn’t clear whether Rory’s life would be much different from her mother’s, which was Lorelai’s hope for her all along.

Today’s girls’ stories may show us that Jo has lived on, but her sisters have been largely forgotten. The new Jos tend to stand out as exceptional characters, different from and largely apart from other girls. What Little Women did so well was to show readers there was not one way to be a girl or to grow into womanhood, but many ways. One notable successor to Alcott’s usage of the ensemble cast is HBO’s Girls, inspired by another four-girlfriend hit, Sex and the City. Hailed by many as a groundbreaking look at the messy realities of young women’s lives today, Girls is decidedly for mature audiences only, but it has some interesting resonances with Alcott’s novel. As Chiara Atik (author of a play called Women, billed as a mash-up of Little Women and Girls) has argued, they “share the same plot, give or take a sex scene or two; they both tell the story of four girls trying (to varying degrees of success) to grow up. . . . The characters of the show are analagous in a way that suggests these four girls—the writer, the responsible one, the sweet one, and the wild child—are time-honored archetypes for American women, rather than products of their creator’s imagination. Or maybe American society and American girlhood just haven’t changed that much in the past 150 years.” Lena Dunham, the show’s creator, has indicated that the parallels are intended. As another writer pointed out, however, the two creations diverge in one important way: Alcott’s little women grow up while Dunham’s girls don’t, as their titles alone suggest.¹⁶ Over six seasons, the four friends struggle to find and keep jobs, get published (in Hannah’s case), and have healthy relationships with men, but they don’t make much progress on the path to adulthood. Taking a rather adolescent view, they seem eager to prove they are grown up simply by being sexually adventurous. Emotional depth and stability, not to mention character development, remain frustratingly out of reach. If nothing else, Girls suggests that maturity is harder than ever for young women to attain and define.

The HBO series Girls, starring Lena Dunham, is an obvious successor to Little Women, although the young women in the series do much less growing up than the March sisters. (AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

When Girls came to an end in 2017 after six seasons, audiences wondered if Hannah and her friends would finally grow up. By the end, two of the girls had married and already been divorced, one had been through rehab for drug addiction, one had gotten engaged, and Hannah had given birth and gotten a job teaching writing. The final episode shows her struggling to be a mom, finding it excruciatingly difficult to bond with her newborn son, who is having trouble breastfeeding. After running off into the woods, where she bumps into a teen who has run away from home, Hannah begins to take on a motherly role, first with the girl, a representation of her former self, and then with her son when she returns home. She seems to have finally learned to connect selflessly with another human being.

Lena Dunham’s series and Little Women tackled the hardest part of girls’ stories to tell: leaving girlhood behind and becoming an adult. While the advent of womanhood may be marked differently today, perhaps by moving away from home and starting a career (and too often simply by being sexually active), it would seem that becoming a mother remains the primary marker of womanhood. Rory and Hannah may be staking out new territory from their predecessor Jo March by becoming single mothers, but the message is still clear: you are a girl until you become a mom; only then are you a woman. As Hannah’s mom explains to her in the final episode, her child is not a temp job or another dead-end relationship with a guy. She can’t quit her son or simply delete his phone number. He is forever.

In Alcott’s day, becoming a wife was the dividing line, and motherhood was expected to follow naturally. But today’s writers, by showing girls with no interest in marriage who become moms on their own, are also making independence from men a key component of women’s maturation. Rory and Hannah are both ultimately connected to their mothers and to a close friend, but not to men. The companionate marriages that Alcott envisioned for her little women remain out of reach for today’s fictional heroines.

Girls further deviates from Little Women in its portrayal of female friendship. Whereas in Alcott’s universe the relationships between women are central and the sisterly bond eclipses all others, in Dunham’s the friends sleep with each other’s boyfriends and in various ways find it impossible to overcome their self-centeredness. The one who seems to have matured the most cuts her ties with the other three, leaving the toxic friendships behind, while the other three remain unable to support each other apart from their own self-interest.

AS GIRLS GRAVITATE to more contemporary fare and away from Little Women, they are missing a lot. Today’s successors to Little Women seem to have overlooked two of the most important themes of Alcott’s classic: companionate marriage and sisterhood. And many of them are missing the central premise altogether, namely that growing up means becoming a better person, one who can balance her own needs and desires with those of the people she loves.

The trend toward fantasy literature can also make it harder for girls to see their future selves in today’s heroines. Hermione’s braininess helps Harry Potter defeat the Dark Lord, but at the end of the series, it’s not clear where she is headed. In Rowling’s conclusion, which flashes forward nineteen years, she reveals only that Hermione has married Ron and had two children. Writers of the Rowling-approved sequel, the play The Cursed Child (2016), had an opportunity to flesh out the adult Hermione, and—to no one’s surprise—made her Minister of Magic. Typically, however, the adventures that fantasy heroines undertake are portrayed as an interlude before real life begins. Once the world is saved or the evil force is vanquished, the book ends.

When it comes to Alcott’s message of girls realizing their potential beyond their looks, contemporary culture still has a lot of catching up to do. Despite the models of Hermione, Katniss, and Rory, girls remain overwhelmed with demeaning images of women. A teacher at McGehee told me that young women today need Little Women more than ever, as a counter to the images of womanhood that bombard them. As one concerned mom has vividly written, “Between mean girls and predatory boys, texting and sexting, and mass media that celebrate Miley Cyrus twerking and Kim Kardashian’s generous booty, it’s hard to help a teenage girl focus on what really matters—like her brain, strength, passion, and conviction; her rights as a human and as a citizen of this country.” In response, she has tried to surround her daughter with strong female role models. While her daughter’s English teachers have assigned primarily texts about boys, and her daughter’s own pleasure reading has tended toward Gossip Girl and its ilk, this mother has encouraged her daughter to read Little Women, Jane Eyre, The Color Purple, and Jane Austen’s novels.¹⁷ Providing our daughters with an alternative canon of female-centered stories can help ensure that they don’t, like so many of my students, get to college or graduate school and wonder why they have read so little about girls’ and women’s experiences.

What makes Little Women, in particular, such powerful reading? It unearths the tensions between family and self, sisterhood and separation, growing up and failing to find one’s way. As today’s stories show us, these themes remain highly relevant. Atik is right that girlhood hasn’t really changed all that much over the past century and a half. However, Alcott’s classic pointed the way not only toward girls’ future selves but also toward the future relationships they could have with men and with each other. She imagined her characters moving into a mature womanhood that achieves self-fulfillment as well as shared joys and responsibilities, a storyline today’s little women desperately need. Until girls’ stories are truly able to follow the lead of Little Women, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy will continue to live and challenge us to consider the many different ways girls can become women.