28 Little Women With a Not so Little Impact: The Feminism Revealed in Film – Abby Page

Little Women With a Not so Little Impact: The Feminism Revealed in Film

Little Women is a timeless novel with adaptations ranging in movies, silent films, operas, Broadway, animated TV series, and more. Louisa May Alcott’s novel written in 1868 is still relevant more than a century after it was published. What still has readers and viewers entranced by the world of the Marches and why is the novel still being adapted? Were the first few adaptations not enough to satisfy? Little Women shows that women’s stories deserve to be heard and that their lives are worth noting. This sentiment was not popular in the 1860s; women’s lives were overlooked, a piece of the misogynistic puzzle. The feminist themes found in Little Women are pertinent to any society where there exists an inequality between men and women. The success of an adaptation all depends on how true the adaptation sticks to the original material of the novel while adjusting its appeal to the target audience. Geoge Cukor’s 1933 adaptation was one of the first adaptations of Little Women and was written for a vastly different audience than Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation. These two films written in different decades manage the feminism found in Alcott’s novel in their own unique way. The paper will argue that both the 1933 adaptation and the 2019 adaptation exemplify the feminism found in the novel through all the female characters with minor changes to the plot according to the 1930s and 2010s.

The two films being examined are almost a century apart and both films were created many decades after the publication of Alcott’s Little Women. Historical context is a contributing factor to the product of both novels and films. Though the Civil War is briefly acknowledged in Alcott’s novel, the Civil War had a significant impact on women. The Civil War shifted the dynamic of what was expected of women. Before the war women were expected to stay at home and spend their days domestically so that the home would be a warm and inviting place for their children and husband. Women were needed during the Civil War, and it was the first time American women played an important part in a war effort. In Little Women Marmee, Meg, and Jo all have jobs outside of the house because they are needed to keep the house afloat. The Civil War changed the definition of what being a woman was and Alcott’s novel shows this.

In 1920 the 19th Amendment was passed giving women the right to vote. The 1930s created a lot more choices for women and the traditional roles of women were challenged. McCallum reflects on this change in the 1930 film industry saying, “films frequently focused on the choice between the traditional female career path (of marriage and domesticity) and nontraditional careers, financial independence, and the need to balance work and home duties” (83). This reclaiming of refeminization is seen in the 1930 adaptation of Little Women. Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 adaption is quite the opposite of Cukor’s with the post-World War II anti-feminist ideology influencing the film (McCallum 84). The film uses the same script as the 1933 film, but the camera angle and an emphasis on romance create a much less feminist-focused film. The 21st century has been full of women’s rights movements with the March for Women’s Lives in 2004, the HeForShe campaign, and most recently the Women’s March in 2017 and the MeToo movement. These movements clearly informed the 2019 adaptation which is filled with feminist motifs.

Casting is one of the most crucial elements that can make or break a film, especially a film adapted from a beloved novel. If an actor or actress does not truly embody the character they are playing, the film can fall flat. Not any actress can play Jo March, the spunky outspoken heroine, who is a blatant feminist.  This excerpt from the novel sums up Jo’s character; “Nothing more, except that I don’t believe I shall ever marry. I’m happy as I am and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man” (Alcott 588). Jo is the feminist role model for women reading the novel at the time and even today. Katharine Hepburn and Saoirse Ronan, who play Jo in their respective films, are both considered feminists of their time.

Katharine Hepburn delivers a flawless performance of Jo in the 1933 adaptation of Little Women that won her best actress in 1934 at the Venice Film Festival. Hepburn still holds the record for most Oscars for Best Actress, taking home this title four times. Katharine Hepburn made strides for women by playing the strong-willed and independent woman in films. She is a 20th-century feminist icon. Hepburn also contributed to the women’s fashion movement making trousers fashionable and acceptable. Hepburn was her mother’s daughter; her mother Katharine Houghton Hepburn was a birth control activist and suffragist who balanced being a reformer and activist while raising six children (Ware 1). Katharine Hepburn was raised by a mother who placed an emphasis on self-esteem and independence and taught her that women were not “the weaker sex” (Ware 4). Hepburn followed in her mother’s footsteps and graduated from college but instead of going into the medical field like her father, she decided to pursue the stage where there were more opportunities for both sexes.

Hepburn was the best choice to play Jo because like Jo she felt oppressed by the time period she was born, she could not have a career, children, and a husband. Jo ends up being wed even though throughout the novel Jo expresses a distaste for marriage. It is speculated that Alcott wrote in marriage because she gave in to societal pressures, but really wanted to leave Jo single and free. The novel has parallels to Alcott’s own life, as Alcott was a prolific writer who never married, and never had any children of her own. Hepburn was married briefly but was quickly divorced, believing that her options were to become the best actress she could be or to become a mother (Ware 5). Of the actresses available in the 1930s to play Jo, Hepburn was the best choice because, like Jo, she had a spirit of liberation and autonomy seen through her films, life, and through the press.

Saoirse Ronan was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards in 2019 for her spectacular performance as Jo in the 2019 adaptation of Little Women. Ronan coming from Dublin, Ireland is far from American, but she pulls off an American accent (a lot better than her costar) and has become a household name in American film. Like Hepburn, Ronan is known for playing ambitious and self-inventive women. She starred in another one of Greta Gerwig’s films called Lady Bird, which is a coming-of-age story that follows the life of an unruly teenage girl defined by her own standards. Lady Bird is the heroine of the film who refuses to be called by the name given to her by her parents and would rather be called by her self-given one. This renaming of herself establishes her independence and her reluctance to follow norms and creates a character of self-definition (De los Ríos Martín 19). The bright pinkish-orange short hair Ronan’s character sports is an outward reflection of her personality and uniqueness (De los Ríos Martín 19). Ronan has also played several other unconventional and strong women in films like Atonement (2007), Brooklyn (2015), and Mary Queen of Scots (2018). Ronan has become known for playing powerful female characters who make their own way in life according to feminist ideals. Who better to play Jo than Ronan in the 21st century, who not only plays complex female characters but chooses the roles she wants to play?

The 1933 adaptation is one of the most faithful adaptions when it comes to the dialogue and plot of Little Women. However, the beginning of the film differs from that of the novel, opening with a much more powerful image of the March family. In the novel, the girls are gathered for the evening and discuss how they wish they would be getting gifts this year and what a shame it was that they were poor now. At the beginning of chapter one, the reader gets a glimpse of what each girl is like, and they complain about the tasks they must do to help their mother. The first seven minutes of the 1933 film show Marmee, Meg, and Jo all hard at work at their respective jobs. Marmee is volunteering to help make clothes for the men and families affected by the war, Meg with the King family as a governess, and Jo with Aunt March. The girls are not shown inside the house until ten minutes of the film have passed. The first glimpse of the girls is them outside in the world happily doing their jobs. This purposeful opening scene changes the domestic paradigm expected of women at the time.

The scene Gerwig chooses to be the opening scene speaks to the feminism found in the novel. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation received backlash for its nonlinear take on Little Women. The film does not follow the chronological order the novel does; in the novel, there is a progression from the girls’ adolescence to their adulthood. The film instead starts with the second half of the novel when the girls are grown, and through Jo, the viewers see flashbacks of the past. The back and forth between timeframes may confuse viewers that do not know the story, but the flashbacks of the past and present echo each other and make the happy moments much briefer and the sad moment even more tragic (Chang para.9). The film does not follow any order of the novel so even the opening scene differs from that of the novel. The opening scene starts with Jo selling her stories to a publisher for the first time. Jo hesitates before opening the door but once she does, she enters a room full of men and bravely greets one of the men at the desk. The publisher agrees to take them for twenty dollars each after arguing over the plot and fee. From the very start, Gerwig is making it clear that the film is about the limited opportunities that women had at the time (Chang para.4). Jo sells her works and is seen flying through the street ecstatic and elated at being able to turn a profit from her own work. Jo courageously walking into a room dominated by men is empowering and sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Amy, like Jo, is passionate about her artistic pursuits and it frustrates her that she will never be the famous artist that she dreamed of being. Amy, the March sister who grows the most out of the four children throughout the course of the novel, may not be her outspoken sister but is certainly a force to be reckoned with. Amy wanting to pursue her art was not a very traditional idea at the time. Women were not artists; they painted as a hobby. The chapter where Amy’s growth and maturity is truly shown is chapter thirty-nine when Amy and Laurie are having an intellectual conversation about her artistic pursuits and marriage. When asked by Laurie when she will create her next magnificent work of art, she says she never will and continues by saying, “because talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I won’t be a commonplace dauber, so I don’t intend to try anymore” (Alcott 652).

The 2019 adaptation recreates this delicate moment between Amy and Laurie perfectly. When Amy and Laurie are discussing her future and Laurie teases her about Fred Vaugn, Amy has command over the room and moves about it freely. The male gaze in films positions women as stationary objects while the man of the room moves about freely. In this scene, it is Amy who is standing, walking, and moving things about the room while Laurie is sitting down on one side of the room or the other. In this scene, Amy is in a powerful position, refusing to sit still and discussing the one thing she has power over, whom she gets to marry. In the novel, Amy mentions how Fred Vaugn is a rich and nice gentleman and she could fancy him if she tries. However, Amy does not say this. “As a woman, there is no way for me to make my own money not enough to earn a living or support my family and if I had my own money which I don’t that money would belong to husband the moment we got married and if we had children they would be his and not mine they would be his property” (Little Women 2019 ), Florence Pugh so eloquently delivers in the film. This change in dialogue highlights the struggles women went through and expresses the anger women felt but never vocalized about the inequality between men and women. During this monologue, Pugh is at the center of the frame, the shot moving from a medium shot to a close-up shot. She can move around in this space but within the structure of the center frame. This shot is parallel to her reality and what she is talking about in her monologue. She will always be trapped in that frame of the structure of society.

The 1933 adaptation tries to avoid the objectification of women and the dominating male but still falls into the trap of conventional womanhood: “Cukor’s 1933 version, reflect[s] a tension between Jo’s active plot function and her position as visual object, thus implicitly destabilizing conventional ideologies of feminine subjectivity” (McCallum 89). Jo in her adolescence displays all the tomboyish qualities of Jo in the novel but as she becomes a young lady they disappear. Hepburn’s Jo is boyish but still feminine. She swaggers, runs, slides downstairs, and has a deep natural voice (McCallum 86). When Jo returns from New York she is much more well-mannered and well-dressed with careful curls, low-necked gowns, and lace (Wang 15). She is now soft-spoken, everyone calls her Jo, and she walks slowly. Wang says, “the 1933 version tells the coming-of-age story of how Jo is disciplined from an unconventional girl full of masculine qualities to a young lady” (15). The film embraces Jo’s tomboyish ways at the beginning of the film but when it is time to grow up Jo loses her individuality, and her writing pursuits are barely acknowledged in the film. Jo’s complex character is diminished, and she returns back to the fixed female role women were expected to play.

Gerwig seems to have only been focused on writing a feminist film for the 21st century even if that meant changing several plot points. Smyth says, “Greta Gerwig was determined to make an empowering feminist film about women out of Alcott’s little girls’ story if she had to reinvent the plot and dialogue on every page of her script” (5). The film seems to lack a lot of what Alcott spent writing about in her novel: hymns, prayers, housework, and time spent reading. Much of the feminist aspects of the film are not originally in the novel. At the end of the film, Jo sees her book published, Little Women, and has a physical copy of it. The loneliness Jo feels helps light the fire that gets her book published for girls, something that never happens in the novel (Van de Kemp 4). The gathering of Marmee’s birthday is the same and the non-diegetic music creates a beautiful end with Jo getting to have both a happy marriage and a successful career. Jo goes on to open a little girl’s school, also differing from the plot but adding to the feminism Gerwig wanted to present.

Both film adaptations differ greatly because of the year they were produced. The 1933 film expresses feminist motifs but returns to the expected societal standards of the time. Margaret Makey expresses that the many adaptations of Little Women may give the younger generations who may not have found their way to Alcott’s original novel a skewed idea of the true story of Little Women. She says there is a balance between creating a good movie, and reworking and stepping over the creative bounds: “the material conditions of publishing and marketing have a profound impact on the kinds of imaginative literary experiences now offered to children. It is important to attend to that impact in all its various forms” (20). The 1933 adaptation is very faithful to the film and feminist motifs found in Alcott’s, but like the novel, it can only be considered feminist within the historical context of the 1930s. Gerwig’s adaptation takes the feminist themes found in the novel and amplifies them so that the feminism in the film cannot be argued. Regardless of the time period Louisa May Alcott’s novel continues to inspire women of every generation. Whether as subtle as it is portrayed in the novel or as outright as it is in the 2019 film, there are feminist motifs that will last on through the future.

Works Cited  

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Harper Festival, 2001.

Cukor, George, director. Little Women. Performance by Katherine Hepburn, Frances Dee, Joan Bennet, Spring Byington, and Douglass Montgomery. Warner Brothers, 1933.

De los Ríos Martín, Cristina, and Celestino Deleyto Alcalá. “Like Mother like Daughter? Star Persona and Female Bonds in Lady Bird.”

Gerwig, Greta, director.  Little Women.  Performances by Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, and Timothée Chalamet. Columbia Pictures, 2019.

Mackey, Margaret. “Little Women Go to Market: Shifting Texts and Changing Readers.” Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 153–73.

McCallum, Robyn. “The Present Reshaping the Past Reshaping the Present: Film Versions of Little Women.” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, Jan. 2000, pp. 81–96.

Smyth, J. E. “Outgrowing Little Women.” Cineaste, vol. 45, no. 2, Mar. 2020, p. 8.

Van de Kemp, Jessica. “‘I Intend to Make My Own Way in the World’: Queer Female Artistry and the Noble Nature of Gerwig’s Little Women.” Cinematic Codes Review, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 59–63.

Wang, Haiyu. “Four Hollywood Film Adaptations of Little Women: Identifying Female Subjectivity in Characters, Plots, and Authorship” Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Mar. 2021.

Ware, Susan. “Katharine Hepburn: Her Mother’s Daughter.” History Today, vol. 40, Apr. 1990, pp. 47–53.

West, Kristina. “Who Owns Little Women? Adapting Alcott in the Twenty-First Century.” Women’s Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, June 2019, pp. 407–20.