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chapter five Gender and Reform New Women and True Womanhood “We don’t need girls to teach us anything.” —Jo’s Boys “There have been other young generals, but they were not girls.” —joan of arc A lcott’s efforts to reconcile coeducation, careers, and choices about marriageinhernovelsLittleMenandJo ’sBoysreflectoneofthecentraldebates of postbellum America about the role of what would eventually be called the“NewWoman.”1ThedebatewouldalsoengageTwain,especiallylater in his career. Emerging as a result of the suffrage movement, the New Woman was the antithesis of the woman immersed in the Cult of True Womanhood— that early nineteenth-century embodiment of romanticism that conflated domesticity and piety.2 The True Woman was pure, pious, and homebound; she wanted nothing more than to serve those she loved. The New Woman was strong, politically convicted, and independent of thought. Her critics charged her with wanting to destroy that sacred bastion of American values, the family, which is why Alcott is so careful to have her incipient New Women articulate their respect for family and the sanctity of marriage.3 For instance, in the same year that Jo’s Boys appeared, Alcott wrote to a young friend describing how her neighbor Sarah Ripley “used to rock her baby’s cradle, shell peas, or sew, & fit a class of young men for college at the same time. One can discuss Greek poetry & chop meat as I saw her doing once with Mr Emerson & Margaret Fuller & the one task ennobled the other because it was duty” (Selected Letters 297). Alcott’s novels Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom demonstrate the tensions at work between the New Woman and the Cult of True Womanhood; Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is his most extended investigation of the topic. Twain’s Joan and Alcott’s characters Josie, Nan, and Rose are all adolescent girls; they are all reformers; and they all call to the reader’s attention the gender imbalances that disempower women by denying them 92 politicalparity.Alcott’sandTwain’sexplorationsofgenderare,therefore,another example of their reliance on youth as symbols for potential social reform. Truly just, and free, and great In 1883, Twain praised coeducation in Life on the Mississippi, describing a Minneapolis university that educates four hundred students, “and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex” (582).Three years after Life on the Mississippi appeared in book form, Alcott published Jo’s Boys, an entire novel on the subject that is even more direct about coeducation than Little Men is. With Jo’s Boys, Alcott concludes the March family trilogy. More important, however, she participates in the dialogues about education for women that recurred throughout the nineteenth century in the United States. For example, Doyle observes that Alcott’s arguments about coeducation were responses both to Catharine Beecher’s assertion that women should be educated in order to better carry out their domestic functions and Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), which argued that educating women caused them to become physically more weak (“Transatlantic” 273–74). Alcott articulates directly the pedagogical philosophy of the coeducational school her novel describes: the founders of Plumfield “believed so heartily in the right of all sexes, colors, creeds, and ranks to education, that there was room for every one who knocked” (Jo’s 281–82). Jo says bluntly, “It is all nonsense about girls not being able to study as well as boys” (288). As in Little Men, Alcott takes as her primary justification for coeducation the moral stance that studying together gives both genders a chance to improve the other: females soften males; males strengthen women. Given that the most common objections to coeducation involved defilement of feminine purity, Alcott’s rationale is an ingenious one in the way that it completely sidesteps the basic premise on which most opponents of coeducation relied—the idea that women would be corrupted by too much knowledge. How could innocent lasses be made less innocent by purifying the lads who needed their refining touch? And wouldn’t innocent lasses who are made stronger be better able to protect their purity? Alcott understood that men would not be willing to grant women suffrage until they deemed the majority of women in America well enough educated to handle the responsibilities of the ballot box. But although suffrage is discernibly her goal in the 1880s—as is evidenced by her journals, her letters , and the increasing volume of suffrage ideology in...

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