The Home Schooling of Louisa May Alcott: How Her Father and Her Mother Educated an American Writer (review)

Lisa M. Stepanski has been a fan of Little Women since she was ten. As she acknowledges, “That book opened a window onto two subjects that forever captured my imagination and intellect: the Alcott family and the nineteenth-century New England home” (1). Completing her doctorate in the mid-1990s, she drew from American literature and composition studies to construct her dissertation, “‘There is No School like the Family School’: Literacy, Motherteaching, and the Alcott Family.” That earlier work is evidently the basis for this monograph.

Redding Sugg’s concept of the “motherteacher” is central to Stepanski’s study, but she cautions that “motherteaching itself is not strictly a gender-based activity as Sugg claims. In fact, as envisioned and practiced by the Alcotts, motherteaching incorporated a host of issues including maternal and feminine identity, pedagogy, literacy training, discipline, and child rearing methods” (28, n. 2). Stepanski also references Richard Brodhead’s “disciplinary intimacy”—“the articulation of a softer, more internalized disciplinary system” (qtd. in Stepanski 9)—as she examines the parenting/ educating practices of Bronson and Abigail “Abba” Alcott. Her central thesis is that “[t]he Alcotts’ family literacy narrative—that is, their curricular and extracurricular experiences with reading, writing, and rhetoric—has yet to be fully documented and appreciated” (2–3).

In chapter one, Stepanski alludes to such works as Lydia Maria Child’s The Mother’s Book (1831) and John S. C. Abbott’s The Mother at Home (1833), as she traces both “the increasing feminization of the teaching profession” (25) and emerging awareness of a mother’s role in fostering her children’s moral and intellectual development. She is particularly interested in how Child, Abbott, and others advocate writing within the home.

Chapter two focuses primarily on Bronson Alcott’s teaching experiences in Cheshire, Connecticut from 1825 to 1827. Stepanski applauds his refusal to emphasize rote learning, his determination to foster discussion, his incorporation of writing opportunities for his students, and his creation of a pleasing environment—including a school library. Cheshire parents and community leaders came to regard Bronson with dismay: perhaps in part because, among other things, he requested a raise and funds to enhance the library; and perhaps because he encouraged his pupils to think independently.

In chapter three, Stepanski conveys Bronson’s belief that the purpose of the educator was to “‘wake’ a child’s soul, and ‘discipline it into the perfection which is its end’” (qtd. in Stepanski 52). Closely reading Bronson’s correspondence with a few Germantown Academy pupils, his daughters’ journals and letters, and the records of his Temple School in Boston, Stepanski admires his willingness to provide them with “a measure of autonomy and self-expression rarely seen in any 1830s classroom” (78). However, she also acknowledges aspects of Bronson’s pedagogy that might be harmful, particularly his public conversations with individual children about their spiritual development.

Chapter four addresses Abba’s attitudes toward parenting and home-educating. Because some of her diaries and other writings were destroyed after her death, Stepanski draws primarily from Abba’s letters to demonstrate that she shared with her daughters her love of reading as well as her lively interest in social issues. Interestingly, in the material quoted within this chapter, Abba acknowledges the gap between theory and practice, particularly in parenting young children, when she admits, “My days have been busy and my nights [restless?]—this you know unfits one for much mental effort” (qtd. in Stepanski 94). Abba did develop a range of resources for helping her daughters to educate themselves as they grew older. She wrote in their journals and invited them to write in hers as well, although she was less likely than her spouse to maintain a regular journal. She read poetry with them and encouraged them to write their own. She wrote letters to them on important occasions, and in 1843, only a few...