ABSTRACT
Girl Scout handbooks cited Little Women and recommended Louisa May Alcott as someone who embodied an ideal of the educated woman worthy of girls' emulation. Alcott's writings often appeared on lists of recommended children's books and reached children in form of special school editions. Louisa Alcott and her elder sister were Bronson's objects of study as infants in one of the first published American diaries of child development. Bronson Alcott had been a daring coeducational innovator at his own interracial Temple School, which later became Louisa Alcott's source for Plumfield, the 'home-like school' in Little Women and in its sequel, Little Men. Alcott was home-schooled in this remarkable New England, Unitarian family who experimented with communal life and often depended upon the charity of their friend Emerson because her father's idealism often left them penniless. Alcott was popular as an artistic writer long before her educational thought achieved recognition. In the 1970s, feminist literary critics intensified scholarly interest in Alcott.
