Learning from Marmee's Teaching

Over the past two decades, feminists have invigorated liberal studies with theorizing about the deeply gendered practices and purposes of teaching. ¹ Preoccupied mostly with contemporary women’s studies classrooms in higher education, these exhilarating discussions of feminist pedagogy have seldom remarked any significant historical precedents and have only rarely considered philosophical questions about teaching girls in coeducational common schools. ² Louisa May Alcott’s autobiographical and utopian fictions of teaching—Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys—have imaginatively explored such questions within the context of nineteenth-century New England, with both practical and philosophical intelligence. The earliest pioneers of feminist pedagogy have included at least one major Alcott critic, ³ but thus far Alcott’s fictional preoccupation with teaching has escaped rigorous feminist theoretical scrutiny. As a feminist philosopher of education, I am concerned about scholarly neglect of educational thought written by women and about girls and women ⁴ —of which Alcott’s March family trilogy is one brilliant example. Such neglect has profound epistemological and practical consequences for coeducation, consequences especially harmful to girls and women—Meg’s, Jo’s, Beth’s, and Amy’s cultural heirs. ⁵