ABSTRACT
Taking into account both various feminist readings of Little Women and Alcott's own experiences in her father's antebellum utopian community, I will read the novel as a site of feminist utopian thought, making use of the way the term utopia oscillates between two possible meanings of its Greek roots-eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place). Utopia can mean either an ideal or an impossibility, and sometimes both. Both meanings of utopia operated in the domestic ideal of the nineteenth century.s Ideologically, home and family represented a good place in contrast to the chaotic and amoral world of business and politics, but some women found cultural expectations of their role more and more confining-more and more a no place-as the century progressed. Like other nineteenth-century feminists, Alcott searched for alternatives to the domestic ideal, and contemporary feminist critics like
Catharine Stimpson and Nina Auerbach have found two good places in Little Women: the independent spirit of Jo March and the community of women the March family comprises.6 Notable in both of these ideals is the absence of men, especially fathers; men would seem to have no place, in Alcott's utopia.
