How Jo March Became a Girlboss
Every generation gets the ‘Little Women’ it deserves, and Greta Gerwig’s film tells the story of a hungry young creative hustling to the top
Of all the female characters in American fiction, there’s one who keeps reappearing, a type writers obviously favor. You know her well: It’s the girl with the opinions, the messy hair, and the diary. The getting-into-scrapes one, the bookworm, the soft-hearted tomboy. She’s the girl who starts the story alone and ends it coupled, whose pride doesn’t stand a chance against romance. She’s sassy but kind, rebellious but dutiful. The one whose insistence that she’s different from everyone else is what makes her universal. She’s an archetype so repeatable, it’s easy to forget that she must have started somewhere. But she did: She started as Jo March.
Jo is one of four sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age novel Little Women, a book that has been adapted for stage and screen again and again since its first volume was published in 1868. But Jo — more than her siblings Meg, Beth, Amy, or their saintly mother Marmee — is Little Women’s undeniable protagonist and a proxy for Alcott herself. Dreaming of a career as a writer, losing her temper, and bemoaning the pressure for women to marry (until she, too, happily pairs off), Jo is the…
