Thought Portal

Welcome to Jo's Boys, a podcast for little women, little men, and everyone in between! We'll be reading through "Little Women" chapter by chapter, pulling out queer and trans threads as we go. Your host is Peyton Thomas, author of the Kirkus-starred novel "Both Sides Now" and a freelance journalist with bylines in Pitchfork, Billboard, and Vanity Fair. You can visit Peyton online at peytonthomas.ca and on Twitter @peytonology.

This week, we're joined by special guest Tess Scilipoti, a Ignatz Award-nominated comic artist whose work has appeared in The Nib. We dive into the eleventh chapter of Little Women, "Experiments," where the girlies decide to abandon their chores for a week and wind up regretting everything. You can visit Tess online at tscilipoti.com and on Twitter @tessscilipoti.

Our cover art is by Allison Hoffman. It interpolates the cover art for Bethany C. Morrow's book "So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix," with permission from Macmillan Children's Publishing Group. Our theme music is Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major.

‘In spite of the curly crop, I don’t see the ‘son Jo’ whom I left a year ago,’ said Mr. March. ‘I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she doesn’t bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights me. I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied. I don’t know whether the shearing sobered our black sheep, but I do know that in all Washington I couldn’t find anything beautiful enough to be bought with the five-and-twenty dollars which my good girl sent me.’ (ch. 22)

Little Women has Suzanne and Chris tackling new territory: a novel, a children’s book, and something written within the last two hundred years. They discuss this tale of four sisters (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy), the possibilities it offers young women (but eventually takes from them), its complex exploration of gender, and its fascination with death.

Show Notes.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (also on Project Gutenberg).

Avidly, on the Los Angeles Review of Books, had a great cluster of articles about each of the sisters.

“How Little Women Got Big” at the New Yorker, which draws upon a recent book about Little Women, Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.

But in 1994, Gillian Armstrong, directing the most successful film adaptation to date, took a bolder approach.

Robin Swicord, who wrote the screenplay, created virtually every line of dialogue from scratch, saying that she had imagined what Alcott might have written had she been “freed of the cultural restraints” of her time. The result swerves from the usual homey scene to offer a politically engaged drama in which Marmee (Susan Sarandon) and Jo (Winona Ryder) advocate for women’s suffrage and none of the Marches wears silk, because it’s produced using slavery and child labor. Males are relegated to the margins: The March household is a matriarchy, presided over by a fierce feminist and reformist crusader who emphasizes the importance of education and moral character rather than interior decoration. Swicord even names Marmee Abigail, which was Alcott’s mother’s name.