her properly innocuous, while we sympathize with Jo's rational rebellion against a meaningless social ritual, we also understand Amy's exasperation at her provoking contrariness and deplore Jo's self-indulgent lack of good sense when she throws away her only chance to go to Europe by gratuitously antagonizing her aunts. As a sympathetic heroine who protests against the pressure on girls to be be tactful, pleasing, and confirmist, to care for dress and long for marriage as the culmination of their lives, Jo was and is an exhilirating model to female adolescents. And, although the book makes clear that Jo must learn to curb her impulses, it endorses her protest against reducing women to a narrow sexual-domestic role. The March girls pursue their artistic interests, struggle to protect their faults, enjoy their companionship. Alcott pointedly refused to let Jo's friendship with Laurie develop into a conventional romance.Most of Alcott's later books capitalized on the success of Little Women:they are stories about and for young people, tracing their development toward maturity and contrasting good, enlightened ways of child rearing with worldly, unnecessarily restrictive, insufficiently moral ones. Little Men continues the story of the March family. In Little Men, Jo and her husband preside over Plumfield, a politically perfect place, inspired by Bronson Alcott's progressive Temple School. Jo, still a nonconformist, has become a charitable matriarch, a broader-minded version of Marmee. Although constantly enlivened by humor and knowledge of young people, these books become less interesting as Alcott goes further from the authencity of her own experience and increasingly subordinates realistic portrayal to moral teaching. Alcott herself felt the constrictions of writing the proper juvenile fiction her public demanded: near the end of her life, she made her alter ego Jo describes herself as "a literary nursery-maid" and acknowledged a tempta...
