I have loved the novel little woman since I was a little girl and my mother would read a chapter every night before I went to sleep. I always felt that I could relate to Jo the most with her comical nose and eyes that could see everything. Oh and how could I forget the long dark brown nest of hair that was always bundled into a net, this was the attribute that made me most like her. Jo was the tomboy that used some of her own slang as Meg calls it. Jo with her boyish name and her slang would complain about being a girl and did things like whistle because it was un-lady like and boyish; which is what I would do when I was younger. I would constantly pop my gum even though my mom repeatedly told me not to because it was something “lady’s didn’t do”; so naturally that made me more inclined to do it. When I would complain that I it was never a problem before my mother would say almost the exact same thing Meg says “ It didn’t matter so much when you were little; but now you are so tall, and turn up you hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.” Obviously my mother didn’t say those exact words because I am a mere Five foot four but Just like Jo I as growing up and becoming a lady and I couldn’t get away with the same boyish things I had been doing my entire life. I fought her on it because I loved boys games and I hated wearing my hair up and feeding into what everyone else thought a “little woman” should behave like. It was so much fun reading this excerpt from the novel because it brought back so many memories of my childhood and how much I loved relating to Jo who to this day is my favorite character in any novel I have ever read.
In Sojourner Truth’s writings she talks about the colored woman’s rights. Women are finally being taken seriously, just like Louisa May Alcott when she was writing Little Women, and she had to establish a herself professionally at a time when women writers were just beginning to be accepted. Both the woman Sojourner Truth is talking about the Alcott's Little Women are enslaved in some way. Jo so desperately wishes to be able to break the mold and act like a boy but because of societal codes she cannot while the women working in the fields for smaller pay than men want equal pay for equal work but because they are women they cant. An excerpt from Sojourner Truth’s “Woman’s Rights” shows a letter written about how she should be treated equal to a white woman because she is in fact a woman who deserves to be escorted across a street or helped over a puddle but where as the “little Woman” have books lining their little cottage, they can write and their mother gives them each a book to read for Christmas, This excerpt has almost every word spelled wrong. Woman are equal both to each other and to men.
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