It’s perfectly feminist to be a housewife
Some want to be like Meg from Little Women. They have the right to make that choice free of censure
Jo must marry Laurie. So hundreds of girl fans wrote to Louisa May Alcott after the success of the first volume of Little Women. Alcott, sieged by letters demanding to know “who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life”, began to plot, “out of perversity”, a different sort of love, life and fate for Jo.
The reason Little Women endures, the reason we still read the book, curl up with Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy on the page or on the screen, is because Alcott’s March sisters are more than wallflowers waiting for husbands. They are real, distinct, headstrong, mulishly stubborn, cattishly cruel (Amy’s burning of Jo’s unfinished novel is one of the great sisterly betrayals), and utterly recognisable. They may marry – but they keep their flaws, hopes and ambitions.
Over Boxing Day lunch, my mother, aunts, cousins and I had a soulsearching debate about which March sister we’d like to be – and which we really are.
At the end of a year in which we were supposed to be inspired by model Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, the Mary Wollstonecraft de nos jours, it has been heartening to spend time over Christmas with women who are more than cartoons in a basque.
In the BBC’S Christmas adaptation of Jessie Burton’s novel The Miniaturist, Nella, Marin and Cornelia are the plot’s agents; the two men – Johannes and Otto – are very much in supporting roles. Marin is fierce; Nella curious and questioning; Cornelia is a nurturer, a feeder-upper, a baker of fried, spiced pancakes.
I’ve just finished reading Katherine Rundell’s children’s Christmas hit
The Explorer. The two girl heroines, aged 10 and 11, are splendid. Lila is a botanist-to-be who adopts orphaned sloths. Con (“It’s short for Constantina, but if you call me that I’ll kill you.”) has a photographic memory for maps. Plane-wrecked in the Amazon rainforest, they are frightened and brave, nurturing and selfish, resourceful and hapless.
But in the week before Christmas I listened to a podcast about how this was a golden age for children’s literature. The reviewer said something that dismayed me then and has been nagging at me since.
She said that when she read Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five to her young daughter, she made sure to praise George, the tomboy who joins Julian, Dick and Timmy the dog for the adventure. She spoke mockingly of Anne, a sad, stay-at-home drudge, forever rearranging the tins of baked beans in the tent while the others thwart the smugglers.
Surely, though, the whole point of feminism is freedom to choose? Yes, one can be a George, never Georgina, and graze knees and muck in and out-run the boys. Yes, one can be Jo March flomping around the house in an ink-stained smock and announcing: “Being born a girl is the most disappointing thing that has ever happened to me.”
If, however, one is a natural Anne, skirt-wearing, shy of risk, a tidier of tins, or a Meg, anxious to have clean gloves and a comfortable home and sweet babies, then that, too, should be celebrated as a choice of equal worth and importance.
In our enthusiasm to encourage women to seize every opportunity available to a man, to be freed from corsets and playpens, and hearth and home, we have come to denigrate the woman who does want domesticity, family and a row of tidy tins.
The modern woman is supposed to scoff at the Meg-type who says: “I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these.”
I have met modern Megs. A friend, a barrister with a First from Oxford, confided that she was longing to give up work for “a couple of babies and a cottage in the country”.
She said it – hush, hush, don’t tell – as if admitting a shameful secret. Many women want some combination of the two: career and children – and they don’t want to apologise for either.
No one who calls herself a feminist should bully or shame another woman for the choices she makes.
The March sisters forgive each other: for burnt books, stolen suitors, singed hair. The sisterhood should do the same.