Let Genius Burn
Louisa May Alcott may be best known for the beloved book Little Women, but her story doesn’t begin or end with her famous novel. On Let Genius Burn, we separate the layers of Louisa’s life to learn more about who she really was--and all the ways her legacy continues to resonate today. We’ll explore the traumatic year of her childhood spent in an experimental utopian community, her service as a Civil War nurse, her final years of wealth and celebrity as a children’s author--and more intimate details and little-known stories of Louisa’s life. Instead of a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s biography, each episode in the 8-part series examines Louisa's life through a different lens--Louisa as a celebrity, writer, activist, daughter, and more-- highlighting her complexity as a person, woman, and historical figure. Ahead of her time, Louisa railed against the limitations of her gender and fought for women’s suffrage. She craved literary greatness, but was weighed down by the financial needs of her family. Through writing scandalous Gothic thrillers, she found a way to voice her own inner turmoil. In the end, she achieved extraordinary financial success, but creative fulfillment remained elusive.We’ll examine all of this and more on Let Genius Burn. Find more on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn or at letgeniusburn.com.
Let Genius Burn
Alcott and Sex Education
Louisa May Alcott and her family were social activists who advocated for all types of reforms in their lifetimes: they were concerned with fair labor, women's suffrage, abolitionism, and diet reform. Yet another social concern for Louisa May Alcott was the access to health and wellness education for young women.
In this episode, we explore the ways that Alcott included health and sex education in her novels, a subversive act in the face of legislation such as Comstock Law that sought to ban materials related to women's health.
We are joined by a scholar who knows a great deal about Alcott's contributions to this field, and many other authors and works. Get ready to take notes for a reading list--we certainly did!
Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera is the Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. She is the author of (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), which releases in paperback this May.
She is also the author of the critical introduction for Helen Brent, M.D., an 1892 novel by Annie Nathan Meyer that she recovered with Hastings College Press and for which she won Honorable Mention for the 2021 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Edition Award. Dr. Tavera is an expert in the fields of long nineteenth-century American women’s literature, medical humanities, and feminist disability studies.
Her articles have appeared in the top journals in her field, including Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Science Fiction Studies, and she currently serves as the Assistant Editor of Utopian Studies academic journal. She was recently on the podcast Lost Ladies of Lit, talking about Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932), which is how she became introduced to the Let Genius Burn podcast.
We hope this episode inspires you to think critically about access to health and sex education and the issues of censorship we are still managing today.