Louisa at Work

Before she became an author and celebrity, Louisa May Alcott was a teacher, seamstress, governess, companion, servant, and nurse. Though they were difficult, her experiences gave her material to write for the rest of her life. This week, learn about Louisa May Alcott's relationship with work, which was both her salvation and the bane of her existence.

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Louisa At Work

Intro: Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess, and I’m Jill Fuller. In today’s episode, we’re learning about something that was both Louisa May Alcott’s salvation and the bane of her existence: this episode is about Louisa at Work.

In 1858, when she was 25 years old, Louisa May Alcott returned to Boston yet again to look for work, recording in her journal, “I am the only bread-winner just now.” It had already been ten long years of looking for meaningful, gainful employment. Louisa did not have a plan for winter, and it was October and getting cold. Her sister Lizzie died earlier that year, and her oldest sister Anna had announced her engagement shortly after. Louisa felt like she was losing her family one sister at a time. She had not become the great actress or writer she swore to be when she left Concord years before. Instead, she’d spent ten years toiling: as a teacher, which she hated, and taking in sewing. She had even worked a short time as a domestic servant. No matter how hard she worked, there was never enough money to support the family. There was never enough work.

On a dark night, Louisa walked alone along the Charles River. Her shoes clicked on the stone street, echoing into the otherwise quiet night. She was despondent, the day of fruitless searching for employment, for money, had worn her down.

Without knowing how she got there, she stood at the Mill Dam. Below her, the black water churned with the promise of respite from this drudgery-filled existence. Louisa leaned out over the water. She loosened her grip on the railing over the water, let her heart beat in her ears. She stared hard into the water below--all she had to do was let go.

If Louisa ever wrote about this incident in her journal, the entry doesn’t exist today. Perhaps she destroyed it before prying eyes could read it. But she did recount it to her family in a letter, though she sugarcoated, as she often did in letters--stressing her tenacity and perseverance rather than her despair. She promised herself that the battle wasn’t over, and she set her teeth and walked away from the Mill Dam determined to find work and make something of herself, she told the family.

One Sunday night, still down and out, she went to listen to a talk by pastor and abolitionist Theodore Parker, an old friend of the family. Parker was one of the most influential speakers of his time, and he certainly had influence on Louisa. His talk, which was called "Laborious Young Women,” spoke directly to Louisa’s troubles. “Trust your fellow beings, and let them help you. Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work til you can find the task you want,” Parker said, which Louisa recorded in her journal.

Parker’s words strengthened Louisa’s resolve. The next day, she went back to the Parker’s house and told Mrs. Parker about her need for work. Within a day, Louisa had two irons in the fire: the first, a place with the Loverings, her former employers, as teacher and companion to a young woman. The second was a place at a Girls’ Reform School outside the city, sewing for ten hours a day. Louisa preferred to stay with the Loverings if they offered her the position, but if not, she’d take the sewing.

Thankfully, the Loverings came through, and Louisa celebrated. She hadn’t wanted to spend ten hours a day hunched over her needle, though she would have done it for the money her family needed. At least she had a good position with a family she liked. “I am fixed for winter and my cares over. Thank the Lord!” she wrote in her journal.

A few months later, she recorded her earnings for the year 1858: a few stories, her work for the Loverings, and ten dollars for sewing. It was another year of scraping by.

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Louisa came of age at a time when the Alcotts were at their poorest. When she was only fourteen, the family left Concord and returned to Boston with the desperate need to pay their debts. These were the industrious years when her mother Abigail worked as a social worker, making less even than she was spending to travel and care for her charges, while Anna and Louisa were teaching out of small rooms in Boston.

Labor had long been a part of the Alcott’s philosophy as a family. Though Abigail Alcott had grown up in a well-to-do family and had not been expected to work as an adult, her decision to marry Bronson Alcott made earning a living a necessity for Abigail. Her work to support her husband’s dreams included both paid employment and the never-ending work of the household. The story that was central to their family’s values, Pilgrim’s Progress, shows idleness as a character flaw. Even if they were not working outside the family, the girls had an obligation to be industrious. It was part of their family’s culture and the enduring legacy of the Puritan culture in New England where they lived.

When Louisa was ten years old, the family spent a year working on a farm called Fruitlands as part of a utopian experiment. At Bronson’s insistence for a pure and wholesome life, Abigail Alcott made all their clothes from linen. She maintained the household while her husband and the others planted seeds and talked philosophy. She attempted to make flavorful meals despite the fact that salt and any spices were forbidden. Louisa inherited her mother’s tenacity and work ethic. In many ways, she worked because Abigail worked, so that one day Abigail might not have to.

While his wife and daughters worked steadily, Bronson, of course, was still trying to earn his living off his thoughts. He’d rented some rooms from educator and friend Elizabeth Peabody and with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson founded something called the Town and Country Club, where he appointed all his friends as the club’s cabinet and charged small fees for his conversations.

If Abigail had given Louisa the strength of spirit to carry on through hardships, enterprising sensibility, and frugality, Bronson had given her ambition. Bronson believed in himself and his ideas, waiting to see the fruits of his own thoughtful labor until the end of his days. He had the support of other like-minded intellectuals, but he never earned enough, always believing that if he served a higher ideal, he’d find a way to live on Earth.

As Louisa grew, she aligned herself more closely with Abigail, and her work ethic was in many ways a reaction to her father’s lack of it. She worked because he did not.

Because of Abigail’s lineage, the Alcotts had to keep up appearances, even as they suffered more financial loss. While the Industrial Revolution was charging ahead, the Alcott girls wouldn’t have taken factory work; it wasn’t appropriate, according to their social class. 

As Louisa described it, “Teaching a private school was the proper thing for an indigent gentlewoman. Sewing even, if done in the seclusion of home and not mentioned in public, could be tolerated. Story-writing was a genteel accomplishment and reflected credit upon the name.” But acting, another of Louisa’s long-held ambitions, was too risqué. Likewise, service work—meaning work as a servant—was not acceptable. So it was an unusual choice when Louisa decided to work for the Richardson family in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1851.

Louisa was eighteen years old, and she offered herself as an able body to the Richardson family, which consisted of a minister, James Richardson, his sister, and his father. He presented the job as an opportunity to join the family, and this appealed to Louisa. She thought she could suffer any difficult work as long as she had a place she belonged—and access to the library, which he had promised.

Instead, Louisa found herself trapped in a strange family dynamic. There was one other servant, Puah, and she was much older and mostly handled the cooking, while Louisa did the manual labor. But while the house was dilapidated and she saw much room for improvement, she was mostly not allowed to tidy it up. Her work was confined to the rooms of the minister, who would read to her and make unwelcome comments on her youth and womanliness.

Louisa later wrote a memoir of the incident called “How I Went Out to Service,” where she chronicled in detail the ways this work was becoming more unpleasant. Unlike many of her other writings, she made no attempt to disguise her identity in this piece, writing in first person and owning the narrative as truth. She did most of the jobs willingly, including splitting kindling and cleaning the floors, but then one day she noticed Richardson’s boots by the polishing box. Louisa found the line she would not cross; she refused to polish the boots and left them there. Slowly, over the course of several days, many more pairs of shoes and boots appeared, until Richardson said he didn’t have a clean pair to wear.

Richardson stormed in and demanded to know why his boots weren’t clean. It was Puah who then stood up for Louisa, saying, “Oh! [Louizy] said she was so busy doing your other work you’d have to do that yourself; and I thought she was about right.” 

The man polished his own boots.

Shortly after, Louisa gave her notice. She had been working there seven weeks in all. As she left, Richardson’s sister pushed a small purse into her hand. She said her goodbyes and began the walk to the train. She opened the purse along the way and found it contained four dollars.

Louisa wrote in her memoir of the incident, “I have had a good many bitter minutes in my life; but one of the bitterest came to me as I stood there in the windy road, with the sixpenny pocket-book open before me, and looked from my poor chapped, grimy, chill-blained hands to the paltry sum that was considered reward enough for all the hard and humble labor they had done.” Her work was worth more than this. She was indignant and angry. In the memoir, she sends the money back—but in her yearly ledger, she counted the four dollars as part of her income. 

As John Matteson writes in Eden’s Outcasts, perhaps her need won out over her pride. Still, Louisa knew her work was worth more than these paltry earnings. The incident showed her where the lines were drawn: what type of work she would do and how much she would accept for it.

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Louisa now knew her own boundaries when it came to work. She was still young and impressionable, and she felt her entire family’s existence revolved around how to earn enough money. These were the first ten years of her adulthood, and they came to define how she understood work for the rest of her life.

Louisa continued to teach and sew to earn her living. She still hated teaching, but as it was one of her few options, she kept at it. In 1861, she made her final attempt at starting a school. Having sent her story about her servant work to the Atlantic, publisher James T. Fields responded, “Stick to your teaching—you can’t write.” He loaned her forty dollars to open a school, and Louisa used the money to set up a small kindergarten in Boston. She took the train there each day from Concord, but it soon exhausted her, and her youngest sister May finished up the semester.

She was done with teaching. Instead, she vowed to pay back Fields when she made her “pot of gold.”

By 1862, she had returned to Concord to care for the family. It had always been assumed this task would fall to her sister Lizzie, but now that Lizzie had died and Louisa was nearly thirty, it was her responsibility. Alf Whitman was a long-time family friend to whom the Alcotts wrote many letters over the years, and according to Louisa he was one of the primary influences for the character of Laurie in Little Women. In 1862, Louisa wrote a letter to Alf about a new Concord paper where she was writing one story a month for ten dollars. She said, “As money is the end and aim of my mercenary existence, I scribble away and pocket the cash with a thankful heart.” Each year, writing made up a little more of her income, teaching and sewing a little less.

Louisa continued to make a distinction between work of “hand” and work of “head.” The work of “hand” was the housework and the sewing. These manual tasks gave Louisa the chance to “simmer novels” while she worked, so there was a strong relationship between the two. In fact, they were necessary to each other. More than once, she wrote in her journal that work was her “salvation.” It was the only place she escaped her troubles and worked with intention toward solving them.

At the end of that year, Louisa went to Washington, DC to work in a Union hospital. This was difficult, physical labor that taxed Louisa greatly. The illness she contracted there nearly cost her her life. Then, as always, she spun her experiences into gold: her book Hospital Sketches, published after she returned from the war, was her first notable literary success. Through this experience, she developed the thinly-veiled autobiographical fiction that would become her trademark.

After the success of Hospital Sketches, Louisa was able to give up most of her other labor and concentrate mostly on writing. Then, she was offered one of her most unusual employment opportunities to date: she could accompany a wealthy merchant’s daughter, named Anna Weld, to Europe as a nurse and companion. William Fletcher Weld thought his daughter’s poor health could benefit from the time abroad, and given Louisa’s recent nursing experiences and desire to see Europe, it seemed like a good match.

It became clear while they were still on the steamer to Europe that true friendship wasn’t going to blossom between Louisa and Anna Weld. If Louisa had dreamed of a trip to Europe, the time she spent with Weld was not matching her expectations. She was nursing a sickly young woman while she was still herself recovering from illness.

Louisa spent the year as other Americans did: she stayed at pensions and met people from around the world. She had her own adventures, including her one real romance with a young man named Ladislav Winiewski. Still, this wasn’t play; she was working. She was obliged to her charge, and she wasn’t always allowed to explore the literary side of Europe she wanted to see, to visit the sites dedicated to her heroes: Dickens, Milton, Goethe.

At last, after about eight months together, Louisa gave her notice and left on a train bound for Paris on May 1st. This was the last time Louisa would do something other than write to earn her bread. Only 3 years later, she laid her golden egg with the publication of Little Women. With its unprecedented success, Louisa never worried about finding other employment again.

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Like many artists, Louisa felt tension between the writing she created because it paid well and the lofty idea that art should be pure artistic creation, separate from the dirty enterprise for making money. She was consistent in telling anyone who asked that she wrote her moral stories for the young because it paid well. It was not, to her, about creating art.

As Louisa got older, she valued herself and her time in a different way. No longer content to scrabble for a few dollars here and there, she had worked for more than a decade to establish relationships with publishers that would pay her what she deserved. By 1872, well into her literary career and after the success of Little Women, her commissions were much higher. She turned down a Christmas story for $2,000, but the publisher came back with an offer of $3,000, and she took it. Compared to the careful recording of five to ten dollars a story in the 1850s, it was a significant improvement—still, Louisa had a price.

Always concerned with repaying debts, Louisa also returned the forty dollars to James T. Fields. She wrote to him, “Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying that I might return them when I made ‘a pot of gold.’ As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfill my part of the bargain, & herewith repay my debt with many thanks.” Though she might not have returned the four dollars to the family in Dedham, she could at least set things right with this publisher.

Louisa remained all too aware that most women still toiled in inequitable conditions. In 1872, Louisa took out an old manuscript she’d called Success, and “fired up the engines” to refurbish it into a novel called Work, in which she explored the employment opportunities available to women. It had been more than twenty years since she “went out to service” by then, but she knew that little had changed for women in the working world. With the novel Work, Louisa did what she had always done: she doubled up on her money-making enterprises, turning the paid work of her past into a story that would itself earn money for her.

The novel is written in an episodic style, where for the first several chapters, the main character, Christy, attempts a different job in each. As servant, actress, governess, companion, and seamstress, Christy meets other women who offer their own experiences, so that Christy might learn from their mistakes. She struggles to find the work that gives her a true sense of meaning.

In the novel, Christy ends up working with other women in a kind of female-separatist utopia. These women work together and share their earnings to improve life for each other. It’s a beautiful vision of what could be possible, and it stands in stark contrast to Christy’s earlier experiences, which were so discouraging that, like Louisa, Christy contemplated suicide. She even went down to the water and stared at its depths, as Louisa once had.

The book Work is dedicated to Abigail Alcott, with the inscription “To my mother, whose life has been a long labor of love.” 

Abigail had taught Louisa about the inequalities of their society through her work with the poor in Boston all those years ago. With this legacy in mind, Louisa finished Work as a statement on inequality and women’s needs in the world of work. They needed to feel meaningfully engaged, to feel valued, and to find belonging and sisterhood. These goals were hard to come by in the market economy.

Until the end of her days, Louisa wrote, though now her worth on the market was clear. “Work is excellent medicine for all kinds of mental maladies,” she wrote in a letter to Alf Whitman. When she was older and battling her myriad health issues, she still wanted to work. She wrote in her journal, “Find a very quiet life is best, for in Boston people beset me to do things & I try & get so tired I cannot work.” With her family comfortable and May in Europe, if there was ever a time to be too tired to work, this would have been it. But even at the end of her life, Louisa found her old habits wouldn’t let go. Pilgrim’s Progress, which had taught Louisa so early in life to fight against Laziness and Sloth, would stay with her. Work had always been her salvation. Even in the hardest times, it rescued her from despair.

As her health declined, though, her doctor told her, “Rest is your salvation.” “So I rest,” she said, though she never was good at resting.

Stay tuned for our conversation but first… In the spirit of the Alcott’s strong beliefs and actions for social justice, each week we are highlighting an organization we believe in and asking for your support. For this episode, we are supporting the Educational Opportunities Fund. Since 1969, the Educational Opportunities Fund has provided scholarships for young people to participate in programs that value diversity, opening minds, fostering personal growth and helping youth respond to social, cultural and environmental challenges as responsible global citizens. Please consider donating today. You can find more information and the links to the Educational Opportunities Fund in the show notes and on our website, www.letgeniusburn.com. Thank you!

We’ll see you next week for Episode 4: Louisa as Scribbler. Until then, follow us on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn. Before we go, don’t forget to check out and donate to the Educational Opportunities Fund this week. You can find information and links to donate in the show notes or on our website. You can also find more information about Louisa and her world at www.letgeniusburn.com.