Inventing the wheel
Golly gee who knew Louisa May Alcott was butch? Besides everyone?
Louisa May Alcott balked when her editor asked her to write a book for girls. “Never liked girls or knew many,” she journaled, “except my sisters.”
…
To family and friends, she was Lou, Lu, or Louy. She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”
Gasp – could this mean………………………..?
All this leads me to wonder: Is Alcott best understood as a trans man?
No. Why? Well, for one thing, because she’s not particularly hard to understand in the first place. She didn’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world she lived in, in much the same way that I don’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world I live in. I don’t identify with the huge skirts and prissy manners of the Victorians and I don’t identify with the torture shoes and waxed crotches of the 2020s. Big whoop. That doesn’t make me a trans man, it just makes me a woman who thinks the conventions about how women are supposed to look and talk and act are deeply stupid and limiting.
Alcott scholars agree that she felt a profound affinity with manhood. “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model,” said Gregory Eiselein, a professor at Kansas State University and the current president of the Louisa May Alcott Society. In “Eden’s Outcasts,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott, John Matteson wrote that Alcott believed “she should have been born a boy.” Jan Susina, a professor of children’s literature, concurred: “Alcott may have experienced what we today would consider gender dysphoria.”
Stone the crows! That would be so exciting if it weren’t for the fact that everyone has always known it because it’s spelled out in the novel.
Still, these scholars hesitate to use the word “transgender” to describe Alcott. “I’d like to be cautious about imposing our words and terms and understandings on a previous era,” says Dr. Eiselein. “The way folks from the 19th century thought about gender, sex, sexual identity, sexuality is different from some of the terms we might use.”
Some of us might use. Others of us, not so much.
H/t Mike Haubrich
I long for and dream of world in which women such as Peyton Thomas learn to be happy as women, and enjoy success as they are.
If I may, this is my Christmas wish:
https://mikehaubrich.substack.com/p/merry-christmas-but-i-cant-let-this?sd=pf
I disagree with that final sentence most strongly. The 19th century view of gender, sex and sexual identity is very much the same as the current ‘understanding’. They believed that females and males had specific roles in society and were expected to dress and act in a manner befitting the roles.
If you did not dress or act in the ascribed manner then you were somewhere not sufficiently manly or womanly. Immense social pressure was applied to people that did not comply. The only difference today is the people think that you can simply and magically transition to the sex that better suits your preference. The underlying roles remain.
The intervening decades have been marked by efforts to eliminate the sex based roles. Something that we almost succeeded in doing until society decided that fantasy was more compelling than reality.
Every time they do this, they are spelling out what they really believe: sex – gender – whatever the hell we’re talking about today – is defined by presentation and conformity to stereotypical roles. Butch woman? Really a man. Effeminate man? Really a woman.
But what about the rest of us? Those of us who fit neither stereotype completely? Oh. You’re non-binary.
Why can’t we be women who wear trousers and like science? Men who like pink and babies? Because we are invested in those masculine/feminine roles, and we fall into the trap EVERY TIME.
All the work feminists did to move toward a more sensible world is erased by just shoving a T up against the LGB.
>She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews.
In the last decade of her life, Louisa shared her house with her widowed sister Anna and Anna’s two sons. Also living with them was a young niece, the daughter of youngest sister May who died in childbirth.
Effectively, Louisa & Anna were co-parenting 3 children. Anna was obviously called “mama” by her sons & probably also by her motherless niece. Which left Louisa (the breadwinner of the family) with the traditional paternal role. I can imagine her nephews & niece called her “papa” in a semi-joking affectionate way.
Turns out she wasn’t trans after all. She was non-binary.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/little-women-author-louisa-may-alcott-may-have-been-non-binary-klcl5ckkf
Mystery solved!