Content Warning: The section of the guide includes discussion of gender-discrimination, illness, and death.

Novelist, poet, and short story writer Louisa May Alcott (November 29th, 1832 - March 6th, 1888) was the daughter of prominent Transcendentalist and Abolitionist parents, Amos and Abigail Alcott. Though largely educated by her parents, Alcott also studied with prominent authors who were involved in these same movements, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like her mother, Alcott was a suffragist. After the state of Massachusetts passed a law permitting women to vote in local elections pertaining to children and education, she was the first to register to vote in Concord.

Alcott’s education came also from being a first-hand witness to the anti-enslavement efforts of her parents and their friends. Her father co-founded an abolitionist society in 1830 with William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel J. May. He was also involved in the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that supported enslaved people seeking freedom. In the 1840s, when the Alcotts were living at a residence called The Wayside, they provided refuge for runaway formerly enslaved people. 

Also in the 1840s, the Alcotts started a Transcendentalist commune called Fruitlands that aspired to Edenism (See: Background). Residents sought to achieve spiritual purity by disconnecting themselves from an economic system that was inherently evil, since it profited from the labor of enslaved people.