Louisa on the Front Lines Read online

  Many people thought his teaching ideas were ridiculous. Regardless, the school he opened in Boston in 1834 was successful for six years. Defying the common belief that girls didn’t need an education, half of his twenty students were girls (two of whom were his daughters Anna and Lu). But Bronson was ahead of his time, and when he allowed an African American child to enroll in the all-white school, the parents quickly withdrew their children. Soon after, Bronson’s school closed, leaving his family thousands of dollars in debt.

  Bronson took an active part in caring for his daughters, which was also unheard of at the time. He carefully observed their behavior and kept detailed records of their development, believing that children were born into the world morally perfect, “trailing clouds of glory.” His wife, Abba, agreed.

  Unfortunately for Lu, her parents’ high ideals meant that they expected perfection from her. Any flaw must be fixed. They didn’t see people for who they were but for how far they fell short of who they should be. Lu did not fit neatly into her father’s ideas. Rebellious, willful, and short tempered, Lu was all action, tearing through the house, making noise, pulling her older sister Anna’s hair, climbing and falling out of trees, and running away from home.

  When Lu was three and a half years old, he recorded her behavior in his journal: “Father, mother, sister, objects all are equally defied, and not infrequently the menace terminates in blows.… Sitting with me today Louisa held my hand in hers, and while enjoying the sense of bodily contact, she seemed to be instinctively tempted to pinch me.”

  To tame Lu’s “wild exuberance of a powerful nature,” Bronson used “discipline mingling severity and kindness.” This meant Lu received spankings—even though her father said he didn’t believe in corporal punishment. But, instead of making him question his pious self-image as a child-rearing expert and his unrealistic expectations of his daughter, he blamed his wife. “I do not believe in its [spanking] efficacy except as a corrective discipline,” he explained in his journal. “Had the children been under my supervision continually… I do not believe it would have been necessary to resort to such methods.”

  Bronson rarely had to punish Anna, whom he favored. He thought fair-haired, blue-eyed Anna resembled and acted more like him, while dark-haired Lu looked and acted more like her mother. Anna was a “good girl”; she was delicate and listened to her father, trying to please him and complying with his rules. Bronson noted in his journal, “She listened to what I was saying, and after I had finished, putting her arms around me, she said, ‘I like you!’”

  Unlike Lu, who defiantly broke the rules and expressed her frustration with a fiery temper, just like her mother. Bronson complained further about Lu in his journal, “She only looks toward the objects of her desires and steers proudly, adventurously… toward the heaven of her hopes. The stronger the opposing gale, the more sullenly and obstinately does she ply her energies.”

  Viewing his children as an extension of himself and focusing on his need to mold them into his idea of perfection, Bronson was unable to see that Lu’s fierce determination in the face of opposition wasn’t a flaw. It was in fact the perfect trait to nurture the seed of her ambition and help it bloom. Bronson’s disapproval and rejection of Lu caused her to look back on her childhood and think that she was “the worst child ever known,” especially when he called her a “demon.”

  Always known for her quick wit and humor, Lu tried to make light of the criticism by signing her letters to her father “Ever your loving demon.” But the constant criticism and rejection emotionally wounded her, making her believe she wasn’t good enough. Lu wanted her father’s approval and love, as well as her mother’s. It wouldn’t be until after her father’s next failed experiment that Lu would figure out how she was going to get it.

  In 1843, her father had decided to cofound a utopian society, a new Eden, based on transcendental beliefs when Lu was ten years old, following the failure of his school in Boston. He moved the family to a run-down farmhouse in Harvard and named the communal farm Fruitlands even though, as Lu wryly noted, there was no orchard. But the name Fruitlands reflected the strict rule that no one on the premises was allowed to eat meat or dairy products of any kind. “No animal substances neither flesh, butter, cheese, eggs, nor milk pollute our tables, nor corrupt our bodies,” wrote a member of Fruitlands. The only acceptable fruits and vegetables where those that grew above ground, toward heaven, such as apples. Root vegetables, such as potatoes, which grew underground and, in Bronson’s mind, toward hell, were forbidden.

  The members weren’t allowed to use animals for farm labor or manure for fertilizer. Although Bronson grew up on a farm, he couldn’t see that his strict ideals were impractical and unrealistic. Without oxen or horses to help plow the fields, there weren’t enough laborers to grow the food needed to become self-sufficient.

  At one time, there was a total of fourteen members at Fruitlands, but Bronson and the other philosophers were often gone, traveling around trying to recruit more members. He left his wife behind with the burden of caring for their four young daughters along with the labor-intensive farming and housework. Isolated and overworked with no source of income, Abba was miserable and afraid she was losing her mind, writing in her journal, “Circumstances most cruelly drive me from the enjoyment of my domestic life.… I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction.… I hope the experiment will not bereave me of my mind.… [T]his [is an] invasion of my rights as a woman and a mother.”

  Young Lu also hated Fruitlands and poured her heart out in her journal. “More people coming to live with us; I wish we could be together, and no one else. I don’t see who is to clothe and feed us all, when we are so poor now. I was very dismal, and then went to walk and made a poem.”

  Bronson’s experiment lasted for six months before it failed. Besides the Alcott family, the number of members had dwindled to two. “He was very strict, indeed rather despotic, in his rule of community.… They were nearly starved to death… [and] would have perished with hunger if they had not furtively gone among the surrounding farmers and begged for food,” ex-members told a reporter.

  The unforgiving New England winter was upon them, and they were running out of firewood. They were not allowed to use fabric made from animals or harvested with slave labor, but their linen clothes were not warm enough for them to survive the winter. Still, Bronson stubbornly clung to his ideals and considered joining the nearby Shaker settlement, a religious community with a communal farming system and profitable woodworking business. The only caveat was the Shakers separated family members by gender and age, so the Alcotts would be required to live separate lives, seeing their children only once a year.

  “I was very unhappy, and we all cried.… I prayed God to keep us all together,” Lu wrote at the time in her journal. (Years later, she would comment, “Little Lu began to feel the family cares and peculiar trials.… She never forgot this experience, and her little cross began to grow heavier from this.”)

  But, in the end, Lu’s mother refused to join the Shaker community. She planned on leaving her husband and taking her daughters with her. “The arrangements here [at Fruitlands] have never suited me, and I am impatient to leave all behind.… My duties have been arduous, but my satisfaction small,” Abba wrote.

  For Bronson, it was a difficult decision. He didn’t want to compromise his principles, but he ultimately decided not to join the Shakers in order to keep his family together.

  However, Bronson was so overwhelmed with disappointment and grief over his failed utopia that he went on a hunger strike and refused to get out of bed. For months, his wife had been questioning her husband’s mental state and confided to her brother in a letter, “I do not allow myself to despair of his recovery, but oh, Sam that piercing thought flashes through my mind of insanity, and a grave, yawning to receive his precious body, would be to me a consolation compared to that condition of life.”

  All the same, Abba was left scrambling, trying to figure out how
to make money. She didn’t want to sell her silver teapot and spoons, but her extended family was tired of her asking for money to pay off their mounting debts. The seemingly never-ending cycle of indebtedness to family members began years ago when Bronson’s own father, a hardworking farmer, sold off part of his farm to settle his son’s first big debt. Abba’s father, an enterprising merchant, stopped giving them money after it was evident Bronson didn’t intend to pay him back.

  When Abba’s brother, Samuel, asked why Bronson thought a paying job was beneath him, Abba explained that Bronson didn’t believe he should accept wages—only donations—which limited his job prospects. “No one will employ him in his way,” she told her brother in a letter. “He cannot work in theirs, if he thereby involve his conscience. He is resolved in this matter that I believe he will starve or freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort.” Despite her misgivings, the relentless strain on their marriage, and her impulse to leave him because of the Fruitlands debacle, Abba was loyal and supportive of her “visionary” husband. She not only considered him a genius and morally superior but also her savior.

  WHEN SHE first met the tall, blond, blue-eyed teacher, with a polished gentlemanly manner and a penchant for beautiful clothes, she was twenty-six years old, a spinster at the time, living with her brother. Although she’d been engaged previously, her fiancé had died unexpectedly. Abba wanted to find love and have a family of her own, and she was immediately taken by the quiet and charismatic budding philosopher. But Abba May came from a prominent Boston family, a descendent of the distinguished Quincys and Sewalls, which included John Hancock, the signer of the Declaration of the Independence, in its extended family. This made Bronson painfully aware of his humble beginnings, growing up a poor country boy whose mother was known to enjoy an unwomanly corncob pipe. He had worked hard over the years educating himself and refining his rough edges.

  Despite their stark contrasts, Abba pursued him, encouraged by her brother, who wrote, “Don’t distress yourself about his poverty. His mind and heart are so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do not seem to concern him.” And, despite their contrasting personalities, they decided to get married. “He is moderate, I am impetuous—He is prudent and humble—I am forward and arbitrary. He is poor—but we are both industrious—why may we not be happy?” she confided in a letter to Samuel.

  But Abba couldn’t see that hidden underneath Bronson’s seemingly serene and pious exterior lurked a destructive fatal flaw. Bronson exhibited traits of a covert narcissist, and his self-absorption always caused him to prioritize his needs before those of anyone else, including his family.

  “Wife, children, and friends are less to him than the great ideas he is seeking to realize,” Abba admitted in her journal, eleven years into her marriage and a few months before moving to Fruitlands.

  Bronson clung to the grandiose idea that he was more enlightened and had a higher purpose than everyone else. His philosophy was going to change the world, and Bronson’s narcissistic need to maintain the Christlike image he had of himself, instead of placing his family’s most basic needs first, was going to keep his wife and daughters stranded in emotional and financial poverty. The family was often forced to rely on the generosity of others, friends and neighbors who left baskets of food on their doorstep, gave old dresses to the girls, and discreetly provided money. “It is this dependence on others which is the worm gnawing at the vitals of my tranquility,” Abba wrote in a letter.

  After the Fruitlands disaster, and Bronson’s emotional and financial abandonment of his family, Abba and her daughters were left to fend for themselves. “I have no accomplishments,” Abba noted to her brother. “For I never was educated for a fine lady, but I have handicraft, wit, and will enough to feed the body and save the souls of myself and children.”

  Abba worked tirelessly trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. But respectable job opportunities for women were scarce. For the next few years, she took in sewing and boarders, tried but failed to start a school, and even left her family behind to work as the matron of a water-cure spa in Maine.

  Through friends, she finally found a respectable job in Boston helping the poor as the city’s first paid social worker. Abba, like Bronson, was always trying to help others whom she considered worse off than herself, even if it meant their children went without a meal.

  “She always did what came to her in the way of duty and charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love’s sake,” Lu commented.

  The Alcott home was “a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men,” Lu recorded in her journal. “Father and Mother had no money to give, but gave them sympathy, help, and if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires. This is practical Christianity.”

  Eventually, Abba opened an employment office, trying to help “good girls” find jobs as cooks, parlor maids, seamstresses, and dressmakers. For a subscription of one dollar, the client was entitled to choose from the pool of prospective employees for the duration of six months.

  “It was not fit work for her,” Lu noted. “But it paid.”

  Meanwhile, Lu’s father was trying to articulate his philosophical ideas for publication, but he was a more gifted talker than writer. He would spend months on the road giving lectures. But these endeavors were not profitable, and one time he brought home only one dollar.

  Abba’s practicality and quest to earn money greatly influenced Lu, feeding her growing ambition. Abba’s struggle was Lu’s living example that women deserved better-paying jobs and equal rights. Her mother was also very vocal about women’s right to vote, writing a petition and sending it to the state legislature in 1852 (it was rejected). Lu’s father was a role model too, influencing her belief that a woman should be self-reliant. Abba reinforced these beliefs by encouraging Lu and her sisters to learn a trade as they sought work to support the family. “My girls shall have trades,” Abba informed her brother.

  WHEN LU was twelve years old, she realized that her sewing skills could make her money. She started making clothes for dolls and selling them to the neighborhood children. The tiny, soft brimless hats she made were all the rage. “To the great dismay of the neighbors’ hens,” Lu recalled, “who were hotly hunted down, that I might tweak out their downiest feathers to adorn the dolls’ headgear.”

  A year later, thirteen-year-old Lu figured out how she was going to win her parents’ love and approval. “I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child,” Lu wrote. “I am old for my age and don’t care much for girl’s things. People think I’m wild… but Mother understands and helps me. I have not told any one about my plan; but I’m going to be good.” Her strategy to be good was to be rich and take care of her family—to rescue them from poverty. To “be a help and a comfort, not a care and a sorrow,” especially to her hardworking and self-sacrificing mother whom she wanted to have “every wish granted.”

  But, as Lu grew older, she was still a wild and irrepressible tomboy, which was not how a young woman was supposed to behave. Her father, who didn’t approve of her plan to be rich, continued to be sharply critical of his mercurial and mercenary daughter. Lu was resigned that she was the bad one.

  Her older sister, Anna, was proper, virtuous, dutiful, and self-sacrificing. Lu’s younger sister, Lizzie, was the saintlike “good” one (shy and serene like Bronson). Lu’s youngest sister, May, who had pretty blond curls, was the “baby” of the family and a little vain and selfish, but things always seemed to go her way.

  Lu expressed her pain in her journal, “My quick tongue is always getting me into trouble, and my moodiness makes it hard to be cheerful when I think how poor we are, how much worry it is to live, and how many things I long to do I never can. So every day is a battle, and I’m so tired I don’t want to live; only it’s cowardly to die till you have done something.”

  Despite the disapproval (or possibly because of i
t) Lu didn’t give up on her plan. She started working outside their home when she was fifteen and wasn’t afraid to try her hand at different jobs, even working as a servant when she was eighteen years old. She was hired out through her mother’s employment agency. Her service job scandalized her wealthy relatives, much to Lu’s delight, considering her rebellious streak. But her job as a hired companion was not what it seemed and turned out to be a humiliating experience, which would negatively affect her attitude toward men. Lu rarely talked about it, but, when she did, there would be tears in her eyes.

  The lawyer who hired her, James Richardson, wanted more than a servant to look after his ailing sister and father. After finishing the housework, he wanted Lu to sit at his feet and listen to him while he spoke philosophically and made romantic overtures. When Lu refused him, he assigned her the roughest chores to do—chopping wood, carrying heavy buckets of water from the well, and shoveling snow.

  It was the hardest work Lu ever did. But she was determined to stay, which she did for seven weeks. Lu had made a promise, and she didn’t want to go back on her word. She also wanted to give her mother enough time to find a replacement.

  The bad experience was made worse when Lu was paid a paltry four dollars. The experience made Lu feel like “a galley slave,” and the insight reinforced her belief in equal rights—for slaves and women. And it didn’t make her waver in her determination to find a job and be paid what she was worth.

  “I will do something, by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!”