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2.2 New Women Ideology
 
While Alcott’s Little Women celebrates women’s domestic role, it still reflects the new woman spirit of that time. New women means women lived at the end of the nineteenth century were changing dramatically on various fronts, most visibly so for daughters middle and upper classes. It was a revolutionary pursued for economically independent, physically adept, and mentally acute, and able to work, study and socialize on a part with men.
 
Traditional ideology restricted women’s mind, new women tried to break the old thought and find a way different from the traditional women’s roles. The new women are with not only independent consciousness, but a sense of responsibility. They are daughters who fulfill their families’ need and piety their parents, mothers who take care of their children with a kind-hearted heart, wives who help keep everything in order and are loyal to men. However, on the other hand, they are intransigent individuals who realize the importance of independence. New women are noble-hearted, they own sacrifice vigor, but they will not submit to their husbands. In their mind, men and women are individuals with equal spirit and intelligence, they have the same rights and are equal important at home. Men and women should mutual respect, arrange their home with mutual dependence (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979:176)
 
Alcott herself was a pioneer of feminist. In her later life, Alcott became an advocate for women’s suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote inConcord,Massachusetts, in a school board election (Sarah Elbert, 1984, 103). Alcott was different from most women at that time, she sought for individualism in her life. She based her heroine “Jo” on herself, but Jo marries at the end of the story whereas Alcott remained single throughout her life. She explained her “spinsterhood” in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, “because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”
 
In Alcott’s novel, the March sisters have a strong sense of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance and self-improvement. Though in the face of adversity, they face up to the hardship and cease to struggle. Self-support is the complete emancipation of men’s spirit, one should stand on his own legs. In their view, ingenuity, noncompliance should be advocated, and one should pay more attention to supple mind and action. They work hard to prove there are not worthless, they desire to undertake jobs to achieve social imperatives. The sisters show their talent of art, Meg goes out to work and earns money by teaching children to lighten the family burden, the sisters organized their own secret society to read newspaper and play drama, Jo earns money by writing and is against the traditional marriage, and husbands take part in the housework. Such scenes different from most families’ are common in the March family, shows their new woman ideology.
 
2.3 Feminist Movement in Alcott’s Age
 
Alcott was born in a transcendentalism family in 1832. Before she was born, the first period of feminism movement in theUnited Statesoccurred as the existence of the women’s sphere seemed to be limiting women’s range of activates. The intellectual and organizational progress women made during the antebellum period grew out of the antebellum reforms. Elizabeth 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。