The Revolutionary Way ‘Little Women’ Portrays Self-Love

After watching Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, I felt a pang of guilt in my stomach. It started at the end of the film when Jo’s relationship with Professor Baehr reached its climax. After realizing she loves him, Jo rushes to the train station to confess her feelings to the professor before he leaves for California. But the scene is far from a conclusion to Jo’s romantic journey. Instead, it knowingly epitomizes how often romantic love and self-actualization are intertwined. It’s this association that Gerwig’s Little Women attempts to undo.  

Little Women is not presented chronologically, and this scene comes shortly after we see “present day” Jo negotiating the publication of her novel with an editor who insists that every lead character must marry in order for readers to be satisfied. In this reference to author Louisa May Alcott’s real-life resistance to marrying off Jo, the film redirects the editor’s scrutiny of Jo’s novel to the story of Little Women itself. This meta moment confronts viewers with their own internalized ideas about the role of romance in women’s lives. Did Jo and Professor Baehr finally couple up because that ending best served the story’s plot and characters? Or did that scene only exist to appease an audience’s expectations? 

For me, this scene meant reckoning with the fact that I didn’t just want Jo and Professor Baehr to be together, but also felt my satisfaction with the story depended on it. Despite every feminist bone in my body, I wanted to see the fiercely independent Jo be proven wrong in her insistence she would never marry. The thought that she would do anything else would throw off the harmony and equilibrium I believed only love could stabilize.

Little Women sets out to unpack problematic reactions like mine by examining what marriage actually looks like through Meg, the eldest March sister. Meg falls in love with a schoolteacher and devotes herself to being a wife and mother. Given the feminist movement’s history of critiquing marriage as a sexist institution, it’s easy to mistake Meg’s desire for a domestic life as an antifeminist choice. The film follows the couple beyond their blissful wedding ceremony, bluntly portraying the sacrifice Meg endures — namely that she never became the actress she once aspired to be. But instead of shaming Meg’s decision, the film gives Meg the space to advocate for herself. When Jo points this reality out to Meg, Meg tells her sister, “Just because my dreams are different from yours, it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.” 

The film questions not only traditional domestic expectations for women, but more modern attitudes toward being single. After moving to New York to live out her dream of becoming a writer, Jo confesses that she is deeply lonely. The confession is particularly moving in light of a culture that often portays being single as feminist salvation. Between #dumphim T-shirts and songs like “Love Myself” by Hailee Steinfeld, being single is portrayed as an adequate, even  powerful, replacement of a romantic interest. This thinking preaches that by putting ourselves and our dreams first we will find absolute happiness. However, Jo’s confession proves that self-love is challenging and that being single also comes at a cost. Just as Meg sacrificed her acting dreams for her family, Jo discovers that her life choices come with their own sacrifices. 

In revealing the drawback of both Meg’s and Jo’s choices, Little Women shows that the decision to remain single is no more a guarantee of a fairytale ending than the decision to get married. Yet, the film also presents the idea that even if these choices don’t lead to perfect results, they may still be the right choices for certain people. By the end of the film, Meg and her husband reaffirm their love for one another, and Jo is united with her one true love: her novel. 

These characters’ journeys  expose our culture’s ridiculous link between relationship status and total happiness, which burned so strong in me when I first saw the film. To think that one facet of a person’s life could have such sway over their overall happiness only does a disservice to such deep and complex little women.