“A Better Plan of Child-Rearing”
Health, Wellness, and Bodily Control in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins
A version of this paper was originally presented at the 82nd Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society on July 14, 2023 in Concord, MA by Jill Fuller
Illustration from first edition of Eight Cousins, 1873
“Sex In Education”
Let’s start not with a look at Eight Cousins, but with a brief discussion of a lecture that took the medical world and the broader public by storm in 1872 and 1873. In 1872, Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke, a physician and board member at Harvard Medical School, delivered a lecture to the New England Women’s Club in Boston entitled “Sex In Education, or A Fair Chance For the Girls.” Clarke argued that the reason women and adolescent girls were delicate, feeble, and prone to illness was largely because they were being educated in the same way as boys. Although he believed they were intellectually equal to men, he believed women should not be educated equally.
According to Clarke’s “closed system theory”, the body had limited energy and it could not divest equal amounts to both the brain and the body. If the brain was used too much, the body would suffer. Adolescent girls needed their energy to develop their reproductive organs and undergo menstruation; if the reproductive system was neglected, he wrote, “weakness and disease” of the mind and body would follow.
He expanded his position in a pamphlet, published in 1873, which went to a second printing within a week. Support and condemnation came in from physicians, activists, and educators in both England and America, including Julia Ward Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a friend of Louisa May Alcott. As scholar Elinor Cleghorn said, Howe, like many others, emphasized that “social conditions….were the root cause of ill health.” The culture, not biology, was creating weak women.
Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson also pointed out that Clarke only focused on wealthy and middle-class women, not the lower classes who were already working and “divesting energy.” It’s also likely that his concern was for white women, not people of color. Essentially, his argument was about power and control over certain women’s bodies, over reproduction and the continuation of the white upper class, not about health.
Eight Cousins and Bodily Control
How does Eight Cousins fit in? Eight Cousins is, at its core, a health manifesto for adolescent girls- with a bit thrown in for boys. It follows 13-year-old orphan Rose Campbell as she meets an extended family of cousins, aunts, and her new guardian, a doctor named Uncle Alec. Rose is described as thin, listless, tired, pale, and suffering from headaches at the beginning of the novel, so Alec guides Rose to be a healthier, stronger, and more confident girl through exercise, a better diet, and less restrictive clothing. As Rose forms bonds with her cousins and learns lessons about serving others, she also faces choices about health, wellness, and bodily autonomy- ultimately learning the “magic of good health.”
Eight Cousins was written in 1874 and published in book form in 1875 and I believe it’s no coincidence that Alcott writes about adolescent female health only one year after the publication of “Sex In Education.” In fact, in August 1875, Alcott wrote in a letter that “Young girls in America do not get a good education in various respects, even though much is taught to them. They know nothing of health care…My story is intended to encourage a better plan of child-rearing…” Like Howe and Higginson, Alcott was responding to Clarke’s views, not in a pamphlet, but through her chosen medium: the juvenile novel.
In this paper, I highlight how Eight Cousins explores control over health and the body, as well as how its central themes connect to current debates on health and bodily autonomy. Alcott’s own experiences inform her perspectives on this topic, so in this essay, I’ll also examine the influences in her life that appear in Eight Cousins.
“A Smart Run Round the Garden”
"Let the girl run and shout as much as she will- it is a sure sign of health...Tomboys make strong women..." "I climb and jump and run so much..." The first statement is Uncle Alec talking about Rose; the second is a line from Alcott’s childhood journal.
At the beginning of Eight Cousins, Rose has no agency over her own body. Her aunts tell her what to do, what to wear, what to eat and drink, and which medicines to take. Rose complains to Alec, “I am so tired and poorly all the time, I can’t do any thing I want to, and it makes me cross…” “That we can cure and we will,” Alec responds. When Uncle Alec arrives, he makes new decisions for Rose’s health, guiding rather than ordering Rose, and explaining his reasons to help her make her own choices. He encourages her to exercise and play like her male cousins, substitutes her morning coffee with milk, and offers her oatmeal rather than fried food.
He also connects physical with mental health, saying, “A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman,” echoing one of Alcott’s private sentiments that “Health of body helps health of soul.” Throughout the novel, Rose’s uncle- the adult- is the one guiding her to the desired outcome; he is in control of the “experiment” of improving Rose’s health. However, Rose soon begins to make her own choices of dress, diet, and activity. For example, when given a choice between tight-fitting corsets and dresses that make her trip or flannel undergarments similar to pajamas that allow her to run and jump, she chooses the latter. She learns to swim and row, bats balls as well as her male cousins, and tells her aunt “she must run and shout whether it is proper or not.”
Alcott too was physically active and strong as a child and young woman. At 10, she lived in her father’s utopian community at Fruitlands, and in her journals, we see contradictory examples of children highly restricted in their diets, lessons, and thoughts, but also given hours of freedom to run and play in the woods. In one entry, she wrote, “After breakfast I washed dishes, and ran on the hill till nine, and had some thoughts, - it was so beautiful up there.” Physical activity was a way for Alcott to exert some sort of control over self and find solace in a situation where she had little external control.
Pain and Patience
At the beginning of the novel, we find out that Rose has been prescribed “a regiment” of medicines, which Uncle Alec swiftly dispatches. His three remedies are “plenty of sun, fresh air, and cold water…” This mirrors a journal entry of Alcott’s from 1871 when she decided to give up morphine “as sunshine, air, and quiet made sleep possible without it.” By the time she wrote Eight Cousins, Alcott was living with chronic illness, suffering from frequent bouts of neuralgia, leg pain, headaches, tiredness, and “aching bones.” She loved to write and work, but too much could set on an attack that would leave her bedridden. This loss of control over her body was devastating.
The fall and winter of 1874, when Alcott was writing Eight Cousins, was a difficult one. "Tried to work on my book, but was in such pain could not do much,” she journaled in October 1874. Again in December, she wrote in a letter, “I am not well, and with little relief from pain day and night worry wears upon me more than I like to have it.” It is notable to contrast the novel’s theme of wellness and a girl gaining strength and health against the backdrop of Alcott’s own pain while writing it.
Though we don’t know the exact cause of her illness, Alcott believed it was from the mercury administered to her when she contracted typhoid pneumonia as a nurse during the Civil War. This rationale allowed her to construct a narrative around her pain and illness centered on sacrifice and put the cause of her illness on an external source, rather than on her own lack of constitution or mismanagement of her health.
In the novel, Rose falls ill near the end, though like Louisa, it is outside of her control- not from the evils of physical or mental exertion but from cold weather and exposure. Rose’s cousin Mac, on the other hand, almost loses his eyesight from “abusing” them with “overwork” and must be bedridden for an extensive period. As Stephanie Peebles Tavera points out in her article “Crip Medicine: Environmental Health and the Matter of Hysteria”, this is a direct subversion of Clarke’s argument that men and boys were physically capable of handling extensive study and brain work. Mac’s illness is through his own mismanagement of his health and his body’s weakness.
The Medical Student
One of the most compelling scenes in Eight Cousins is the chapter “Brother Bones”, in which Rose becomes Uncle Alec’s “little medical student” and Alec teaches Rose anatomy using a human skeleton hanging from the chandelier of the study. Rose learns where the organs are located in the body, how many air cells are in a pair of lungs, and how the ribs are constructed and why corsets are harmful to them. This chapter, more than any other, is a direct attack on Clarke’s pamphlet. He and his supporter, Dr. Henry Maudsley, condemned female physicians; Uncle Alec responds with “This is a medical college where women are freely admitted…” By teaching Rose anatomy, Alec passes along one of the most critical lessons of the book: health education is crucial to having control over one’s own body.
As Alec tells a horrified Aunt Myra, “I mean to teach her how to manage her nerves so that they won’t be a curse to her, as many a woman’s become through ignorance or want of thought. To make a mystery or terror of these things is a mistake, and I mean Rose shall understand and respect her body so well that she won’t dare to trifle with it as most women do.”
The Fight For Bodily Autonomy Today
Today, we’re seeing the debate over bodily autonomy and access to health information take center stage again in our local and national discourse. In 2022, according to the American Library Association, there were “1,269 demands to censor library books and resources,” the highest number since ALA began compiling data more than 20 years ago and more than double the challenges reported in 2021. Included in this list are books that focus on health education, sexual education, and information about sexual and gender identity for young adults, such as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberly and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson.
Abortion rights were severely threatened in 2022 with Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protection to people seeking abortions. Simultaneously, legislation denying gender-affirming medical and mental health care to trans, intersex, and non-binary people has skyrocketed, with 561 total bills introduced across the country; 39 have passed and 129 have failed as of this date. Most are still active.
Personal health and bodily autonomy has once again become a battleground, as it was in Alcott’s day. Like Clarke’s pamphlet in 1873 decrying the strain of study on young women’s bodies, the core argument is not about health itself, but about power and control. We know how Alcott responded. How will we?
Photo from Unsplash
Works Cited:
“2022 Book Bans.” Unite Against Book Bans. Published April 24, 2023. Accessed May 23, 2023. https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/2022-book-bans/.
“ALA Unveils Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022,.” Unite Against Book Bans. Published April 24, 2023. Accessed May 23, 2023. https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/most-challenged-books-2022/.
Alcott, Louisa May. Eight Cousins. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875.
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, with an introduction by Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
Alcott, Louisa May. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, with an introduction by Madeleine B. Stern. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
Clarke, Edward H. Sex in education; or, A fair chance for the girls. Boston, J. R. Osgood and company, 1873. Pdf. Accessed May 2, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/item/07031164/.
Cleghorn, Elinor. Unwell women : misdiagnosis and myth in a man-made world. New York: Dutton, 2022.
Tavera, Stephanie Peebles. “CRIP MEDICINE: ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND THE MATTER OF HYSTERIA.” In (P)Rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, 29–67. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Accessed May 16, 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2x1nqk1.6.