Louisa May Alcott and her work Louisa May Alcott was a great writer of her time and is the perfect example of how conflicting messages during the American Renaissance influenced the lives of young women from all over the world. In the book Little Women Louisa gives Marmee the appearance and attitudes of her mother, Abba Alcott. Her mother once wrote that women should assert their "right to think, feel and live individually, to be something in themselves." In contrast, Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, felt that Louisa was more of a challenge because she was willful like her mother and had to be taught to control her impulses. The American Renaissance had a profound effect on Bronson Alcott's educational theories and this in turn influenced the life and writings of his daughter Louisa May Alcott. Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 to Bronson and Abba Alcott. Abba Alcott was the daughter of Colonel Joseph May, a supporter of women's rights and abolition. Louisa was quite lively, and understood this naturally, so her father blamed her mother for this. His father was a transcendentalist and believed that his lighter color indicated a deeper spirituality and a closer connection to divinity (Saxton 205). Bronson felt that Louisa couldn't control herself because she was born with dark hair like her mother. He referred to her as “possessed,” “pathetic,” and “bound in chains she could not break” (Sanderson 43). This clashed somewhat with his other belief that children were considered blank slates, or tablulae rasae. This theory simply states that the mind is in its hypothetical blank primary state before... halfway down the page... it is given a lot of time to think about school and raising children. So her book Little Women is almost an autobiographical account of her life, as well as a critical study of characters and events during the American Renaissance period. Works Cited: Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: Signet, 1983. Elbert, Sarah, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (Philadelphia: Temple, 1984), 86. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Femininity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Sanderson, Rena. "A Modern Mephistopheles: Louisa May Alcott's Exorcism of Patriarchy." American Transcendental Quarterly 5 (1991): 41-55. Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott: a modern biography. New York: Noon Press,1995.