“Our Own Marches”: Little Women, Then and Now
I grew up with Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (1994). For many of us who came of age in the 1990s, it was a winter ritual: plaid skirts, candlelit parlors, snow-flecked Massachusetts streets. Winona Ryder’s Jo was our rebel heroine—quick-witted, tender, restless, forever scribbling in the attic while the world told her to marry. That movie was not just a story; it was a map of girlhood, friendship, and the promise that art and integrity might coexist.
Years later, living in New England, not far from Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, the story feels even more personal. The damp cold of Concord in March, the creak of old floorboards, the smell of pine smoke—it’s all there, not just in memory but in landscape. When Greta Gerwig’s Little Women arrived in 2019, it felt like coming home to a house I’d once lived in, only to find the furniture rearranged, the windows thrown open, and sunlight pouring in at a new angle.
Armstrong’s 1994 film is lush, intimate, and sincere—a story of domestic feminism that honors the hearth as a site of quiet revolution. Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy grow not by rejecting their world, but by inhabiting it fully, insisting that tenderness is a kind of courage. The feminism of the 1994 film is warm and moral, rooted in the language of character. When Marmee (played by Susan Sarandon) tells her daughters she’s “angry nearly every day of my life,” it’s a revelation whispered through candlelight, not shouted from a barricade. Her radicalism is maternal, her power measured in gentleness and example.
Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation, by contrast, explodes that quiet into something self-conscious, even metafictional. Her Jo (Saoirse Ronan) doesn’t just live Little Women—she’s writing it, editing it, negotiating for copyright and control. The film weaves together two timelines: the idyllic past of the sisters’ youth and the more fractured present of adulthood. This structural boldness reframes Alcott’s story as a dialogue between author and creation, idealism and reality, art and commerce. Gerwig’s feminism is not content with sympathy—it demands agency.
Both films are feminist, but in different registers. Armstrong’s is the feminism of community and care: it honors the moral labor of women whose work has long gone unnamed. Her film lingers on domestic scenes—the sewing, the nursing, the shared laughter—as sacred acts of endurance. The sisters’ lives, though bound by convention, radiate purpose. In that sense, Armstrong’s Little Women echoes Alcott’s own: modest, moral, but quietly subversive.
Gerwig’s Little Women sings in a louder key. Her Jo doesn’t simply choose independence—she defines it. The 2019 film refuses to end neatly; it complicates Alcott’s conclusion, blurring the line between Jo the character and Louisa the author. “Women have minds and souls as well as hearts,” Jo declares, echoing Alcott’s lifelong tension between duty and desire. Gerwig gives us a Jo who wins not only artistic fulfillment but financial control—something Alcott herself fought for in a world of male publishers.
Faithful and Free
Armstrong’s version feels like Alcott’s New England—snow, hearth, and moral steadfastness. Its fidelity lies in tone: the sincerity, the warmth, the moral weight of small decisions. It softens Amy’s vanity, sanctifies Beth’s death, and closes the circle of family with old-fashioned grace.
Gerwig’s version, meanwhile, is faithful in spirit but radical in form. She keeps the dialogue crisp and modern without breaking period illusion, rearranging time to reveal how memory shapes narrative. Her final scene—Jo watching her book being bound—is pure invention, yet truer to Alcott’s life than any literal retelling. It’s the kind of fidelity that transcends imitation.
Watching the two films together is like reading the same novel at different ages. The 1994 film is the book you loved as a child—its faith, its warmth, its moral clarity. The 2019 film is the same book reread as an adult—aware of its compromises, attuned to its silences, and still moved beyond words.
Perhaps that’s why both endure. Little Women has always been about change—about how women make meaning in a world that limits them, about the ache of growing up and the grace of letting go. Armstrong taught us to love the March sisters as ideals; Gerwig reminds us they were also artists, workers, and women negotiating power in their own right.
Living here, not far from Alcott’s old desk in Concord, I sometimes imagine her looking out the window, pen in hand, watching the seasons turn. I think she would have recognized herself in both Jo Marches—the one by the fire and the one in the publishing office. And I think she would have smiled to see her “little women” still sparking conversation, still arguing, still alive.
