Louisa May Alcott and her workLouisa May Alcott was a great writer of her time and is the perfect example of how the contradictory messages of the American Renaissance affected the lives of young women from all over the world. In the book Little Women, Louisa gives Marmee the appearance and attitudes of her own mother, Abba Alcott. Her mother once wrote that women should assert their “right to think and 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 strong-willed like her mother and needed to be taught to control her impulses. The American Renaissance had a profound effect on the educational theories of Bronson Alcott and this in turn affected 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 spirited and she came by it naturally, so her father blamed her mother for that. His father was a transcendentalist and he believed that his lighter color demonstrated a deeper spirituality and a closer connection to divinity (Saxton 205). Bronson felt that Louisa could not control herself because she was born with black hair like her mother. He called her “possessed,” “pathetic,” and “bound by chains she could not break” (Sanderson 43). This somewhat contradicted his other belief that children were considered blank slates, or tablulae rasae. This theory simply states that the mind is in its primary hypothetical state of emptiness or emptiness before the middle of the sheet gives it plenty of time to think about school and raising children. Thus, her book Little Women is almost an autobiographical account of her own life as well as a critical study of the characters and events of 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. Russell, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual science: The Victorian construction of femininity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Sanderson, Rena. “A Modern Mephistopheles: The Exorcism of Patriarchy by Louisa May Alcott.” American Transcendental Quarterly 5 (1991): 41-55. Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. New York: Midday Press,1995.