SOURCE: "Departures," in The Promise of Destiny: Children and Women in the Short Stories of Louisa May Alcott, Greenwood Press, 1983, pp. 135-48.

In the following essay, Marsella articulates the "moral code" of Alcott's Scrap Bag stories in relation to the author's portrayal of women and children.

The short stories in the six volumes of Louisa May Alcott's Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag are the children's counterpart of that great body of essays, pamphlets, and books written in the nineteenth century by ministers and popular writers who gave advice to parents on how to rear their children. As such, they can tell us much about the attitudes and values that nineteenth-century parents held about their children and the proper way they should be reared, although, of course, they can tell us little about the actual practices parents engaged in. Although the stories are not as heavily didactic as earlier nineteenth-century tales...