“Jo’s Little Woman”
March 24th, 2026
Writer: Nascha Martinez
Editor: Emma Minock
I never got “lost” in books, as I often felt that the written word was the only time I was truly found.
Like so many little children, I had one favorite book to re-read as a kid: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The premise was, as the name might imply, a book centered around the story of four women, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, who undertake daily life and growth together during the time of the Civil War. To some, this novel may undoubtedly sound like a read best intended for putting one to sleep. For me, every small descriptor, even of the moment around the fireplace, reading their father’s letter was like candy to a mind searching not for dopamine, but for definition.
I spent hours on Buzzfeed personality quizzes, reading up on the author, and, when the newest movie came out, re-watching scenes to see how seamlessly the dialogue in her book translated to the cinematic works of Greta Gerwig. However, as I got older, books for fun turned into texts for class and work for our future. Somewhere along the way, the connection I had forged between myself and those little women seemed to dissipate into a nostalgic remembrance of who I once was.
While I had previously found bits and pieces of myself in every little woman, it was in Jo and her stubborn yet well-intentioned soul that I had once found myself more seen, especially as an adolescent, than in any character I had encountered before. In college, after years of forgetting about Little Women, those stories that were once engraved in my mind quite literally verbatim came back to me in my 8:30 English class on one not-so-sunny Michigan day.
The question at hand: Does college make you a better person? Substantively, defining better requires a certain amount of ambiguity, but coming off the rush that is the first semester of freshman year, the only answer that could come to mind was a different question: Do I know who I am enough to know what better is?
My mind, in that moment, went to my always-favorite character, Jo, who got married long after her then-perceived time, and who invested in reading and gallivanting and all manner of activities then unsuitable for a young woman. Jo was herself and, though afraid of being alone, did not let unease unsettle her guiding values. What the character of Jo really teaches is that living your life authentically, regardless of what society or sisters might think, is what develops the most meaningful outcomes.
In college, confronted with the many challenges of finding myself and my future, I found once again in Jo a literary north star: pursuing becoming your best is, in fact, your best so long as you enter into that pursuit with honesty. As she herself would say, “I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship." (Part 2, Chapter 41)
