Louisa May Alcott Society

  Legacy Forum In honor of the 150th anniversary of Louisa May Alcott’s novel  Work  (1873) we invite short essays (2,000 to 3,000 words) that reflect on the intersections of labor, precarity, and organizing in nineteenth-century American women’s writing for an upcoming forum in  Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Drafted and pitched as a semi-autobiographical novel in the early years of the 1860s, but not published until after Alcott’s blockbuster success with  Little Women  (1868),  Work  follows the protagonist through a range of jobs in which she gathers a community of laboring women, examining the gendered tolls of labor across class and racial lines. In our current moment of rising labor action in education and the arts, how can  Work  and related texts help us think through labor solidarity, especially in industries associated with gendered and intellectual work, as well as caregiving, reproduction, and other invisibilized forms of gendered labor? We invite close readi