The Woman Behind the Girls

Louisa didn't want to get married, it seems from this text. She moved to Boston in 1855 when she was 22 and lived on her own. She took in sewing and looked after children and wrote. At 24, she wrote, "I love luxury, but freedom and independence better." Then, sadly, in her early fifties, "Freedom was always my longing, but I have never had it." So many things didn't exactly work out -- for her or for the country. All that zealous abolitionism, and racism is still our besetting sin. All the work for women's suffrage, and neither men nor women turn out in great number to vote. Louisa died early from mercury poisoning (used to treat her typhoid fever), and drug companies still preserve their vaccines with mercury because it's cheap.

War still defines us: Louisa was for the Civil War and nearly gave her life for it. Bakke was against the Vietnam War and plotted violence against the government. We still destroy and are destroyed. High-minded authors were certainly for equal rights, except that Nathaniel Hawthorne ranted to his publisher that "America is now wholly given over to a d****d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash." In 1870, "Louisa made more money than any other living America author." Since she died, 118 years ago, our technology has changed greatly. Our brash, greedy, materialistic, idealistic country seems not to have changed much at all.

Sunday in Book World

· Overachievers at Walt Whitman High.

· White supremacists after the Civil War.

· Young intellectuals in New York.

· Dirty secrets of college admissions.

· An enemy combatant tells his tale.