https://www.city-journal.org/little-women
You might think that when a film you love is nominated for an Oscar for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress, and best supporting actress it would be a time for champagne, but in the case of Little Women, it’s been sour grapes all around. The film received six nominations in total, but its many avid admirers were still furious: Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, was not nominated for best director, proof that misogyny reigns in Hollywood.
Even before it opened, the film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel had taken on heavy sociological and political significance. Amy Pascal, the movie’s producer, had tweeted that men were not attending screenings of the Greta Gerwig–directed movie due to “unconscious bias” against women. Another Hollywood feminist VIP, Melissa Silverstein, jumped in: “I think it’s total, fully conscious sexism and shameful. The female story is just as universal as the male story.” The media were off and running: “Little Women has a Little Man problem,” Vanity Fair announced. “Men Are Dismissing Little Women: What a Surprise,” was the snarky title of a New York Times column.
Actually, the reasons that men (and a fair number of women like myself) don’t share in the widespread euphoria over the film couldn’t be more mundane. For one thing, the movie is based on a children’s book—to be precise, a book for girls. Thomas Niles, Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers, asked her to write a “girls’ book.” And that’s exactly what she set out to do. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but she needed the money. “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this kind of thing,” she complained in her diary in the spring of 1868. “Never liked girls; never knew many besides my sisters.” When Niles reported to Alcott that his niece had found the early pages enthralling, Alcott, who remained unenthusiastic about the project, conceded: “As it is for them, they are the best critics.” No surprise, then, that grown men aren’t crowding theaters to see the latest movie version of a nineteenth-century girls’ book.