As it seems like in all things, America was behind the curve. Although Alcott came from a very forward thinking family, the rest of the United States did not agree that women should be formally educated for work. As such female writers in America were stifled in ways their European counterparts were not. The Bronte sisters and Jane Austin had paved a way (if at times small) for women in Europe to become writers, yet in America those pens remained mostly silent. That is not to say that there were no female writers, but there were no blockbusters like you had in Europe.

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However, by the 1840s, things began to change. As the Abolitionist movement grew so did the women's rights movement. Indeed the two movements were married to one another until a sticky divorce towards the beginning of the Civil War. Women at the time began to speak out about issues like slavery, education, the prison system and many others. These eventually became topics that women felt a need to write about. This influenced works including Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and actress Fanny Kimble's Journal of a Resident on a Georgian Plantation.

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However, no American woman had made the leap into fiction (or in Alcott's case, a semi-fabricated autobiographic novel). Louisa May Alcott was a really the first American writer to be wholly supported by their writing and become such a critical success. With her success came the emergence of a new type of female writer in America, and she was followed by some of the greats like Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Grace Elizabeth King, and Constance Fenimore Woolson