How the Women Became Little

In 1834, Amos Bronson Alcott—most famous now for being the father of the author of Little Women, but then a 34-year-old self-taught intellectual determined to become famous himself—founded the Temple School for children in Boston. One of his visions (he was the kind of man who had many) was of space: He wanted his school to be a kind of cathedral, and he found a fitting setting for it on the second floor of the recently built Masonic Temple on Boston Common. The classroom spanned 60 feet. Its ceilings were so high that in winter the cavernous space they enclosed was always cold. Its enormous arched window bathed everything in sacred-looking light. Alcott arranged the desks in a semicircle, since his would be a classroom of conversation, in which every soul was valued, every voice listened to. He would be these voices’ conductor. He put busts of Plato, Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and Socrates around the classroom’s periphery, and a bas relief of Christ behind his own desk, right above his own head.

Alcott’s school quickly found a different kind of space, too, thanks to his assistant, ; not long after the Temple School opened, she started writing a book about it, called . In 1835, a full year before ’s appeared, it would become the first published book to emerge from the Transcendentalist movement. Peabody was 30 years old when she worked at the Temple School, and surely one of the most overqualified—and had opened her own school at the age of 17. Peabody was the one who taught Alcott’s students mathematics and Latin, because Alcott himself wasn’t qualified to teach either. She was also the one who found him his first crop of students amongst the children of the Boston intellectual elite who knew her but not him.