Column: When I was a little woman

“ ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” Those opening words of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women are, to me, among the most memorable first lines in all of literature—right up there with “Marley was dead,” “Call me Ishmael,” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged. . . .” I was given a copy of the book when I was far too young to have the patience to read it all the way through, so I read the first page many times before I finally managed to press on with the rest.

From the first page to the last, Jo was always my favorite of the March sisters, and not just because her name is similar to mine. I loved how awkward and unladylike she was, always scorching her dress or staining her gloves, but portrayed as no less worthy of affection because of it. Although I didn’t share her early love of writing—that came much later for me—I admired her determination to develop her talent into both a career and a means of self-actualization. For all that times have changed since the 1860s, her struggles with and against the expectations of her sex are timelessly relevant.

Miller’s Diary

Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.

As I was growing up in the 1980s, I was taught that girls could do anything; a poster on the wall of my childhood bedroom even said as much. At the same time, subtle and insidious messages to the contrary were all around. The same poster , for example, featured a picture of Smurfette , the only female smurf in Smurf Village, who impressed on a generation of children that although boys could be brainy , handy , or grouchy , being a girl was itself a unique personality trait.

Thankfully, my childhood, unlike the Marches’, wasn’t disrupted by civil war, and we never had a Christmas without presents. On one memorable occasion—I think it was in 1983, when I was six years old—my parents gave me two standout gifts.

One of those gifts was a doll: a Fisher Price “My Friend Jenny.” The really popular dolls of the day were the Cabbage Patch Kids, but my parents weren’t prepared to brave the department store brawls to buy into that craze. They convinced me that Jenny was close enough, and I happily accepted their reasoning.

The other was a science kit: a trove of components for doing all kinds of open-ended experiments. There was a little battery pack for wiring up simple electrical circuits to make lights flash and buzzers sound. There were color filters, polarizers, lenses, and diffraction gratings for playing around with light. I’m sure there were magnets in there somewhere. There was even a printed chart with pictures and descriptions of all the types of clouds and their funny names (“cumulonimbus” and all that).

All the pieces came packed in a plain green plastic box. It wasn’t branded specifically for girls, or even really specifically for kids. The experiments were kid friendly, in that they were safe for a six-year-old to play with, but they weren’t presented as the science of dirt or snot or nail polish or any other preconceived notion of what kids (or girls) are supposed to like. Rather, it seemed its basic premise was that the physical world is fascinating enough, in and of itself, for explorers of all ages, and it doesn’t need to be brightened up with flashy distractions to be made interesting. I agreed—and still do.

I adored and treasured both gifts. I relate this story not because I think my childhood interests made me exceptional, but because I think they didn’t. Nobody ever told me—at least, not in so many words—that there was anything wrong with playing with dolls, liking science, and being a girl. So I happily persisted in all three.

But my nascent interest in natural science was temporarily derailed just a few years later, when I discovered the superpower that would dominate my life for the rest of my formative years: I was very, very good at solving the particular sort of math problems posed in math contests, from Mathcounts to the USA Mathematical Olympiad . Where Jo March had her writing, I had my math books, at least for a while.

Competition is inherently a group activity, and the oddness of my showing up in the winner’s circle despite being a girl was suddenly impossible to ignore. Then puberty set in, which just further complicated everything. But that’s another story for another column.