The second half of the book in particular — originally published, and still sold in Britain, under the separate title Good Wives — “is, for the most part, incredibly dull; most of it is left out of film interpretations. And yet,” argues Hillary Kelly, “it needs to be reckoned with if we’re going to assess what it means for young girls to read Little Women today. … It is obsessed with wifely duty — deferential to patriarchy and dismissive of female ambition of any variety other than the maternal. … It’s downright strange that intelligent women would call a book that disposes of its protagonists’ dreams in order to settle them into lives darning socks ‘required reading’ for young girls today.”