Revolutionary-Turned-Writer Kit Bakke ’68
To Read from Miss Alcott’s Email

Photo by Jacqui James

On Wednesday, Oct. 25, Kit Bakke '68 will read from her book Miss Alcott’s Email: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds, an imaginative hybrid of biography and memoir cast as a correspondence between Bakke and the 19th-century author and activist Louisa May Alcott. The reading, to take place at 7 p.m. in Haffner Hall's Dorothy Vernon Room, is free and open to the public.

Bakke is in many ways an exemplary, if not exactly typical, member of the Baby Boom generation. A founding member of the Bryn Mawr College chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, she later joined the radical Weather Underground, which advocated violent action in opposition to the Vietnam War. She lived in a commune for a while before embarking on a more conventional middle-class life. Like many women of her generation, she was the daughter of a full-time homemaker, but she chose to work full-time outside the home while raising her own children.

At 55, Bakke had seen two daughters through college and enjoyed professional success on an unusual career track that began with pediatric nursing, traveled through hospital management and ended up in highly remunerative information-systems consulting. “But,” Bakke says in Miss Alcott's Email, “I can’t help thinking that it’s not quite enough just being in a family, making another family, earning one’s keep and then exiting stage left.” Given the statistical probability of decades more of living, Bakke found herself asking a question many Baby Boomers face: “Now what? Where’s the action? The freedom and fear, the fun and fight?”

“My revolutionary days in the passionate and violent Weather Underground were like the ruins of Pompeii, the sharp edges slowly silted over by the ash of graduate school, marriage, kids in college, professional career, husband with ditto, vacations, gardening, dinners in nice restaurants,” she says. As she began to sift through those ashes, Bakke, an avid reader of both biography and 19th-century literature, discovered a profound sympathy with another revolutionary a few layers deeper.

Louisa May Alcott, Bakke discovered, had been passionately devoted to the abolition of slavery and to suffrage for women. She, too, had lived on a commune; she, too, had been a nurse, during the Civil War. Growing up in Concord, Mass., Alcott had absorbed transcendentalism at it source, tutored by her parents' neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Alcott, Bakke says, “never buried her scrapes, never laid aside her ideals, but mined them her whole life to create wealth (“I turn my adventures into bread & butter”), fame, and a string of good works. Plus she did it all husbandless in a time when the odds for female success were infinitesimal. Her life, surely, would give me impetus and ideas for thinking about the rest of mine.”

The written result is, according to The Washington Post, “an excellent book ... like a wonderful movie shot with a hand-held camera.”

Bakke's reading is sponsored by the Bryn Mawr College Bookshop, which will offer Miss Alcott's Email for sale; Bakke will autograph copies of the book after the reading.

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