Wealth & Money Quote by Louisa May Alcott

A neat little punchline wrapped around a social diagnosis: Alcott sketches a world where money is no longer a fairy godmother but a system with assigned roles. The line sounds airy, even gossipy, but it’s doing something sharper than complaining about bad luck. “Men have to work and women to marry for money” isn’t a cute binary; it’s a trap disguised as practicality. Men are pushed into wage labor as proof of worth. Women are pushed into matrimony as their only sanctioned lever of economic power. The joke is that both are called “choices” in polite society.

Alcott’s intent reads as double-edged. She’s mocking the fading fantasy of effortless inheritance (“fortunes left them in that style”) while indicting the supposedly modern arrangement that replaces it: merit for men, market for women. The subtext is brutal: women’s labor is erased or domesticated, so marriage becomes a financial instrument. Romance gets reframed as strategy; affection becomes a luxury add-on. When she calls the world “dreadfully unjust,” the adverb matters. It’s not tragic grandeur; it’s everyday cruelty, the kind you’re expected to accept with good manners.

Context matters, too. Writing in a 19th-century America that prized domestic virtue while limiting women’s legal and economic independence, Alcott (who herself worked to support family) understood the cost of making “respectability” a paywall. The line lands because it lets the reader laugh - then realize what, exactly, they’re laughing at.