The Christmas release of director Greta Gerwig’s new film version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women presents a fresh opportunity for Alcott’s 19th-century classic to be read as a book that speaks to the present feminist moment. But it will be a shame if the renewed interest in Alcott that Gerwig has sparked does not also lead to a long-overdue appreciation of Alcott’s heroism in the Civil War.In 1862, two weeks before Christmas, Alcott left her home in Concord, Massachusetts, to serve the Union cause by working in a military hospital in Washington, D.C. In Little Women Alcott made the Civil War the background for her story of the March sisters and their mother, but in 1862 the Civil War became central to Alcott’s life.In the Union Hotel Hospital, a former Georgetown tavern in which she worked, Alcott saw death firsthand, and, like the doctors and nurses in the hospital, became vulnerable to the disease and infection the wounded troops brought with them.Men Will Love ‘Little Wome...