Jo's relationship with writing was the most important relationship of her life for a very long time.
It preceded her friendships and her romances and her sense of obligation to her family and its needs.
When the family needed money she sold her hair — the one feature she was genuinely vain about — without hesitation.
When she finally sold a story she felt a pride and satisfaction that nothing else in her experience could match.
Writing for Jo was not a hobby or an ambition in the conventional sense — it was the activity in which she was most herself.
She was more fully alive at her desk with a pen in her hand than she was in any parlor or at any social gathering.
Society told her that this was an inappropriate priority for a young woman of her time and station and expectation.
Jo refused to be defined by society's expectations — writing was her true identity and purpose.

The treatment of Jo's writing in Little Women is one of Alcott's most personally revealing and most politically significant choices.
Alcott herself was a writer who wrote to support her family under circumstances that did not always value what she produced.
She knew from experience what it meant to insist on the primacy of creative work in a world that dismissed female authorship.
Jo's dedication to writing is therefore not merely a character trait but a statement about what Alcott believed creative work deserved.
It deserves to be taken seriously as identity — as the activity that reveals and sustains the most essential self.
Not as a supplement to real life or a pleasant way to pass idle hours but as the core around which a life can be legitimately organized.
When society tells Jo that writing should be secondary to marriage and domesticity, it is telling her to put herself second.
Jo's refusal to accept this instruction is the most profound and the most personal refusal in the entire novel.
Jo refused to be defined by society's expectations — writing was her true identity and purpose.