I agree with what you said about Little Women, in that we often don't realize that what is considered an "improvement" by one culture or generation is not at all an improvement by our own standards. This semester I took a linguistics class, "Language and Gender" and was shocked to find out that so many things I had considered normal/accepted gender roles really had a negative effect on the progression of gender equality in our society. I hadn't considered myself a feminist either, but reading books like Little Women help us re-evaluate what we consider the norm.