A scene from the Sex and the City movie. (Craig Blankenhorn/New Line Cinema/Alliance Films Media)

Sex and the City made its TV debut when I was a teenager. I was hooked from the beginning, though I didn’t immediately figure out why.

I could understand why it spoke to me on a camp level — Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte spoke with the snappy patter of sassy queens and sported over-the-top ensembles that verged on drag. But even for a relatively worldly girl like myself, their world seemed foreign. Where the Sex squad drooled over Manolo Blahnik shoes and drank Cosmos in boutique lounges, I wore a ratty pair of Converse All-Stars and drank warm beer in parks. They mapped out a set of rules for the high-end men they wanted to bed and date; I was starting to accept that I wanted to kiss girls and anxiously hoped that one might want to kiss me back. I abhorred the spate of flip 20-something chick columnists who appeared in the wake of Sex and the City, hired by youth-courting magazines in search of their own Carrie Bradshaw. And though I admired the show’s sexual frankness, I couldn’t fathom being so blunt and forthcoming, even with my own BFFs.

But as I got to know the show’s characters, their individual quirks started to feel familiar. There was the idealistic naïf with a gentle soul; the moral centre with maternal instincts; the vain dilettante whose selfishness masked her huge heart; and the bold protagonist, a word wizard with a tomboyish air and often crippling ambivalence. They were 30-something girls learning to become the women they wanted to be.

These archetypes existed long before the advent of Sex and the City. For anti-Sex stalwarts who remain perplexed by the popularity of the randy HBO series, I would argue that its appeal has a lot to do with the enduring legacy of Little Women, a book I fell in love with at the ripe old age of eight. (Since then, I’ve reread it at least 50 times; it’s a keeper.)

Louisa May Alcott ’s proto-feminist tome has been a rite of passage for generations of girls. This 1868 novel follows the lives of Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy March, four staunch siblings striving to become good, upstanding adults. They model themselves on their strong, ethical matriarch, who hangs tough while their absent dad — a kindly minister — helps keep the faith for soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. Based on Louisa and her sisters, the March girls were complex and flawed, and they helped shape my understanding of the many facets of femininity.

A scene from George Cukor's 1933 film version of Little Women. (RKO Pictures/Getty Images)

Sex and the City and Little Women share several attributes. Before Sex was a show, it was a book — or rather, a collection of salacious essays penned by Candace Bushnell. Born 90 years after Little Women was published, Bushnell used her newspaper column in the New York Observer to document the adventures of an independent woman navigating love and life in the urban U.S. at the turn of the century. Alcott wrote for the Atlantic Monthly and penned gothic romances under a pseudonym before finding breakout success with Little Women, in which she documented the adventures of independent women navigating love and life in the urban U.S. at the turn of the century.

Both Bushnell and Alcott have been celebrated as figureheads for their particular moment in feminist history. Bushnell helped introduce the (somewhat) shocking notion that women were fans of no-strings-attached nookie, just like men. (This was no secret to third-wave feminists.) But beyond that, Bushnell presented a complex, profound portrait of female friendship and solidarity that felt novel in a climate of Mean Girl bullies. And though the SATC quartet was on the lookout for Mr. Right, aside from idealistic Charlotte, none of the characters was wholly convinced that finding Prince Charming would complete (or fix) her life. As for that spinster Alcott, the reason she never married is that “I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

Alcott was raised in a progressive family. Her father, a proponent of Transcendentalist philosophy who hobnobbed with Thoreau and Emerson, believed in educating women. An early first-waver, Alcott fought for suffrage and attended the first-ever convention for women’s rights in 1848. Though her characters were vessels used to communicate messages of female empowerment, Little Women was not all dreary didacticism. While they modeled their lives on Pilgrim’s Progress, the March sisters also fretted over soiled gloves and too-tight slippers, singed their hair while preparing for balls, engaged in coy courtship rituals and fell for doting suitors.

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, circa 1860. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Alcott likely would have been appalled by the crass consumerism of SATC, which reaches its apogee in the recent film version. When Carrie purchases an authentic Louis Vuitton bag for her assistant, it’s made to seem as altruistic as the March family’s decision to give away their Christmas feast to destitute neighbours. Little Women promoted an agenda of selfless charity; Sex and the City worships labels. But SATC’s binge spending seems more like a symptom of our times than a suggestion that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are apolitical materialists. Sex and the City, the film and the series, acknowledges that the characters use fancy trinkets to distract themselves from their emotions, which isn’t so different from Little Women. Where SATC’s Samantha swoons over a Birkin bag, Amy March pouts till she acquires her must-have accessory: pickled limes.

There are those who condemn Sex and the City for being unrealistic, and to them, I say: 'Uh, yeah?' The series was never founded on a verité agenda but rather on an optimistic fantasy of girls hoping for happiness in the archetypal Big City. Little Women has its own version of implausible wish fulfillment. Both narratives are invested in exploring emotional truths.

For a while, my family engaged in a curious Jewish Christmas ritual. Every year, we’d break out our VHS copy of Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film adaptation of Little Women (starring Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as mother Marmee). As the popcorn popped, my mother would scurry around and yelp, “Maybe this time Jo will marry Laurie!” And every year, we would moan through the agony of watching our fearless heroine brush off the boy who loved her.

The same way that Carrie dumped her perfect fiancé Aidan on Sex and the City, a panicked Jo rejected her long-time chum Laurie, crying, “You’re a great deal too good for me, and I’m so grateful to you, and so proud and fond of you, I don't know why I can't love you as you want me to. I've tried, but I can't change the feeling, and it would be a lie to say I do when I don't.” Carrie Bradshaw would have a hard time busting out a more tragic breakup monologue.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.