Puzzle #14: March Women

This puzzle was inspired by the Women’s March, which took place all over the world on January 21, 2017. March is the surname of the 4 main characters in “Little Women,” so it seemed an apt way to riff on the title without doing something overtly political. For my theme answers, I tried to find women from different fields, and I ended up going with AMYSCHUMER instead of AMYSEDARIS even though I’ve actually worked with the latter.

Placing the theme answers in a pinwheel formation left room in the middle, so I did populate it with DEFIANT before filling the grid. Constructors call this a seed entry. EROS is tricky, so that’s why it has the additional “reverse” clue.

I had fun injecting a great quote into the JOBS clue, some pointless rambling into the ALIBI clue, and a confession into the ERNIE clue. The BIG clue is also an unusual one: it’s a fill-in-the-blank that also doubles as a trivia clue. Wonder how many other movie taglines share this property…