Was Laura Ingalls Wilder a feminist?

[WeAreJackieWeaver]

Having read absolutely everything on my reading list this year, I’m re-reading the Little House on the Prairie books.
I loved these books as a child, now reading them as an adult I’m struck how fiercely Laura fought to be allowed outside her gender box. She’s fiesty, loves being physical, running and riding horses and hates the expectations placed on her by society just because she’s a girl. Girls should sit quietly and do womanly tasks like sewing.
Her sister Mary is the complete opposite and loves being feminine and embraces the expectations of her.
Both girls were highly intelligent and their education was encouraged by very progressive (for the time) parents.

During this never-ending winter lockdown the books have helped give me some perspective on the hardship of lives past but I’m loving reading about Laura’s gender non-conforming escapades.

Has anyone else read the books?

This is a brilliant thread, I read all of the Little House books over and over again when I was younger and loved them - even though my knowledge of the geography of the US and the history of the time was sketchy at best.

Funny how certain details stick with you though - when our heating breaks I always find myself thinking about Laura and Pa twisting straw into sticks for the fire in the Long Winter.

I am also now waiting for Prairie Fires to arrive. Reading through the posts on here I suspect that Mumsnet has sent the Amazon algorithms into a frenzy.

Ahh, those were simpler times when Laura couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have got her own tin mug and a bit of candy for Christmas

I think she had a paper doll too

This is an interesting story as well en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Oatman. I came across a book about it on Pinterest last night.

I think we should all start embroidering 'hair receivers' like the one Laura makes for Ma -- you basically use it to store the hair you pull out of your hair brush so you can make a false front or a hair switch to help out your actual hair.

When I think about the food, I wonder about what we would normally consider a modern 'balanced' diet -- understandably, given that they're largely living on what they can grow and get from hunting, their diet is overwhelmingly starches, flavoured with small amounts of bought salt pork, or meat in abundance when it's available, or can be smoked/frozen etc. Not many green vegetables, and almost no fruit other than exotic treat oranges about twice.

(I know they do also use dried pulses, though one of the things that sounds delicious as LIW describes it but really can't have been is the 'bean broth' I think they have during a cold spell on the claim -- but which is just the water in which dried beans have been cooked! The actual beans are served at another meal as 'baked beans.')

Am I remembering rightly that at some point they eat tomatoes treated as a fruit and sliced with sugar and cream?

And I do also wonder about bear -- Laura loves bear meat (is it in Little House in the Big Woods?), but I wouldn't have said that the meat of a carnivorous animal would taste good...?

Nellie had dolls and all the candy she could eat but Nellie was evil with fancy hair ribbons

Gordon Buchanan who made a documentary about bears said a bear burger was the nicest burger he'd ever eaten!

their diet is overwhelmingly starches

Laura, Carrie, and baby Grace all died from type 2 diabetes complications

www.diabeticmommy.com/DMWPsubdirectory/2014/06/laura-ingalls-diabetes-hec/

I doubt she considered herself a feminist, but there's no doubt she pushed back against traditional female roles, especially for children.

Have just ordered Prairie Fires having reread the series during lockdown! Looking forward to it.

I’ve got to The Long Winter and cant find my book
I can find all the other books but not this one. I wonder if it fell apart, it was read so much.

I remember Pa and Laura twisting haysticks to keep warm once the wood ran out. Can you imagine a more morale sapping job? You spend all day twisting the rough stalks just to see them burn up in seconds. Jeez.

abebooks.co.uk

Brilliant website for second hand books. Just checked for you, OP and The Long Winter is £3.30. (I'm assuming you're in the UK).

In more recent years, the rights to the books have changed, which is partly why there are a lot more books. You can get books on:
Little House: the Martha years (Laura's great-grandmother)
Little House: the Charlotte years (Laura's grandmother)
Little House: the Caroline years (Ma)
Little House: the Rose years (Laura's daughter)
There are a few books in each sub-series. I think they were only published in the US, though (I came back from New York with quite a few when I was there about 20 years ago.) But that's what the Internet is for...

There have also been a couple of books about Mary, and one or two filling in "missing" years in Laura's books.

This thread is worse than the fifty bookers threads for recommendations. Taken The Long Winter from the playroom and ordered Praire Fires.

I have to admit that I've never read the books. They always seemed so short and childish that they didn't appeal to me. Maybe, like Harry Potter, they should be repackaged with more grownup covers?
Seen all the original TV series, and the newer mini-series, which was actually set on the prairie.

(There's a scene in one of the early shows where Laura and Mary and changing the nappy of a recently-discovered baby. "We'll soon have you changed", says Laura, "be a good little...Girl!". Obviously, Laura's of the Assigner/Gender Critical school.).

Default the current UK editions have beautiful covers. I would buy a set but I already have the 70s paperbacks and the 80s paperbacks

I don't know how to link it but there is a brilliant online thing full of photos of people (including blokes) wearing dresses sold last year in the US shop Target which are essentially terrible looking prairie style dresses (bit Laura Ashley looking). It's hilarious. I think it might be an Instagram thing - targetprairiedress or something.

I've just remembered I saw the dress thing on boredpanda.com.

Re the diet, given that Laura lived till she was 90 it didn’t seem to do her much harm...

#targetdresschallenge
Check it out. It's brilliant.
Yes Irma despite their poor health both Almanzo and Laura lived to a good age.

Creaking gates hang longest...

I have to admit that I've never read the books. They always seemed so short and childish that they didn't appeal to me

I read them as a child, so it is quite nostalgic to re-read as an adult. Perhaps it is different if you read for the first time as an adult.

In one of the books, for some reason Ma and the girls have to harvest all the food from the vegetable garden, even though it's not yet ripe. I can't remember why - but they're not going to waste it.

Ma makes a pie out of the green tomatoes. When Pa comes home and eats it he thinks it is apple pie. He is amazed and asks where they got the apples from.

One day we had something go wrong in our garden. Again, I don't remember what, but my mum ended up harvesting all the tomatoes. She put some of the green ones on trays in a dark room, and some on trays in a bright room, in the hope that some would ripen. I told mum about what Laura's Ma did, so she had a go at making a green tomato pie.

It was delicious! Really did taste like apple pie (more like apple and rhubarb) and she made it far too sweet because the sour unripe tomatoes actually needed rather less sugar than expected.

I was thinking yesterday about Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop
Cafe!

Having seen the TV episodes so many times, about all I know about the books is how much the show diverges from them in terms of locale.

If you've got Covid overload, avoid Season 1. episode 18, 'Plague':

With the sudden intensity of a prairie storm, typhus is unleashed on an unsuspecting Walnut Grove, teaming Charles with Doc Baker and Reverend Alden, who work together to the point of exhaustion tending to the community's sick and dying; but when new victims begin to pour in from the surrounding countryside the desperate men know they must find the source of the plague if they expect to stop the deadly epidemic.

And Season 3, episode 13, 'Quarentine':

Counting on his immunity to protect him from the deadly mountain fever that killed his first wife and daughter, Isaiah Edwards takes Doc Baker to help with neighboring Elmsville's outbreak. But after contact with an infected townsman, Mr. Edwards unwittingly carries the disease back to Walnut Grove and when daughter, Alicia, develops symptoms, he must fight to save his new family while the rest of the town goes into quarantine.

JellySlice I think it’s when they have the blackbirds settling on the crops and eating everything, so they quickly harvest what they can, then eat the blackbirds as well 🤣. I don’t think it’s when they had locusts as they came too quickly and just destroyed everything. I can’t remember whether it’s Carrie or Grace who was the baby then but Laura describes the baby screaming as the locusts climb all over her

@NovemberR

abebooks.co.uk

Brilliant website for second hand books. Just checked for you, OP and The Long Winter is £3.30. (I'm assuming you're in the UK).

Thank you, I am in the UK.

I've been ever so lucky to grow up near many of the original Laura Ingalls Wilder homesteads. We visited them all as children and I've taken my own DD to most as well. I'm a huge fan and have read them all cover to cover several times. I believe Laura was a feminist because she often begged to do non-traditional girl activities and her pride in this was evidence in her fictionalized self. No books impacted my childhood like hers.