Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" Series

[Sharpie66]

She was 15 for just a month when she started teaching, since her birthday was February 7th. 

Wasn’t Mr. Bouchie Mr. Boost’s brother? I always wondered if anyone ever linked him and his wife to the Brewsters. 

[Blergh]

Cherry Ames,

 

 OK, YOU may not blame Pa one bit if he had avoided military service during the US Civil War but, during the years immediately following, a great many folks WOULD have had that been the case. Hence, if that was the case, not only could that have been a contributing factor re his 'itchy feet' (IOW, not wanting to chance the neighbors getting to know him well enough to start questioning his wartime activities) but also Mrs. Wilder herself may not not have wanted to chance her readers in the 1930's who had grandparents old enough to remember (and even serve) to have done any questioning which would have taken away from the Pa Could Do No Wrong deal. That may also explain why her narrative started with the family leaving their extended family in the Big Woods rather than around the time of her birth or the start of her parents' marriage.   Oh, and I concede it's possible Ma may have had miscarriages before Mary's birth but considering how doggedly that family DID record births (even Laura's own son whom she never named) , it's somewhat doubtful that they wouldn't have jotted down a sad event like a stillbirth or a baby taken too soon in their family Bible.

[BlossomCulp]

9 hours ago, Blergh said:

 OK, YOU may not blame Pa one bit if he had avoided military service during the US Civil War but, during the years immediately following, a great many folks WOULD have had that been the case. Hence, if that was the case, not only could that have been a contributing factor re his 'itchy feet' (IOW, not wanting to chance the neighbors getting to know him well enough to start questioning his wartime activities) but also Mrs. Wilder herself may not not have wanted to chance her readers in the 1930's who had grandparents old enough to remember (and even serve) to have done any questioning which would have taken away from the Pa Could Do No Wrong deal.

The problem with this theory is that Pa did settle in De Smet in 1879, not so many years after the war ended, and lived out the rest of his life there.  Pa may have deliberately avoided military service, or he may just have been lucky enough not to have to go (I am no historian, least of all American Civil War history)  I don't suppose every man of fighting age actually fought in that war, it would have been impossible for one thing!  Anyway all that aside I think the explanation for Pa's itchy feet is exactly as the books portray and probably a lot of the reason the west got settled by a lot of people pretty similar to Pa.

Edited January 4, 2018 by BlossomCulp

[CherryAmes]

On 1/3/2018 at 0:34 PM, Blergh said:

Oh, and I concede it's possible Ma may have had miscarriages before Mary's birth but considering how doggedly that family DID record births (even Laura's own son whom she never named) , it's somewhat doubtful that they wouldn't have jotted down a sad event like a stillbirth or a baby taken too soon in their family Bible.

That's a fair point and I agree with you that it's more than likely they would have done that.  Do we know for certain that they didn't?  I haven't read as deeply into the story behind the story as many of you seem to have done.

[Neko]

On 1/3/2018 at 7:08 PM, BlossomCulp said:

The problem with this theory is that Pa did settle in De Smet in 1879, not so many years after the war ended, and lived out the rest of his life there.  Pa may have deliberately avoided military service, or he may just have been lucky enough not to have to go (I am no historian, least of all American Civil War history)  I don't suppose every man of fighting age actually fought in that war, it would have been impossible for one thing!  Anyway all that aside I think the explanation for Pa's itchy feet is exactly as the books portray and probably a lot of the reason the west got settled by a lot of people pretty similar to Pa.

Didn't Pa have brothers who fought in the Civil War?  If so, maybe he wasn't expected to volunteer as much, since no family should lose all their sons, or whatever?  IDK, I'm not a Civil War expert, either. :P

[CherryAmes]

His younger brother George ran off to join the army, he's the wild brother who scared Laura in Little House in the Big Woods.  I don't know if he would have served during the Civil War or not.

ETA: Found something referencing military service for the Ingalls and Quiners:

Quote

 At a time when many young men his age were being called to military service, Charles Ingalls managed to avoid conscription. Whether he, Henry, and Peter believed that moving to the frontier might have the effect of sparing them from military duty is uncertain. Approximately eighty thousand Wisconsinites--about one-half of all white males in the state between the ages of eighteen and forty-five--twelve thousand of whom died, served during the war. In February 1865, during the last year of the war, Charles signed a petition to hold a special town meeting to appropriate two hundred dollars for every volunteer who stepped forward to fill the local quota. Two of his brothers as well as Caroline's brother Joseph did serve in Union blue. The latter, tragically, died from wounds suffered in the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, three months after he had enlisted. By January 3, 1865, when Hiram and James (who went by his middle name rather than his first name of Lansford) Ingalls crossed the Mississippi River and went to Lake City to enlist in the First Regiment of Heavy Artillery in the Minnesota Volunteers, the war was nearly over.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/miller-wilder.html

Edited January 6, 2018 by CherryAmes

[CraftyHazel]

On 12/28/2017 at 1:44 PM, CherryAmes said:

I didn't blame Ma at all for feeling as she did about Almanzo.  The books make the age difference slighter than it actually was but in reality Almanzo was 10 years older than Laura which means she was still only in her mid teens when a man in his mid 20s came courting!  I'd have been less than happy about that too if I'd been Ma.   

My grandparents were married in 1909, when my grandfather was 29 and my grandmother was 14 or 15.  They were married 21+ years when my father...the baby of the family...was born.

[BlossomCulp]

On 1/14/2018 at 2:28 AM, Marmiarmo said:

My grandparents were married in 1909, when my grandfather was 29 and my grandmother was 14 or 15.  They were married 21+ years when my father...the baby of the family...was born.

The point being made though is not that this never happened but that it did not happen as commonly as we seem to believe.  Statistics bear out the idea that most of the time people of that era married for the first time in their 20s and the age difference was no greater than it typically is today.  What I found interesting when I checked the links given earlier was that, if anything, there was a period of time during the mid 20th century where the average age of marriage was younger than it is now and when it was in Laura's time.  I am guessing it was because the 50s and 60s saw a period of relative affluence where getting married younger and having children sooner wasn't a disadvantage.

Edited January 17, 2018 by BlossomCulp

[Black Knight]

On 1/17/2018 at 7:14 AM, BlossomCulp said:

What I found interesting when I checked the links given earlier was that, if anything, there was a period of time during the mid 20th century where the average age of marriage was younger than it is now and when it was in Laura's time.  I am guessing it was because the 50s and 60s saw a period of relative affluence where getting married younger and having children sooner wasn't a disadvantage.

No, the age of marriage is linked to the breadth of options women have. The more able they are to be self-supporting and to have employment outside the home, the higher the age of marrying rises.

The '50s were largely a reaction to the WWII period where they had no choice but to encourage women to work because the men were overseas. Frightened of allowing that to continue after the men returned, there was a concerted effort to push women back into the home, and it was done largely by telling girls that their one and only purpose was to be a wife and mother, as soon as possible.

[BlossomCulp]

On 1/21/2018 at 9:02 PM, Black Knight said:

The '50s were largely a reaction to the WWII period where they had no choice but to encourage women to work because the men were overseas. Frightened of allowing that to continue after the men returned, there was a concerted effort to push women back into the home, and it was done largely by telling girls that their one and only purpose was to be a wife and mother, as soon as possible.

That's a very good point but I think it still does go hand in hand with this era being an era of relative affluence.   This was also a time when it was commonplace for a one income family to live a more than comfortable life.  Many women may have entered the workforce later because this became an option they couldn't have explored earlier but they also went into the workforce in greater numbers to help pay the bills!

[proserpina65]

On ‎12‎/‎30‎/‎2017 at 10:37 AM, BlossomCulp said:

But that doesn't really address them changing things to make it seem like Almanzo was still a teenager when he first met Laura. 

The books don't make it seem like Almanzo is a teenager.  It's pretty clear that he's in his early twenties.  It never struck me that he was a contemporary of Cap Garland; he struck me as being older than Cap.  Still younger than in real life, but not a teenager.

[BlossomCulp]

26 minutes ago, proserpina65 said:

The books don't make it seem like Almanzo is a teenager.  It's pretty clear that he's in his early twenties.  It never struck me that he was a contemporary of Cap Garland; he struck me as being older than Cap.  Still younger than in real life, but not a teenager.

In The Long Winter she tells us that Almanzo is 19 and in the scene where she first meets him he is working with his brother and she tells us "the man and the boy" at one point.  I think it's pretty clear she wants us to think of Almanzo as being much closer in age to Laura than he actually was.  Which is fine.  I don't blame her.  Incidentally my favourite book of the series is The Long Winter - whatever the age difference, true or fictional I love the relationship between Laura and Almanzo!  Now that I think about it I tend to re-read the last three books** and rarely read the earlier ones anymore.  

**by last three I mean Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years.  The First Four Years I include with West from Home and On the Way Home.  Afterthoughts that are of interest to read but not part of what I think of as my series :).  Especially First Four Years - the real Debbie Downer (if probably more true to life) of the bunch.

Edited February 7, 2018 by BlossomCulp

[SherriAnt]

I just finished reading "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder" by Caroline Fraser, and I highly recommend it. It's an honest look at her personality, her life and her relationships. Laura was a complicated woman, obviously very affected by the quite numerous traumas in her life. I did find Rose Wilder Lane to be very obnoxious and ungrateful, but with the evidence of her mental illness, depression they say, but she had a healthy paranoia too, I have a teeny bit more sympathy. I wonder if the time apart during Laura and Almanzos diptheria, and his subsequent stroke, damaged the bond between them enough to cause their clashes? 

I really like learning more about the real stories behind the public story. 

[CherryAmes]

Does that book address at all the relationship Laura had with her sisters?  I guess one thing that I was expecting was that the Ingalls girls would stay close as they got older.  Not geographically but at least through letters and visits now and then.  I remember reading about one visit Laura made to see Grace and Carrie but one visit in many many years doesn't seem like much!  Did Laura ever see Ma or Mary again after Pa's funeral for instance?  

Edited February 18, 2018 by CherryAmes

[nodorothyparker]

The opening sentence of the book mentions that when Laura received the news Caroline had died, she hadn't been back to see any of them in 20 years.  There's a little bit of traveling back to South Dakota to visit Carrie and Grace as the two surviving sisters much later after the book money would have started to come in, but it doesn't seem like there was much of a relationship there beyond letters back and forth.  Laura didn't travel to go to any of their funerals as they passed on, which could be attributed to her own advancing age and Alamanzo's continued ill health as much as anything.  She often cites not being able to leave him alone as reason not to go to things, and before the books they often legitimately didn't have the money to be traveling about much.  The book does mention a failing poverty-stricken Grace once asking for a bit of charity that Laura apparently ignored and that she and Carrie seem to have figured out from that not to ask for help again.

I really loved this book for the way it filled in all the background around the stories.  It doesn't shy away from acknowledging that Charles and then Almanzo made a number of questionable if not downright terrible choices along the way, but it does a really nice job of explaining the politics and culture of the time that encouraged them to make a lot of those choices.  Scientists and other experts knew that settling the Great Plains for farming was a bad idea for all the reasons that eventually caused the Dakota bust and later the Dust Bowl and were telling everyone who would listen, but poor settlers eager to claim "free land" were told by prominent voices of the day to ignore the warnings and were lured west by glossy brochures making sky high promises.  It's interesting to see how Laura in her later life seemed to understand some of this while resolutely refusing to understand the rest in her attitudes toward those struggling through the Dust Bowl and Great Depression all around her.

Rose, well, if you've gotten this far in all the writing surrounding the series, all you can say is Rose is going to Rose.

[BlossomCulp]

6 hours ago, nodorothyparker said:

The book does mention a failing poverty-stricken Grace once asking for a bit of charity that Laura apparently ignored and that she and Carrie seem to have figured out from that not to ask for help again.

Was this after the success of the books? Because that's just so sad and wrong if so.  Yes Laura wrote those books but they were based on her family, surely that would count for something.  Guess not  - I don't want to believe that "my" Laura would have so little concern for her sisters that she would allow them to live in poverty when she had the means to help. 

Edited February 18, 2018 by BlossomCulp

[kathyk24]

I think Laura earned more money dead than alive. The Little House books were published during the Depression and the 1940's when no one had much money. Laura probably wanted to save money for her medical expenses. I can't blame Laura for keeping her money after supporting her family during her childhood.

[nodorothyparker]

Because the monetary amounts discussed are 1930s and '40 values, it's sometimes hard to get a clear sense of just how well Laura and Almanzo were really doing after the books.  They were at least comfortable enough to travel around a bit and make a couple of driving trips back to South Dakota.  It also doesn't help that Laura's and Rose's finances were hopelessly entangled always paying and borrowing from each other.  The book notes that while her hardscrabble upbringing made Laura notoriously miserly, Rose's made her a disastrous spendthrift who was constantly having to be bailed out.  I get the sense too that the real money came after Laura was gone as Rose and then the political crony she willed everything to got control of the copyrights.

Part of it, I think, was that Laura and Rose tried to have it both ways as to how true or autobiographical the books really were.  Laura insisted in interviews at the time that they were true even as she admitted that several characters like Nellie were compilations, but she and Rose were continually moving events around or omitting them altogether with Rose borrowing heavily from them for her own more openly fictionalized books.  And some stuff they pretty much did make up wholesale, especially in the later books where Rose was trying to insert her libertarian screeds.  We're never told what Carrie or Grace thought of any of this, but it's pretty clear that they didn't benefit financially in any way from the books even though they were the ones who took Mary in and took care of her in her final years after Caroline died.  The other part of it is that while she wasn't as overt or abrasive about it as Rose was, Laura bought into a lot of her politics where FDR was a dictator worse than Hitler and the New Deal and Social Security and related relief programs were a shameful sort of tyranny.  Laura seemed to be of the attitude that she always worked and made do and she expected everyone else to do the same.

[CherryAmes]

5 hours ago, nodorothyparker said:

We're never told what Carrie or Grace thought of any of this, but it's pretty clear that they didn't benefit financially in any way from the books even though they were the ones who took Mary in and took care of her in her final years after Caroline died. 

I know I read that Carrie did have some input into the books and shared her memories with Laura.  I also read she was very proud of the books.  I can't recall where I read this but a quick look at the wikipedia entry for Carrie seems to confirm this.  I'd have to wonder if some of these more recent biographies are taking a few liberties and omitting things to make their own version of Laura's life more what they want it to be and not what it may actually have been.  

[nodorothyparker]

I want to say I've read that somewhere too, but there's been so many books on the subject I'd be hard pressed to say where specifically I read it.  This one does mention that Laura quizzed various relatives, including Carrie, on details as she was writing the series but doesn't offer up much more than that.  I go into reads of any of this stuff assuming that the author is going to have done a certain amount of connecting the dots on the evidence they have available and making their own suppositions from that.

[BlossomCulp]

On 2/19/2018 at 7:24 PM, nodorothyparker said:

I go into reads of any of this stuff assuming that the author is going to have done a certain amount of connecting the dots on the evidence they have available and making their own suppositions from that.

When I first discovered this thread and the other LIW readalong thread I read a lot of posts that seemed to suggest that Pa was a hard drinker and generally not at all a nice guy!  I was expecting that this was because further information about the family had come to light in the slew of books that have come out recently.  That doesn't seem to be the case however.  I think what is happening is a lot of people (including some of the writers of these books) are going looking for scandal and aren't really finding it at the end of the day so instead they are making a lot of suppositions to make things "zippy".  No one wants to read about good people making the best of things, they'd rather read a "searing expose" but it sounds like the searing expose isn't much more than that Laura and Rose fictionalized more than they wanted to admit and that their politics aren't to everyone's liking (including mine I must admit).

Edited February 23, 2018 by BlossomCulp

[nodorothyparker]

There is a fair bit in this book to support the idea that Charles made some really unwise decisions, financially and landwise, and he wasn't above skipping out on debts he didn't consider fair or reasonable.  He lost at least one farm in early adulthood before the timeline of the books and another in Missouri somewhere around the Little House of the Prairie time period that sounds like he was taken in by a known huckster that the author clearly thinks should have been obvious to him.  The family was also basically homeless and living on the begrudging charity of the Masters family (family of Genevieve Masters, one of the models for Nellie Olsen) for quite awhile during one of their multiple stays in Iowa.  It's actually pretty interesting how complex and intertwined the history of those two families was from Minnesota to Iowa and then finally to South Dakota that definitely would have played into the Nellie-Laura relationship as portrayed in the later books.

A lot beyond that is conjecture.  Laura obviously wanted to portray Charles as a towering figure of pluckiness and self reliance and chose to either gloss over or omit entirely some of the very real hunger and hardship that the family endured as a result of his choices.  It leaves a lot of room for reading between the lines.  I like that this book took the time to lay out how he came to some of those choices or that sometimes there really wasn't another better choice he could have made.   We're told, for example, that Charles declared himself wholly indigent and without means to get a relief barrel of flour and a few paltry supplies during the worst of the grasshopper years, but it's put in the context that that became an option only after years of state legislatures repeatedly refusing to vote for ANY relief measures knowing that residents were hungry and desperate because prevailing political wisdom of the day was that it would make them lazy and dependent.  It's one of a number of historical books I've read recently that have made me more fully appreciate just how ruthless the classism has always been in this country, soaring rhetoric or ideals to the contrary.

[BlossomCulp]

20 minutes ago, nodorothyparker said:

It's one of a number of historical books I've read recently that have made me more fully appreciate just how ruthless the classism has always been in this country, soaring rhetoric or ideals to the contrary.

I've been reading more about the settlement of the west here in Canada as well and it's sad how the government lured people over from Europe with soaring promises of free land, streets paved with gold and wide open spaces and the reality was that very few people actually made a living from that free land.  Which didn't turn out to be so free.

[nodorothyparker]

Yep.  Even if I wasn't so interested in the story of the Little House series, I still would have considered this book worth the read for its comprehensive look at the one-two punch of the Sioux war and the subsequent Homestead Act that drew poor people by the thousands to the upper plains on faulty promises of free land that would be so easy to farm.  You see Charles in the books echoing some of the claims that were made in marketing materials about how great it was that he didn't have to battle endless trees and rocks to plow, never considering that there was a reason there was only tough prairie grass covering so much of it.  The governments at the time drove off or killed the original inhabitants, lured settlers out there to replace them, and then mostly showed contempt for them too that they couldn't make a go of it.

[BlossomCulp]

That's exactly why I cut Charles a lot more slack then some seem to.  Yes he made bad decisions but we all have the luxury of hindsight!  Once the decision had been made to move west they essentially ended up between a rock and a hard place - keep moving westward and hope for better times or move back east and admit defeat.  And move back east to what really?  It's not difficult to understand why they would have been reluctant to go back and live off the charity of family - assuming there was still family there for them to go to!  In the end the made the best of things when they settled in De Smet and it sounds like Charles was a respected member of the community and they finally had a settled home even if it didn't turn out to be the thriving farm they had been led to believe they'd be getting.  If Charles was foolish he was in the company of thousands of others making the same mistakes!

[dramagrrl]

On 2/7/2018 at 3:19 PM, proserpina65 said:

The books don't make it seem like Almanzo is a teenager.  It's pretty clear that he's in his early twenties.  It never struck me that he was a contemporary of Cap Garland; he struck me as being older than Cap.  Still younger than in real life, but not a teenager.

The books absolutely and definitively make it seem like Almanzo is still a teenager (at least when he is first introduced in The Long Winter) and a contemporary of Cap Garland. There is a whole section (more than a full page) in The Long Winter in which Almanzo is thinking about how most people in De Smet, including Cap, think he is at least 21 because he owns a homestead. He then "explains" (through us reading his thoughts) that he was actually 19, but thought he was as good as any 21-year-old, so when he had signed up for a homestead and had been asked his age, he had told the person recording the details to "put me down as 21" and had gotten away with it. Later in the book, when he and Cap go on the dangerous search for the seed wheat, the narration from Almanzo's point of view again mentions that he and Cap are really the same age (19, with only a few months between them), but Cap treated Almanzo "with respect" and allowed him to take the lead because he thought Almanzo was at least two years older.

Edited March 3, 2018 by dramagrrl

[Blergh]

Oscar Edmund 'Cap' Garland was born in 1864 (three years older than Laura) and would be killed from a boiler explosion in 1891- at just 26 years of age yet certainly was colorful and heroic enough for Mrs. Wilder to want to immortalize as a hero who saved the town from starvation! I have to wonder if Almanzo who would live to 92 ever pondered the irony of their very different fates and whether Cap would have still glowed had HE lived to a ripe old age!

Edited March 10, 2018 by Blergh
Cap's fate

[DakotaJustice]

I’m glad to have found this forum. 

I've been a fan of the books most of my life...the show, I can do without. 

I've been listening to the Audible of "Prairie Fires" and a thought occurred to me...

Rose apparently was bipolar and had a love-hate relationship with Laura.  As well as making a lot of things up and holding them up as truth. Also playing the victim etc.

One story I have my doubts about now after hearing this book is Rose's version of what happened to the money in the writing desk (in "On The Way Home"). Rose states that there was a $100 bill hidden in the desk for their land purchase which mysteriously disappeared then reappeared as it had "slipped into a crack in the desk".

I've seen many photos of that desk and I don't see where there would have been a "crack" it could have "slipped" into. Also, US currency bills were significantly larger then - about a inch longer/wider than now (bills were changed to the current size in 1928). 

Rose stated in her story that Laura removed every scrap out of the desk, looked in all the envelopes, turned the desk upside down and shook it - nothing. Then all of a sudden, it magically reappeared 3 weeks later? 

Rose had a history of stretching the truth and I believe this was just another fib she told to make it a better story. 

What had really convinced me that it's a made up story is the stated amount. Rose said it was a hundred dollar bill and that was all they had. 

However, according to Prairie Fires, Mansfield records state that Laura purchased the 40 acres for $400, paying $260 (not $100) up front and a note for the remaining $140 on 21 September 1894, 22 days after they arrived in Mansfield. 

IMO what actually took place is more prosaic - it took three weeks of looking at different places, along with looking for odd jobs, before they purchased. 

But it wouldn't have been dramatic enough for Rose.

[DakotaJustice]

TBH reading some of the earlier posts on this thread really kind of annoyed me because they were pretty off the mark. The posts date back from 2014, prior to the release of Pioneer Girl and Prairie Fires (that said there were some other very good books released prior to those two). The most critical, damning comments appear to be based on the RWL bio The Ghost in the Little House which is very critical of Laura and very pro-Rose. It's this book that purports the belief that Rose wrote the books.

Also, the critical damning comments were coming from a 21st century POV. 

Laura wasn't *forced* to work, she wanted to help the family. My own father who is in his 80s had to work on the family farm along with his brothers. Laura loved her family and especially Mary and wanted to help her go to college. From what I read the tuition was free but room and board were not.  Laura never said her Pa was perfect, she loved him and the books exist because of her memories of him. 

And it's clear from reading Pioneer Girl along with Let the Hurricane Roar to know the difference between Rose's voice and Laura's voice...

[DakotaJustice]

On 12/29/2017 at 10:10 PM, kathyk24 said:

It wasn't unusual for men to be married to much younger women during Laura's lifetime. I think she probably wrote about her childhood honestly but Rose and the book publishers changed things because no one wanted to read about a less than heroic Pa. Laura would be horrified to learn that her life story had changed to accommodate the tv series.

My parents are 10 years apart and married when my mom was 18 and dad 28. Still married almost 60 years later.

[BooksRule]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/us/laura-ingalls-wilder-book-award-trnd/index.html

'Laura Ingalls Wilder's name has been stripped from a prestigious book award because of racist themes'.  I know there has been talk for months in the library world about this issue, and the American Library Association has just made it official. As a librarian and as a reader of her books, I can see that it was a real dilemma. Even though her name has been taken off the award, it is acknowledged that her books are still an important part of children's literature (and I think can be really good books as teaching tools to discuss content with children).

[voiceover]

Eh, on behalf of Laura: the American Library Association can shove their *award up their collective behinds.

*eta: Didn't realize it was the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for Correctly Portraying 21st Century Attitudes in 19th & 20th Century Literature".

George Orwell called & said: By all means: take her name off that.  

Edited June 25, 2018 by voiceover

[Mabinogia]

It bothers me when people from another era are judged by modern morals. Things were different when she was growing up. She told stories about what life was like then. Good stories. Stories that live on to this day. Use her name and legacy to explain to children how far we've come as a society and that even good people can be shaped by the world they live in. It just seems like they are trying to take away her contribution to literature because she came from a time and place where racist attitudes were the norm. 

[Cobalt Stargazer]

5 hours ago, voiceover said:

Eh, on behalf of Laura: the American Library Association can shove their *award up their collective behinds.

*eta: Didn't realize it was the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for Correctly Portraying 21st Century Attitudes in 19th & 20th Century Literature".

George Orwell called & said: By all means: take her name off that.  

This is what I said when I saw the article on my FB feed. The books were written and published during the Depression, and the word was actually changed from 'people' to settlers' in the fifties when people complained. That it took them twenty damn years to even have a problem with it, enough of a problem to get it changed in the first place, says a lot, but....sure, let them remove Ingalls' name from this award so that no one else can get offended.

[Neko]

Unpopular opinion time: I don't think it's a big deal, and I can understand why they did it.  I re-read the books a few years ago, and I was surprised at how many lines and characters made me uncomfortable.  Her books aren't being censored or removed from libraries, so I can't get angry about this.  I get it.

Edited June 26, 2018 by Sweet Summer Child

[voiceover]

2 hours ago, Sweet Summer Child said:

  Her books aren't being censored or removed from libraries, 

Not yet, anyway.

I think "uncomfortable" is not a bad reaction to have.  I winced at Pa's "darkie" performance when I read about it in Little Town on the Prairie -- and I was 8! but I understood that it wasn't a thing that people should do -- and that was the 70s.  Before I'd ever taken a college course on evaluating and analyzing writing, art, film.  Before I ever read the words that I'd understood even as a child: One can appreciate a book or a film or a painting, and understand it as **a product of its time**.

I adored Disney's animated The Jungle Book.  Those songs and that story = a thing that's wound into my family history.  Years later I started reading Kipling because of that, then criticism of Kipling and bios of Kipling, and now I understand it all...different.  I still adore that film, and nothing will change that.

One big reason I loved the Laura Ingalls character as a child?  Because in a world full of blond princesses, she had brown hair.  Like mine.  I held Laura and Jo March and Caddie Woodlawn (and Nan Bobbsey!) in my heart, and as my example, of four non-blondes (I know) who were tough and smart and clever and -- excepting Nan -- based on real people.  Even cooler.

As adults, it's fine and important to look back on the books and films and TV shows we loved as children, and dig deeper.  My interest in Kipling led to an interest in India, and Indian writers; til finally I spent two years off that coast, absorbing the culture.  But I will never turn my back on the source material; never ever understand why a child shouldn't discover those worlds on her own.  Never understand why we must denigrate *female authors*!! for simply being a product of their time.  

[Cobalt Stargazer]

5 hours ago, voiceover said:

Not yet, anyway.

'Not yet' is key, since some high schools have banned Huckleberry Finn, and now that this particular door has been opened I'm wondering what's next. Uncomfortable is not a bad thing, but censorship, which is what this is no matter what face you try to put on it, is. If this is the route we're going to take, we should at least be honest about what we're saying - that it's easier to avoid having a conversation about why Ingalls wrote what she wrote and how times have changed. I was never much of a fan of the books, vastly preferring Anne of Green Gables, but someone else's discomfort is not worth tossing the book into the garbage just because such attitudes are no longer acceptable.

Edited June 26, 2018 by Cobalt Stargazer

[Neko]

Are the Little House books even popular with kids, anymore?  I'm asking because I really don't know.

Anyway, these posts, along with a thread on Reddit, has made me reexamine my original opinion on this topic.  Honestly, I can see both sides to the issue, and I'm working through it.  Thanks, Reddit, you're a great rabbit hole. :P

Edited June 26, 2018 by Sweet Summer Child

[kathyk24]

50 minutes ago, Sweet Summer Child said:

Are the Little House books even popular with kids, anymore?  I'm asking because I really don't know.

Anyway, these posts, along with a thread on Reddit, has made me reexamine my original opinion on this topic.  Honestly, I can see both sides to the issue, and I'm working through it.  Thanks, Reddit, you're a great rabbit hole. :P

My sister and I read the books when we were kids and she read the books to her children. I think the television show is probably more popular than the books. I think it's important not to minimize how difficult life was for minorities in the past.

[HyeChaps]

I work in a large bookstore. The books still sell well.  

[nodorothyparker]

15 hours ago, Sweet Summer Child said:

Unpopular opinion time: I don't think it's a big deal, and I can understand why they did it.  I re-read the books a few years ago, and I was surprised at how many lines and characters made me uncomfortable.  Her books aren't being censored or removed from libraries, so I can't get angry about this.  I get it.

 

That's mostly where I'm at too.  The little girl in me who grew up as the show was airing in real time and loved loved loved on Laura and Mary in the books wants to get my back up on this, but the adult in me who knows I didn't even know what the minstrel show in LTOTP was supposed to be about and didn't register the old Indian at the beginning of The Long Winter saying "Heap big snow come" as anything can see the other side of it too.  And that's not even necessarily a criticism of the books as I know she was writing during the Depression about what she remembered from still another different time from another perspective and she and Rose were fictionalizing from there.  My daughter is of the age where we read Big Woods earlier this year before she got sidetracked with other stuff and it did spark some discussion, both about our own pioneer ancestors who probably didn't live much differently and likely would have thought many of the same things, and since second grade is when our schools here start tackling our colonial history and the Native Americans, some of what happened to them as well and how their removal opened the way for what America would become.  I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much that we can get though at least some of the series this summer now that school's out to the later books, which were my favorites growing up anyway.  I know there will be more discussion there if we do and some of it probably will be uncomfortable but that's okay.  It's a learning experience.

It's not banning the books.  It's not censorship, which by definition involves the government making it unavailable.  People still read and love Huckleberry Finn, which I adore and reread periodically even if schools don't much teach it anymore.   Ultimately, it's the library association's award and they can call it whatever they want. 

[DrSpaceman]

Add me to the side that thinks its ridiculous to drop her name from the award. 

She is giving a historic perspective on how people thought and acted at the time in the area she lived.  We should not forget that such a world existed at one time.  Its a reminder of how awful things used to be for some people and still are for others.  No, they are not banning her books, but by removing her name from the award over what she wrote is stating that literature that reflects a different age with different values is to be admonished.  

Literature and art at its best reflects the age of its creation, both good and bad.  If you sanitize it down to only the appropriate and proper ideas that we still agree with today, it loses its meaning.  And its message.  It becomes pointless. 

[Mabinogia]

1 hour ago, DrSpaceman said:

No, they are not banning her books, but by removing her name from the award over what she wrote is stating that literature that reflects a different age with different values is to be admonished.  

yep. Her books, her contribution to literature has not changed at all. It is just such a cowardly move IMO. She is still the same writer she was the week before they changed the name of the award. So what, exactly, are they trying to say here? That someone shouldn't be heralded for their writing skills if what they wrote is no longer considered "appropriate"? I'm not angry or all that worked up over it. I'm mostly sad that this is the world we now live in, where we are so much more worried about offending people that we whitewash everything and admonish anyone from any era who doesn't live up to today's standards.

So Laura's name is taken off this award, but Jefferson the slave owners name is still on everything and we still have a team called the Redskins and the Indians. Ok world.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

More than that, it's just as annoying when it happens in the opposite direction. Remember the kerfuffle when Go Set A Watchman was published?

Someone in an online writing group I belong to said something unrelated to this last night - nothing would ever get written if we spend all our time worrying about whether it might offend someone. That doesn't mean authors should go out of their way to be provocative, but it also doesn't mean everything needs to be sanitized and cleaned up so that modern people can be comfortable with it existing at all.

[Neko]

I was thinking more about the character of Laura, and it's kind of refreshing shockingly modern, she is.  That's the best way I can put it.  Laura does some not-so-good things, from time to time, and she is punished for them, but the books don't moralize her actions in the way other books of that time often did.  Laura getting angry at Mary taunting her and slapping her is treated as a normal thing that happens between siblings.  Laura coming up with the rhyme about Lousy Liza Jane is something she does without thinking and she later regrets it.  Laura isn't a bad kid, and she isn't an angel, either.  For a female character written during the Great Depression, that's interesting.  So many books of that time and especially before it would have gone out of their way to make Laura more of an example than an actual person.

[DrSpaceman]

19 hours ago, Sweet Summer Child said:

I was thinking more about the character of Laura, and it's kind of refreshing shockingly modern, she is.  That's the best way I can put it.  Laura does some not-so-good things, from time to time, and she is punished for them, but the books don't moralize her actions in the way other books of that time often did.  Laura getting angry at Mary taunting her and slapping her is treated as a normal thing that happens between siblings.  Laura coming up with the rhyme about Lousy Liza Jane is something she does without thinking and she later regrets it.  Laura isn't a bad kid, and she isn't an angel, either.  For a female character written during the Great Depression, that's interesting.  So many books of that time and especially before it would have gone out of their way to make Laura more of an example than an actual person.

I have not read the books in decades, but I did read Little Women a few years back.  Little Women I think suffers from the problem you mention.  I compare Little Women to Full House if it was set in the mid/late 19th century.  (which I suppose is more appropriate when you consider Little House was made into an actual TV show) The kids aren't perfect, but each chapter is the kids learn a very special (obvious) lesson and then end up telling their mom how wrong they were and how they won't do it again.  You can almost hear the "Ahhhhhh....."  from the audience at the end of the each chapter.  Its so sappy and superficial. 

[starri]

On 6/26/2018 at 9:35 AM, Mabinogia said:

So Laura's name is taken off this award, but Jefferson the slave owners name is still on everything and we still have a team called the Redskins and the Indians. Ok world.

You know, a lot of of people have a problem with that too.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation did recently finally decide to stop pretending Sally Hemmings didn't exist.

[SherriAnt]

This is crazy to me, I feel like this is a first step towards book banning. She was writing about her own life, which happened to be during a time of common racism. I don't feel like she was especially derogatory towards Natives, I think she was showing what most white people were really like. And for every time Ma was vocal about her hatred, Pa was equally vocal about his, respect isn't the word, but viewing them more equally than her. Now, the minstrel show is very racist, but it was common entertainment up until vaudeville, so not really shocking. She also very clearly credits Dr. Tann for saving them, and seemed to have some fond memories of him. His laugh, especially. People need to remember that she was writing about the 1860's, in the 1930's, and she seems pretty progressive for both of those times. 

I had no problems understanding that the views weren't right anymore when I read these, neither did my daughter, and neither will my granddaughter. Just explain to your kids, but don't strip her of her honours. 

[Mabinogia]

I just hope the books don't ever get whitewashed because I think it is important to remember that even good people, and I think we'd all agree the Ingalls' were good people, were influenced by the majority in the time and place they lived. In Laura's time natives were the enemy. Sure, we (I'm of European descent so I use we) technically were the ones invading their land and stealing it and slaughtering them all, but history is written by the winners and I'm sure Laura grew up being told that Indians' were dangerous (which they were, with good reason) and were lesser (which they weren't, but people always say that about those who are different so they can feel better about themselves). 

I just feel that, as important as it is to acknowledge that that sort of belief is wrong and terrible, it is also important to show that even good people were susceptible. It is too simple to say bad people are racist and good people are not. It's far more complex than that. It's about what we are taught, how we are raised and the world we grow up in. 

Do I think Laura was a racist in her time? Probably, she didn't know any better. Do I think she would be if she grew up in our time? No.

I wish, rather than just changing the name of the award, they used the award as a platform to discuss this stuff. If we just ignore history we are doomed to repeat it. If we flash a light on it, we can learn from it. 

[Irlandesa]

3 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

I wish, rather than just changing the name of the award, they used the award as a platform to discuss this stuff. If we just ignore history we are doomed to repeat it. If we flash a light on it, we can learn from it. 

I fully endorse discussing the contents of Laura's book and the casual racism of the white settler perspective depicted in them.  But keeping her name on the award probably wouldn't lead to that.  Before the news broke of the name change, I wonder how many people even knew of the existence of the award? I'll admit, I didn't. If they kept on keeping on, odds are the only people who would really be aware of the debate would be people who were already well aware of that attitude in her books, librarians or anyone who followed debates surrounding children's literature closely. 

Taking action to change the name increased awareness of the award and the attitudes of her parents. 

And even if it managed to lead to a discussion every four years when it is given out, it would have the consequence of taking the focus off of the recipient and back on to the contents Wilder's books.

 

On 6/26/2018 at 8:35 AM, Mabinogia said:

She is still the same writer she was the week before they changed the name of the award. So what, exactly, are they trying to say here? That someone shouldn't be heralded for their writing skills if what they wrote is no longer considered "appropriate"?

I don't think that's what they're saying.  She was the first recipient of this award which is probably why it was named after her.  She is still considered the first recipient of the award.  They're not taking that away from her.

Yes going with a more neutral name is safer.  But considering the diversity in recent winners, it lets potential winners (especially Indigenous winners) off the hook of having to accept an award named after someone who depicted racism in her writings.