Because
Jesus was the great elevator of women and because my wife, Kathy, loves
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie and because
feminism has all shapes and sizes and because some of those shapes and
sizes don’t fit very well into Christianity, I offer this new book
review to those of you who love this woman and her story and to those of
you who would love to read a refreshing picture of feminism with grit
and strength and character that is rarely lifted up as a model for young
women today.
Enjoy.
Jeff
The
South Dakota Historical Society released Pioneer
Girl: The Annotated Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder last fall.
The book sold out in a matter of weeks. This represents an interesting
turnabout. When the manuscript was first written in 1930, it was not a success.
Wilder had not yet published the Little
House on the Prairie series that would gain her fame. Her
autobiography was rejected by a number of publishers. It was only when her
daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a popular writer of juvenile fiction, reimagined and
remarketed Pioneer
Girl for a juvenile audience that it finally saw print.
More
a diary than a polished memoir, it follows the movements of the Ingalls family
through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakota Territory. We see the local
color of habit, dress, and mannerism, and learn about the events that formed the
basis of her novels, which, as Wilder once wrote, constituted “not a history,
but a true story founded on historical fact.” Editor Pamela Smith Hill
provides extensive annotations, drawing on newspapers, census accounts, maps,
and letters.
Some
have focused on the differences between Wilder’s autobiography and her novels,
particularly on the adult focus of the one and the juvenile audience of the
other—with much praise for the so-called “grit” and “harsh reality” of
Pioneer
Girl. The love, courage, and optimism of the autobiography are
overlooked, as are the grit and harsh reality in the novels. By
the Shores of Silver Lake begins with the unanticipated arrival of
Aunt Docia at the shanty: “Ma sighed. She was ashamed of the untidy house, and
so was Laura. But Ma was too weak and Laura was too tired and they were too sad
to care very much.” This scene alludes to the profound depression surrounding
the real-life events of the Ingalls family in Minnesota, where nine-month-old
Charles Frederick Ingalls dies, Mary Ingalls goes blind, and the family is
bankrupted following the great grasshopper blight of 1874–1876 and doctor’s
bills from illnesses. While Wilder includes the last two events explicitly in
her children’s novels, she leaves out baby Charles’s death, which is only
described in the autobiography.
Another
event found only in the autobiography is the near-rape of Wilder in Minnesota,
when the husband of a sick woman she was caring for came into her bed, drunk one
night, ordering her to “lie still!” Laura, then about eleven years old,
thwarted the attack by threatening to scream. But the novels do not shy away
from the dangers awaiting young women. In By
the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura and her cousin Lena respond with
horror upon hearing of the marriage of a homestead girl of thirteen years. When
the family runs a bed and board, Caroline, fearing the rough male boarders,
orders Laura and Mary to lock themselves in the bedroom.
As
a child, I identified with the bold heroine Laura, the feminine version of her
father. As a wife and mother rereading these books to a brood of six, it is Caroline
Wilder, the figure of “Ma,” who draws me in. The belief that Wilder’s
novels are unrealistically prim is bound up with our debates over feminism and
femininity. Many self-identified feminists reject traditional femininity,
claiming women’s roles and even feminine characteristics of softness or pity
undermine female strength and ultimately limit their opportunities. Likewise,
many traditionalist Christians shun the term “feminism,” identifying it with
a movement that rejects the roles of mother and wife, thus weakening the family,
and making women more like men—a move that undermines divine division between
the sexes. But in the figure of Ma we see a strong Christian woman who leads her
family in education, culture, courage, and love. The strength—the
feminism—she embodies is based on the Christian virtue of fortitude.
When
the wheat crop fails, destroyed by blackbirds—does Caroline wring her hands
and weep? No, she makes blackbird pie and everybody eats it. She sends her
eldest daughter, Mary, blind from illness, to college, where she learns Braille
and higher mathematics. Two of her daughters become newspaper writers; one
(Carrie) runs four different newspapers and holds down her own homestead. On the
prairie, Caroline does not admonish her children to stop bickering or pick up
toys, but she tells them repeatedly, as a motif running throughout the series,
“that they must never be afraid” and “they must be
cheerful”—breathtaking advice on the prairie where there is much to fear and
plenty that is grim.
Caroline
is a woman concerned with settling her family while her restless husband,
Charles Ingalls, feels a pull to move. In the beginning of Little
House on the Prairie, we are told that there were no more animals in
the big wood because “wild animals would not stay in a country where there
were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either.” Restless, like a wild
animal, Charles Ingalls eschews the company of those other than his family. However,
Caroline questions the move—“must we go now?” For, we are told, the
weather was cold and the house snug.
Despite
her preferences, Caroline quietly, but actively, supports her husband’s
decision to move. She cooperates not as an act of placid obedience, but of
sacrificial courage. Whenever “the new house” is built, the “moving day”
ends with Caroline placing her tiny porcelain shepherdess upon the mantel. The
house is now a home—Caroline’s home. Wilder underscores Caroline’s
shepherd-like guidance throughout the series with the image of the Good Shepherd
and the recurrence of the Twenty-Third Psalm.
Wilder
gives us a refreshing take on the lost art of homemaking; it is not the
punishment of the repressed automaton wife as our culture portrays it. Rather,
Wilder describes it as bound up with creative resourcefulness: The homesteader
constantly innovated on the prairie where nothing but dirt and sky were
readily available. From washing clothes with no running water to sweeping clean
houses literally made of dirt, everything these women did required physical
strength and immense spirit. These sacrificial acts provided order and sanity,
and ultimately civilized untamed parts of America.
Hence,
in addition to fortitude, Caroline and the pioneer woman represent civilization
and culture. In both Pioneer
Girl and the novels, the family’s wayfaring ends because Caroline
insists upon the education of her children, something that can only take place
living near town. She protects the intellectual and moral growth of her
children, which was not easy in the land savage with beasts or in the town
savage with men where the family previously had found itself.
Caroline’s
example stands in contrast to figures like Laura J. Brown. According to the
notes of Pioneer
Girl editor Pamela Smith Hill, Brown was the secretary of her
county’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Brown, Wilder tells us,
“was literary and wrote for several church papers, neglecting her personal
appearance and her house which was always dirty and in disorder.” Then there
is the dreadful Mrs. Bouchie—she so despises the Dakota Territory that she
threatens her husband at night with a butcher knife to demand that the family
return east. There is also the kindly Mrs. McKee, who is too frightened by
homesteading’s loneliness to stake her family’s claim alone, with only a
child in tow.
Wilder’s
criticism of Mrs. Brown and of other women suggests that feminine virtue is
irrevocably tied to the home. Against a feminism that would separate women from
the house and their roles as wife and mother, Wilder praises women who fiercely
guard their households’ moral and physical survival. Popular culture bombards
young girls with the choice between the seeming empowerment and sexual license
of secular feminism and the mindless obedience, as they depict it, of
traditional roles like the ones supposedly seen in Pioneer
Girl and the Little
House series.
But
there is little docility in Wilder’s women. When Laura Ingalls weds Almanzo
Wilder in Pioneer
Girl, she tells him that she can’t promise to obey him when doing
so goes against her better judgment. This is why I often feel that we would do
well to reappropriate the term “feminism.” Terms such as “feminine
vocation” or “femininity,” which Christians use as alternatives to
“feminism,” have a connotation of docility and passiveness that fails to
describe the women we most admire, whether in Wilder’s time or in our own.
Reviewer Sarah
Klitenic Wear is professor of classics at the Franciscan University of
Steubenville
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