“Laura tried to listen but she felt stupid and numb. Pa’s voice slid away into the ceaseless noises of the storm. She felt that the blizzard must stop before she could do anything, before she could even listen or think, but it would never stop. It had been blowing forever.”
I went through such a big Little House period. But more than anything the food stuck with me, to the point that I no longer have any of the books, but I still have the Little House cookbook. I worry about how i would feel if I re-read the series and had to reckon with just how bad it is.
I am also curious about how the tv show has warped the way people view the story.
I read all these books with my dad growing up. (I suspect he censored some of the overt racism, because his method was either to read it as is and have a discussion afterward or to skip over parts and I don't remember having discussions about these books as we did about Tom Sawyer and Pippi Longstocking when she went to the South Pacific and some others, which I remember vividly.) Weirdly, I don't remember The Long Winter at all. The ones I remember best are Big Woods, Plum Creek and Farmer Boy and I suspect that's because what I liked about these stories were the procedural elements. The actual narrative of the stories is hazy, but I have vivid memories of how to tap a tree to make maple syrup and turn a bladder into a balloon and how to braid hair and bake various cakes and breads and how to trap different animals. From about ages five to 10 I was obsessed with survival stories, My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet and the like. And then in sixth grade I was sick of them and never looked back. I suspect it's because my family was pretty poor when I was really little and I always felt anxiety about losing everything. My parents got the jobs they kept until retirement when I was 10 (dad) and 11 (mom) and I think that when that sense of precarity disappeared, my interest in survival fiction went with it.
So, funny thing: when I was little, I loved reading about pioneers (I read the Kirsten books in the American Girls Collection OBSESSIVELY), but I never really could connect with the Little House books. I read them all and wanted to like them a lot more than I actually did. And I think it's because of something identified in this piece: they were so. heavy. on sensory detail. I know a lot of people appreciate that in stories, but my dialogue-loving self would get impatient with all the description and start hunting for the next quotation mark.
I'm kind of glad now that I was never too attached to them, because articles I've read about Laura and her family in recent years have been really pretty cringey. Can definitely see the connection between the Long Winter and the pandemic, though. Of all the books, that's the one I most vividly remember. (Maybe because, like a story, it had a natural beginning, middle, and end, whereas the other books are describing experiences that aren't necessarily so plot-friendly.)
I read the Little House series as a child in the early 1960s, and I also believe Ms. Wilder's attention to detail and how she felt during her experiences were why I was so drawn to them. I also purchased a set of the books at a yard sale and read them to my daughter in the 1980s. During the current pandemic, I checked "The Long Winter" out of the library as an ebook to remind myself what isolation and hardship could truly be like and that I didn't have it so bad, with my snug studio apartment and plenty to eat.
I do certainly agree that there is much racism in the books and I believe they should be read and remembered in the context of their time period. Pa's performing in blackface is particularly offensive, but this was considered socially acceptable up until the early 1960s. My high school in Ohio had a minstrel show with endmen in blackface every year up until 1965. Ma's extreme prejudice against American Indians, echoed by Laura as a young wife, is also offensive, but was the prevailing attitude in that time period.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time listening to my grandmother's stories as a girl in a large family on a farm in Georgia in the 1890s/1900s, when times and beliefs and styles of childrearing were very different from today. I could see, as I matured, how some of these attitudes and beliefs were no longer appropriate. I grew to become a liberal adult with a strong sense of social justice and my daughter did as well. To read books like the Little House series today requires explanation and disclaimers, to be sure, but I do not believe dismissing all of history, even the distasteful parts, helps children, and adults, to see where we've been, where we're going, and how far we need to go as a nation, and a people.
Thank you so much for this! I really love the way you're parsing through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (and thank you for the podcast rec - I hope they cover the weird quartet of American Girl Mysteries boxset that I had at some point because the one about New Orleans and privateers is... whoo. Something else). Also, this struck me in particular and is so totally true: "But here’s the thing: the pleasure you’re remembering was pleasure just in reading, not necessarily the content. What’s precious was that time, either spent by yourself and in your mind, or with whoever was reading the book to you — not these books." Thank you!
I am currently reading the Little House series to my sons. We are loving them. We have had awesome talks about settlers and food that many did and things that now we realize weren’t so good. Same goes for American Indians. These books include good and also some not-so-good. We can’t distill history to we messed up and they were innocent victims or even we were just expanding and they were ruthless. As with all things of humanity, there are so many diverse stories to share. I am glad to include Native American stories and a visit to see exhibits as we Laura’s stories. I’m so glad I made the choice to read them and the boys love them too!
This is a great, thoughtful post, which I came to late. I want to push back, respectfully, at the idea that the books are inappropriate for children. The racism in the Little House books is very real, but so are their extraordinary qualities of empathy and the evocation of both interior and material life. A lot of great literature is morally compromised. Children, even young children, are able to grapple with moral complexity - in fact doing so is a vital part of their moral education. Anyway, I appreciate your analysis of "The Long Winter"!
I’m so glad a friend of mine pointed me to this. Great piece, Anne. I have studied LIW’s life and work for over 30 years, and have presented over 250 interactive public history programs on her around the US. Most of the time I present first person living history in her persona circa 1900. I have soooooo many things to say about her work that many people in the audiences don’t want to hear let alone acknowledge, especially about the racism. At this point I’ve completely reinvented my work, because I’ve found that the more we talk about the vile nature and implications of colonization, colonialism, and westward expansion in the immediate context of LIW, the more vulgar the resistance. That resistance manifests in racist folks redoubling their efforts to impose even more racism in the education and culturalization of the children in their care. In fact, I no longer present to groups compromised primarily of children for this reason.
I could, and often have, expounded on this subject at length, so the one thing I’d ask all readers to consider is this:
Whenever any attempt to face LIW’s racism head-on is made, there are always a lot of people at the ready to defend or downplay it with “It was a different time! That’s what people thought/said/wrote/acted/believed back then.” But this statement alone IS the problem. Because the only people who thought/said/wrote/acted/believed these things were the dominant culture: white racists. That’s it. Everyone else thought/said/wrote/acted/believed differently. But everyone else were largely the people being oppressed, so their voices and actions were ignored or silenced or halted with violence.
Still, BIPOC have always protested their oppression. White racists have fought to maintain racist systems.
As a historian, my job is to demonstrate how these racist beliefs manifested in laws and structures and systems that were inherently racist and caused widespread oppression, up to and including genocide; further, it’s my job to show how BIPOC resistance was met with violence and further oppression that continues today. It’s incumbent upon me as a white person and a scholar to examine my privilege and truly interrogate what happens when a subject is nearly always discussed from a white perspective, which is what has happened with LIW’s life and work. The BIPOC readers and scholars who have studied and responded to LIW’s work are too often dismissed and pushed aside. A good place to start understanding the harm LIW’s work has caused by perpetuating racist myths and stereotypes is to look at the work of Native scholars, such as Dr Debbie Reese (tribally enrolled, Nambe Pueblo) and to read works such as Dr Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (2014).
There’s so much work to be done. But I’m glad to see more people are willing to do the work, or at least talk about it with those who are. Baby steps, I guess.
Thanks for helping make sense of why this book stands out as my favourite in the Little House series, which I read avidly in the 80s. The big, middle and end, coupled with the overwhelming danger, add up to a complete story. I have reread countless times the chapters where Laura and Carrie struggled home from school in the terrible blizzard and where Cap and Almanzo risked their lives to get wheat for the town. Unparalleled drama.
The ending of this essay is just ... wow. So true. What we'll have left when this ends are the narratives we'll start to shape and how we've treated one another. And I love the Limerick quote (I hadn't read that review before), "When people embrace, trust, and act on the proposition that the United States is a land of opportunity, how are they to make sense of failure?"
Wasn't Sarah Palin a big Ingalls fan? I seem to remember these books coming up a lot when she and John McCain were running, and that was the first time I heard conversations about how the misleading self-sufficiency narrative of the books shaped a lot of conservative/libertarian thinking on the right. Also the first time I read bout the truths of the Ingalls' lives, like how dependent they were on the generosity of other people. They never "made it" but how much of that mythology plays into the sense of entitlement of homesteader descendants now, I wonder.
I don't know why I loved these books so much as a kid, but the sensory detail might be a big part of it. The hay-twisting scenes have always stuck with me, and how when the train of food and supplies finally arrived, Laura's hands were so chafed and ripped-up from twisting hay that they caught on the fabrics their friends had sent. But also I really didn't have a lot of book options growing up. We had a tiny town library and a lot of books in the house (most of which were not for kids), so I read what I had over and over. My kids have Raina Telgemeier and a zillion Warriors books, so these don't have much attraction for them.
Yes. I read these when I was quite young, in elementary school. I re mostly the Ingalls family's cheerful optimism. In 2009-2010 there was a series of blizzards in the Washington DC area and I was actually quite stuck in my suburban house with my husband and infant son, reliant only on neighbors with appropriate vehicles. I went back and read this book and was struck and surprised and struck at my surprise at the details that the family was clearly starving to death, running out of food and fuel, conserving calories by limiting movement, and still facing almost certain death by starvation if Manly & Cap didn't obtain wheat. It reminded me more of a Holocaust memoir or POW memoir like "Unbroken" where you can see the protagonist is dying in slow-motion. This book is truly terrifying and touched me as an adult
We received a collection of the Little House books for my daughter. My husband would read to her as I breast fed her before bed. Neither of us had read them before. Besides being appalling racist, they’re very harsh on children. It’s very “listen to adults because they know best” and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We started to read the Anne of Green Gables books next, and it was a welcome contrast. Creativity and being different were lauded. Children were raised with love instead of fear. We understood pretty easily why the Little House books tended to be loved by conservative-leaning folks and the Anne books by more liberal-leaning.
I read some of the Little House books as a kid, but I was more Nancy Drew and Boxcar Children. I hadn't read The Long Winter and after AHP's twitter thread and this post, I decided to check it out - I borrowed it and Birchbark House from the library. It's cold and dark here in Maine and it's the pandemic and I read most of The Long Winter from the bathtub and I loved it. I think all the sensory detail reminds me of the 5-4-3-2-1 meditation/grounding exercise and I like the simplicity of the books; there's not too much plot it's just these folks' lives.
I remember that I liked Little House in the Big Woods more than Little House on the Prarie though I didn't remember much about LHP; maybe even as a child I reacted to the racism and didn't like it. I've bookmarked Little Squatter on Osage Diminished Reserve -- I skimmed it a week or so ago -- but while reading The Long Winter makes me want to re-read Little House in the Big Woods, I don't have any desire to re-read LHP.
I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books growing up! Not gonna lie, what probably initially drew me to them was that the main character was a girl also named Laura who had brown hair! I used to watch the TV show, too. My grandparents were farmers, so these stories really helped me visualize through all of the vivid details about farming what it was like for my mom and aunts growing up (yep, a family of all daughters!) All of these personal connections really made the books extra special to me. Even weirder is that this Laura ended up growing up wearing her hair in braided pigtails more often than not, marrying a man 15 years older than her (Laura and Almanzo were 10 years apart), and having one daughter. When I hyphenated my name, I saw it as following in the tradition of women like Laura Ingalls Wilder who went by both names.
So imagine how awkward I feel as a far leftist now realizing how incredibly racist these books are...ugh...
I'm in the process of rereading the whole series - just now in the first book - and am hoping to figure out a way to introduce this series to my daughter one day where I can explain the context of the time period and how these are awful things that people used to believe and why we don't believe them now. Fortunately I have some years to figure it out.
Just remember the roman empire fell, and the dark ages took over; but in the end people survived. They also survived black plagues, smallpox, influenza pandemics, and other things like cholera, typhoid and dyptheria. Human beings still remain despite bad government policies, drought, famine, wars, depressions, pandemics...etc ..etc. John Lennon said "Where there is life; there is hope." He was born during a Luftwaffe bombing raid in world war II. During this covid pandemic please remember to keep your dreams alive! That is what makes the world a better place!
I went through such a big Little House period. But more than anything the food stuck with me, to the point that I no longer have any of the books, but I still have the Little House cookbook. I worry about how i would feel if I re-read the series and had to reckon with just how bad it is.
I am also curious about how the tv show has warped the way people view the story.
I read all these books with my dad growing up. (I suspect he censored some of the overt racism, because his method was either to read it as is and have a discussion afterward or to skip over parts and I don't remember having discussions about these books as we did about Tom Sawyer and Pippi Longstocking when she went to the South Pacific and some others, which I remember vividly.) Weirdly, I don't remember The Long Winter at all. The ones I remember best are Big Woods, Plum Creek and Farmer Boy and I suspect that's because what I liked about these stories were the procedural elements. The actual narrative of the stories is hazy, but I have vivid memories of how to tap a tree to make maple syrup and turn a bladder into a balloon and how to braid hair and bake various cakes and breads and how to trap different animals. From about ages five to 10 I was obsessed with survival stories, My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet and the like. And then in sixth grade I was sick of them and never looked back. I suspect it's because my family was pretty poor when I was really little and I always felt anxiety about losing everything. My parents got the jobs they kept until retirement when I was 10 (dad) and 11 (mom) and I think that when that sense of precarity disappeared, my interest in survival fiction went with it.
So, funny thing: when I was little, I loved reading about pioneers (I read the Kirsten books in the American Girls Collection OBSESSIVELY), but I never really could connect with the Little House books. I read them all and wanted to like them a lot more than I actually did. And I think it's because of something identified in this piece: they were so. heavy. on sensory detail. I know a lot of people appreciate that in stories, but my dialogue-loving self would get impatient with all the description and start hunting for the next quotation mark.
I'm kind of glad now that I was never too attached to them, because articles I've read about Laura and her family in recent years have been really pretty cringey. Can definitely see the connection between the Long Winter and the pandemic, though. Of all the books, that's the one I most vividly remember. (Maybe because, like a story, it had a natural beginning, middle, and end, whereas the other books are describing experiences that aren't necessarily so plot-friendly.)
really enjoyed the “just trust me.” thanks for sharing!
I read the Little House series as a child in the early 1960s, and I also believe Ms. Wilder's attention to detail and how she felt during her experiences were why I was so drawn to them. I also purchased a set of the books at a yard sale and read them to my daughter in the 1980s. During the current pandemic, I checked "The Long Winter" out of the library as an ebook to remind myself what isolation and hardship could truly be like and that I didn't have it so bad, with my snug studio apartment and plenty to eat.
I do certainly agree that there is much racism in the books and I believe they should be read and remembered in the context of their time period. Pa's performing in blackface is particularly offensive, but this was considered socially acceptable up until the early 1960s. My high school in Ohio had a minstrel show with endmen in blackface every year up until 1965. Ma's extreme prejudice against American Indians, echoed by Laura as a young wife, is also offensive, but was the prevailing attitude in that time period.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time listening to my grandmother's stories as a girl in a large family on a farm in Georgia in the 1890s/1900s, when times and beliefs and styles of childrearing were very different from today. I could see, as I matured, how some of these attitudes and beliefs were no longer appropriate. I grew to become a liberal adult with a strong sense of social justice and my daughter did as well. To read books like the Little House series today requires explanation and disclaimers, to be sure, but I do not believe dismissing all of history, even the distasteful parts, helps children, and adults, to see where we've been, where we're going, and how far we need to go as a nation, and a people.
Thank you so much for this! I really love the way you're parsing through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (and thank you for the podcast rec - I hope they cover the weird quartet of American Girl Mysteries boxset that I had at some point because the one about New Orleans and privateers is... whoo. Something else). Also, this struck me in particular and is so totally true: "But here’s the thing: the pleasure you’re remembering was pleasure just in reading, not necessarily the content. What’s precious was that time, either spent by yourself and in your mind, or with whoever was reading the book to you — not these books." Thank you!
I am currently reading the Little House series to my sons. We are loving them. We have had awesome talks about settlers and food that many did and things that now we realize weren’t so good. Same goes for American Indians. These books include good and also some not-so-good. We can’t distill history to we messed up and they were innocent victims or even we were just expanding and they were ruthless. As with all things of humanity, there are so many diverse stories to share. I am glad to include Native American stories and a visit to see exhibits as we Laura’s stories. I’m so glad I made the choice to read them and the boys love them too!
This is a great, thoughtful post, which I came to late. I want to push back, respectfully, at the idea that the books are inappropriate for children. The racism in the Little House books is very real, but so are their extraordinary qualities of empathy and the evocation of both interior and material life. A lot of great literature is morally compromised. Children, even young children, are able to grapple with moral complexity - in fact doing so is a vital part of their moral education. Anyway, I appreciate your analysis of "The Long Winter"!
I’m so glad a friend of mine pointed me to this. Great piece, Anne. I have studied LIW’s life and work for over 30 years, and have presented over 250 interactive public history programs on her around the US. Most of the time I present first person living history in her persona circa 1900. I have soooooo many things to say about her work that many people in the audiences don’t want to hear let alone acknowledge, especially about the racism. At this point I’ve completely reinvented my work, because I’ve found that the more we talk about the vile nature and implications of colonization, colonialism, and westward expansion in the immediate context of LIW, the more vulgar the resistance. That resistance manifests in racist folks redoubling their efforts to impose even more racism in the education and culturalization of the children in their care. In fact, I no longer present to groups compromised primarily of children for this reason.
I could, and often have, expounded on this subject at length, so the one thing I’d ask all readers to consider is this:
Whenever any attempt to face LIW’s racism head-on is made, there are always a lot of people at the ready to defend or downplay it with “It was a different time! That’s what people thought/said/wrote/acted/believed back then.” But this statement alone IS the problem. Because the only people who thought/said/wrote/acted/believed these things were the dominant culture: white racists. That’s it. Everyone else thought/said/wrote/acted/believed differently. But everyone else were largely the people being oppressed, so their voices and actions were ignored or silenced or halted with violence.
Still, BIPOC have always protested their oppression. White racists have fought to maintain racist systems.
As a historian, my job is to demonstrate how these racist beliefs manifested in laws and structures and systems that were inherently racist and caused widespread oppression, up to and including genocide; further, it’s my job to show how BIPOC resistance was met with violence and further oppression that continues today. It’s incumbent upon me as a white person and a scholar to examine my privilege and truly interrogate what happens when a subject is nearly always discussed from a white perspective, which is what has happened with LIW’s life and work. The BIPOC readers and scholars who have studied and responded to LIW’s work are too often dismissed and pushed aside. A good place to start understanding the harm LIW’s work has caused by perpetuating racist myths and stereotypes is to look at the work of Native scholars, such as Dr Debbie Reese (tribally enrolled, Nambe Pueblo) and to read works such as Dr Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (2014).
There’s so much work to be done. But I’m glad to see more people are willing to do the work, or at least talk about it with those who are. Baby steps, I guess.
Thanks for helping make sense of why this book stands out as my favourite in the Little House series, which I read avidly in the 80s. The big, middle and end, coupled with the overwhelming danger, add up to a complete story. I have reread countless times the chapters where Laura and Carrie struggled home from school in the terrible blizzard and where Cap and Almanzo risked their lives to get wheat for the town. Unparalleled drama.
The ending of this essay is just ... wow. So true. What we'll have left when this ends are the narratives we'll start to shape and how we've treated one another. And I love the Limerick quote (I hadn't read that review before), "When people embrace, trust, and act on the proposition that the United States is a land of opportunity, how are they to make sense of failure?"
Wasn't Sarah Palin a big Ingalls fan? I seem to remember these books coming up a lot when she and John McCain were running, and that was the first time I heard conversations about how the misleading self-sufficiency narrative of the books shaped a lot of conservative/libertarian thinking on the right. Also the first time I read bout the truths of the Ingalls' lives, like how dependent they were on the generosity of other people. They never "made it" but how much of that mythology plays into the sense of entitlement of homesteader descendants now, I wonder.
I don't know why I loved these books so much as a kid, but the sensory detail might be a big part of it. The hay-twisting scenes have always stuck with me, and how when the train of food and supplies finally arrived, Laura's hands were so chafed and ripped-up from twisting hay that they caught on the fabrics their friends had sent. But also I really didn't have a lot of book options growing up. We had a tiny town library and a lot of books in the house (most of which were not for kids), so I read what I had over and over. My kids have Raina Telgemeier and a zillion Warriors books, so these don't have much attraction for them.
Yes. I read these when I was quite young, in elementary school. I re mostly the Ingalls family's cheerful optimism. In 2009-2010 there was a series of blizzards in the Washington DC area and I was actually quite stuck in my suburban house with my husband and infant son, reliant only on neighbors with appropriate vehicles. I went back and read this book and was struck and surprised and struck at my surprise at the details that the family was clearly starving to death, running out of food and fuel, conserving calories by limiting movement, and still facing almost certain death by starvation if Manly & Cap didn't obtain wheat. It reminded me more of a Holocaust memoir or POW memoir like "Unbroken" where you can see the protagonist is dying in slow-motion. This book is truly terrifying and touched me as an adult
We received a collection of the Little House books for my daughter. My husband would read to her as I breast fed her before bed. Neither of us had read them before. Besides being appalling racist, they’re very harsh on children. It’s very “listen to adults because they know best” and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We started to read the Anne of Green Gables books next, and it was a welcome contrast. Creativity and being different were lauded. Children were raised with love instead of fear. We understood pretty easily why the Little House books tended to be loved by conservative-leaning folks and the Anne books by more liberal-leaning.
I read some of the Little House books as a kid, but I was more Nancy Drew and Boxcar Children. I hadn't read The Long Winter and after AHP's twitter thread and this post, I decided to check it out - I borrowed it and Birchbark House from the library. It's cold and dark here in Maine and it's the pandemic and I read most of The Long Winter from the bathtub and I loved it. I think all the sensory detail reminds me of the 5-4-3-2-1 meditation/grounding exercise and I like the simplicity of the books; there's not too much plot it's just these folks' lives.
I remember that I liked Little House in the Big Woods more than Little House on the Prarie though I didn't remember much about LHP; maybe even as a child I reacted to the racism and didn't like it. I've bookmarked Little Squatter on Osage Diminished Reserve -- I skimmed it a week or so ago -- but while reading The Long Winter makes me want to re-read Little House in the Big Woods, I don't have any desire to re-read LHP.
I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books growing up! Not gonna lie, what probably initially drew me to them was that the main character was a girl also named Laura who had brown hair! I used to watch the TV show, too. My grandparents were farmers, so these stories really helped me visualize through all of the vivid details about farming what it was like for my mom and aunts growing up (yep, a family of all daughters!) All of these personal connections really made the books extra special to me. Even weirder is that this Laura ended up growing up wearing her hair in braided pigtails more often than not, marrying a man 15 years older than her (Laura and Almanzo were 10 years apart), and having one daughter. When I hyphenated my name, I saw it as following in the tradition of women like Laura Ingalls Wilder who went by both names.
So imagine how awkward I feel as a far leftist now realizing how incredibly racist these books are...ugh...
I'm in the process of rereading the whole series - just now in the first book - and am hoping to figure out a way to introduce this series to my daughter one day where I can explain the context of the time period and how these are awful things that people used to believe and why we don't believe them now. Fortunately I have some years to figure it out.
Just remember the roman empire fell, and the dark ages took over; but in the end people survived. They also survived black plagues, smallpox, influenza pandemics, and other things like cholera, typhoid and dyptheria. Human beings still remain despite bad government policies, drought, famine, wars, depressions, pandemics...etc ..etc. John Lennon said "Where there is life; there is hope." He was born during a Luftwaffe bombing raid in world war II. During this covid pandemic please remember to keep your dreams alive! That is what makes the world a better place!