The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast · The History Chicks | QCODE

Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Do-over, Part One

·2 hr 7 min·4 clips

Laura Ingalls Wilder gets a fresh, heavily researched revisit. The hosts place her life inside nineteenth-century expansion, from untamed wilderness and pioneer restlessness to white settlement, the establishment of towns, and modern industry, while reminding listeners that the Little House books came much later, after years of living through hardship. There is a lot to work with. A big part of the conversation is the sheer amount of scholarship that has appeared since their earlier coverage, and the pair sound pleasantly stunned by how many studies and biographies are now on their tables. The family story is rough. Laura grows up moving from one difficult homestead to another as her family chases stability, and the episode keeps circling back to the grind of famine, drought, illness, and financial hardship that shaped every choice. The domestic labor matters. Pa fixes what needs fixing and takes on whatever work he can, while Ma cooks and cleans for other people and the girls help out whenever they are not babysitting. The rent bill hangs over everything. Mr. Stedman is described as taking Pa's share of the profits by claiming there were no profits, which pushes the family further down the slope and makes the whole situation feel less like frontier adventure and more like attrition. Laura's writing changes the picture. The hosts read her fiction as a place where she can build the protective parents and sheltered childhood she did not really have, even though the real child was exposed to a great deal of adult burden and very little shielding. The pressure keeps rising. When a landlord threatens to sell Pa's horses to cover overdue rent, the Ingleses leave in the middle of the night in August 1877 because losing the horses would mean losing any future on the land. That escape leads back to Walnut Grove. There the children can go back to school, and after a while Pa is able to rent a store downtown, which gives the family a little breathing room without making the hard edges of the story disappear. A doctor's wife also enters the picture. She asks Laura to help around the house and keep her company, promising to legally adopt her, and the hosts treat that offer as another frontier arrangement that shows how thin the line could be between rescue and labor. Near the end, the hosts bring in a song. It is the tune Laura and Almanzo were singing the night he proposed, which gives the close a sweet bit of period texture after all the hardship.

As heard by us

A frontier biography that treats Laura Ingalls Wilder as a survivor, not a souvenir.

The episode gives Laura Ingalls Wilder a careful, well-sourced look, setting her life inside nineteenth-century expansion, prairie hardship, and the later work of turning memory into the Little House books.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want Laura Ingalls Wilder with mud on its boots, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast