The Complicated History of ‘Little House’ and Why We Can’t Stop Resettling the West
The first TV series, which premiered in 1974, was harkening back to a pioneering time right at the moment when women had gained several rights that were previously unavailable to them. Yet Wilder’s stories are still read by many almost as historical fact, without an understanding of that larger context.
In the books and the first TV series, Laura wore her sunbonnet loosely tied as a sign of defiance of expectations. I kept waiting for that to show up in the new series. To my surprise, Laura (Alice Halsey) rarely even wears a sunbonnet now, instead sporting a simple Stetson-style hat, given to her by a boy cousin, and girlish pussy-willow buds stuck in the brim. (Yes, I want one.)
Gone are the loose bonnet ties. Laura is who she is. In public, she and the Ingalls women wear unique straw confections, stiff and upright, that frame their faces like halos. They are not hidden by old-fashioned sunbonnets. Yet even with her slingshot skills and boyish hats, Laura gives no indication that she’ll step on the wrong side of the feminine line.
The new series—with all episodes directed entirely by women and a producing team of mostly women —includes someone telling Caroline, now a recognized truth-teller and a sought-after leader, that a woman can be anything she wants to be in the West. Not every woman, though: The successful Black female shop owner, Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), isn’t welcomed into the Ladies Historical Society (an exclusion that happened regularly as history was written on the frontier). If a woman chooses to oversee a saloon, like Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag), the most independent white female character in the series, she is relegated to the literal outskirts of town. As for the Osage women, well, even the mission-educated among them, like White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), are virtually excluded.
My family arrived as settlers in the 1620s, fought in the American Revolution, and by the 1840s, my ancestors were moving westward in covered wagons. I still have a quilt my then 17-year-old great-great grandmother made on the Oregon Trail. The family settled in Washington Territory long before statehood.
This pioneer heritage was important to my family. As a kid, I totally identified with Laura. I embraced her. Did I know of the more complicated history growing up? No—or only in bits and pieces that were set aside as easily as a cross-stitch sampler. It wasn’t until later that I started connecting the threads.
And I’m not alone. In 2018, the Association for Library Service to Children removed Wilder’s name from its children’s book award (though she retains her honor as an award winner) over what the organization called “an inconsistency between Wilder’s legacy and the association’s core values,” after literary analysis brought to light insensitive portrayals of Black and Native American characters in her work. The new TV series does work against that, with Sonnenshine deliberately centering an Osage family alongside the Ingalls and working with Indigenous story consultants and directors.
