Reply to Little House on the Prairie Reboot!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP.  But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out?  I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism.  Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world.  I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.[/quote]

PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman.

The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times.

Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA.

When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty.

I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past. [/quote]

It sounds like you need to move to the politics forum.

Have you ever been farther west than Virginia or visited any western location beyond Chicago or LA?  Gone camping?  Driven through the Dakotas or Kansas?  Spent a winter day with a broken heater?

What those pioneers did was extraordinary. [/quote]

I am from the west and have camped and hiked etc.  I agree it’s extraordinary which is precisely why there is a danger in romanticizing all that because people then think things were better.  Some things maybe were (no worried about microplastics in our brains!) but many were not.  I’m reminded of the pbs reality show that put modern families out there to live like pioneers for something like 60 days.  The men all found it a great vacation from the stress of modern life.  The women all despaired of the fact that the women’s work was literally never done..  Then men basically worked with the sun. But the women needed to be up first to feed the men and work after dusk to clean and get things ready for the next day.  Washing took forever.  Cooking took forever.  Everything took forever.  And at least those women weren’t pregnant, which the pioneer women often were.  There was one census in the late 19th or early 20th century where they asked women how many children they’d birthed and how many were still living.  Just scanning those pages is heart breaking.  And that doesn’t even include the endless miscarriages due to back breaking work, contaminated food/water, and viral disease.  There’s a reason that young women flocked to the cities when industrialization happened — even working in a dark, dangerous  mill was better than this.  [/quote]

The Little House books 100% focused on how hard the pioneer life was for women in particular.

That was one of the main themes woven throughout every novel.

Ma worked way harder than Pa.   That was clear in every book.[/quote]

[b]Pa also worked damn hard though. It's crazy to say that anyone farming on the prairie had it easy.[/b] (And note that in the PBS show, the men who took the seriously the dictate of how much firewood they needed to cut ahead of the winter did not find fake prairie life to be very pleasant.)

Recall that LIW wrote that Pa usually didn't play the fiddle at night except in the winter, because he was too tired.[/quote]

Pa was a loser who moved the family multiple times to get out of debts and unpaid bills.  Because he was a feckless boy-man, his wife had to live in a series of increasingly worse hardship locations.

[/quote]

You really don't have any understanding of history.

Are you quite young?[/quote]

I’m not that poster but am an American history major who also has adhd.  (And I’m not young.) I can see the adhd in Pa.  I wouldn’t say he was a loser but he was a restless risk taker.  Some of those types did quite well in the 19th century but many, many did pretty poorly.  The same traits that make him so fun are also what makes him a little bit of a disaster.  I don’t think it would be great to be married to him long term.  And that is judging him based on the standards off the day.

It is crazy when you do 19th century research how many people failed financially multiple times and put themselves back together.  Like Victoria Woodhull who had two get rich quick schemes and went broke twice after them.  Even Milton Hershey went bankrupt twice before making it big.  Without credit rating agencies, you just moved and tried something else.  But that doesn’t mean those people were easy to live with!

I expect the TV show will gloss over the hardships even more than the books did (as did the 1970s show), so I do wonder if it will give the MaHA trad wife types more fuel for their misguided fire.[/quote]

All of the pioneers were risk takers.  They were also people who did not give up and were not afraid of changing course to survive or improve their lives, even if misguided.  They failed gloriously and often, yet pivked themselves up and tried again.  They were survivors.  That doesn't make them ADHD.  That makes them tenacious and men and women of their times.

There is actually a book called Giants of the Earth written by a Norwegian author, published in Norway and later the US in the late 1920s, that tells a similar historical fiction account of his family's history as pioneers during and around the same time as the Ingalls family.

The book is for adults, not children, so it is much more mature in how it approaches the subject matter.  But the experiences, fears, attitudes and tenacity are eerily similar to Laura's story, just told from a different experience and different style.  If you read any pioneer writings from that time period of westward expansion, including first person diaries and news reports, what Laura wrote [i]was[/i] the pioneer experience, simply told through the eyes of a child and written for the ears and eyes of a child.  She wasn't making things up, and frankly, not glorifying or creating some mythical fiction.  She was recounting real stories about real people and events, reflecting the mindset of the era, and capturing the resilience, insurmountable struggles, ingenuity and incredible accomplishments of a consequential era in US history.  The pioneers were a remarkable people, living in a remarkably transitional time, and her writings reflect this.

To make the book series something that harps on every fault and flaw on her father to appease modern antipatriarchal audiences, and to focus on her family as runabout shiftless vagabonds, or to highlight tragedies like the loss of a child, would have ruined the book series and created something that would not have stood the test of time.  She wrote about her own family experiences.  She is allowed to write about the ones she felt worth sharing in the way she wanted to present her own story to the world.

The person who is harping on the lazy man child alcoholic Pa does sound young, maybe 20s or early 30s, from the generation where they were taught to throw our intellectual honesty and view all of history through a post 2020 grievance identify lens. [/quote]

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