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]

[b]Don't know that he was a loser,[/b] but he was definitely a frontier guy looking to serially homestead. The only reason they finally settled down was because Ma put her foot down and said the girls needed to get formal schooling.[/quote]

So you think that a guy who packed up his family multiples times, sometimes in dead of night, to run out on doctor's bills, creditors/store tabs, and rent is...not a loser?

[/quote]

Your details about him running away from creditors wasn't in the books.
Where'd you get that info from?
Apparently he became a justice of the peace and a lawman in De Smet.[/quote]

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