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Usually Mary and Laura (together) would watch Carrie and Grace.
Think of this...Laura got her teaching certificate at 15.
In real life, Laura was actually 16. The certificate which is reprinted in "Little Town on the Prairie" had the date on the original changed from 12-10-1883 to 12-4-1882 in the book. She also inflated her history test score from the original score of 69 to 96 in the book. The exhibition she and Ida took part in happened before her first school in the book, but in actuality, it happened after she taught that first term at Brewster's (real name Bouchie).
In real life, Laura was actually 16. The certificate which is reprinted in "Little Town on the Prairie" had the date on the original changed from 12-10-1883 to 12-4-1882 in the book. She also inflated her history test score from the original score of 69 to 96 in the book. The exhibition she and Ida took part in happened before her first school in the book, but in actuality, it happened after she taught that first term at Brewster's (real name Bouchie).
I read the book "Pioneer Girl" a couple of months back and I just dropped off "Prairie Fires" this afternoon. But I knew a lot about Laura and Rose before I read those books.
There's a lot more to Laura's life than what was in the books and there's a good reason they're filed under fiction. They're darn good books for detailing what life was like in that time and era. But I think too many people take them at face value and think you can apply what's in the books to real life. Unfortunately, that didn't really work out for Laura's parents and it doesn't always work out today either.
The "Pioneer Girl Project" of the South Dakota Historical Society Press just published a statement about the ALA's deletion of Wilder's name from the award. Here's the link to their statement: https://pioneergirlproject.org/2018/...-wilder-award/
One of the excellent things about this statement is that it provides a link to John E. Miller’s article “American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder†which was originally published in the journal South Dakota History.
I like their concluding sentence: "It is better to study than to seek to erase an important legacy like Wilder’s."
Read the Miller article; it's really interesting!
Thank you for the link, and I absolutely 100% agree with Miller.
I posted before in this thread almost a year ago, but I find many of the more recent posts interesting, and I did want to say something now about Mary being catered to.
As others have pointed out, we are talking about a different time. I don't know why some people have such a hard time understanding that. Until quite recently, nothing much was expected of those who had severe handicaps (in the opinion of those around them, at least). There was not the awareness and the assistance available to many people who were blind, deaf, crippled/paralyzed, or whatever. As times change and people become more educated, most public opinion changes -- but not until then.
And that (what I italicized above) is also what bothers me about some efforts to "smear" Laura Ingalls Wilder -- as I have written before, if some people want to ban anything objectionable (racist or whatever) in the literature of the past, I would guess that 90% of the books written before 1965 or so would be on the banned list, and I think that would be, literally, a terrible shame.
Last edited by katharsis; 07-13-2018 at 07:32 AM..
I don't think anyone wants to smear Laura Ingalls Wilder. I think instead people have always been interested in the person behind the books and as they find out more about her, they begin to realize she was as complex a person as anyone today and she also had her blind spots and faults like many others.
People have read about Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, and criticized her. Like many others, I'm not a fan of RWL, but I also have to recognize the era she grew up in, when newspaper journalists didn't always feel the facts were pertinent to a story. I also believe RWL was bi-polar and that brings more understanding to her behavior and temperament.
I posted before in this thread almost a year ago, but I find many of the more recent posts interesting, and I did want to say something now about Mary being catered to.
As others have pointed out, we are talking about a different time. I don't know why some people have such a hard time understanding that. Until quite recently, nothing much was expected of those who had severe handicaps (in the opinion of those around them, at least). There was not the awareness and the assistance available to many people who were blind, deaf, crippled/paralyzed, or whatever. As times change and people become more educated, most public opinion changes -- but not until then.
And that (what I italicized above) is also what bothers me about some efforts to "smear" Laura Ingalls Wilder -- as I have written before, if some people want to ban anything objectionable (racist or whatever) in the literature of the past, I would guess that 90% of the books written before 1965 or so would be on the banned list, and I think that would be, literally, a terrible shame.
Yup, I agree. Erasing books means erasing our pasts.
The Little House TV series, which is still shown in reruns, has some anachronisms.
It's set in the 1880s, when telephones were barely invented. Only a handful of phones existed, in very large east-coast cities. Certainly, rural doctors in Minnesota did not have had telephones until several decades later. It's also unlikely that Nellie Oleson would have a voice-recording machine, which had also been barely invented, and use it to capture Laura's embarrasing gossip.
It's unrealistic (in one of the last episodes) that Laura would have traveled to Arizona to take a college class, or that the great Ralph Waldo Emerson would have lectured there. Arizona then was a wild frontier territory, and a train ride from Minnesota would have been extraordinarily long, complex and probably involve several changes of trains.
One episode was called "Jonathan's Mountain" with Ernest Borgnine. There are no mountains in southern Minnesota.
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