No. I think the writers speak to the issues of their time and in the voice of their time.
She wasn’t espousing views, she was writing fiction and in the voice of the characters. She was not doing anything but writing a story.
How the heck do we know what she believed?
As I mentioned in post 18. Is Mark Twain next ? Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer is now not appropriate ? though considered perhaps the greatest piece of 19th century American writing. And a wonderful story of love and friendship in a difficult environment and age ?
Are we going to take Twain’s name off of his award? The Mark Twain award for American humor?
I know what I am certain about. Our history is our history. Retroactively judging people in the past based on today’s standards is not only ridiculous but dangerous. Good people who contributed significantly are being erased because they participated in activities that were the norm for the time. Statues are being removed and names being removed does not change history.
There is a famous quote
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
This has since been quoted and paraphrased as
“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”
“We must always look forward, but we have to understand our history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past.”
What I remember from the books was Pa, his respect for the Native Americans and his guilt that they were pushing them off their ancestral lands. It was always clear to me that Ma’s fear was unfounded and that Pa wasn’t really convinced that just because they were farming the land it was a better use of it than hunting. Those books made me understand why “Manifest Destiny” was both beguiling and wrong, more than any dry history book did.
I’ve never understood the problem with Huckleberry Finn either. The whole point of the book is that Huck realized that Jim should have the same rights he does.
Also, it’s like saying you shouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird because some of the characters are racist. These books, like the Little House books, challenge readers to think about racism.
At age 7, I understood the Little House books to be pointing out the problems with Ma’s perspective, and I recognized her prejudice. No one read the books to me or commented on them to me- I was reading them on my own.
My son could see this too, at the same age, a generation later. We did talk about them, but he “got it” on his own.
Do not underestimate either children or this wonderful series.
Does “the current movement” include Holocaust deniers and people who say the cause of the Civil War was the South being treated poorly by the North? If so, I agree, it’s dangerous. I want to make sure that people know that rewriting history is done by folks of all political stripes.
@rosered55 Yes, my use of “current movement” includes all of the above. As I said, our history is our history and we should not erase it to fit current day standards or politics or whatever. And yes that applies to ALL attempts to erase or rewrite history.
I read a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I was stunned to find out that the last time Laura visited her mother was when she went back to DeSmet for her father’s funeral. Her mother lived 22 more years after the death of Charles Ingalls. Laura did not visit her mother for the last 22 years of her life! I wonder if the closeness described in the books was more fiction than truth, and her love for her father was really what tied her most to her wonderful family memories.
I read these books (my absolute childhood favorites) to my kids when they were young. Because of the TV show, the title “ Little House on the Prairie “ was the most famous, even though the show depicted the next book… but “ On the Banks of Plum Creek” wouldn’t have been as good a title for TV… I had a problem with the text and the differences between what I was trying to teach my children about race and how the author felt and lived. It was too complicated to explain to a six year old. We just moved on to the next book.
Have any of you read “Caroline” ? I can’t imagine being a 23 year old, pregnant, with two young children, crossing a frozen lake in a covered wagon as the ice is cracking beneath you. And you finally get to the other side and you have to deal with the horses, your young kids, cooking over a fire, pouring rain and oh yes, no real latrines…and you know that you will probably never see your family again.
Sorry to get off topic. I can’t imagine any young adult reader even knowing who literary awards are named after…
@privatebanker My mind immediately went to Mark Twain’s work, too.
My kids both read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” in middle school. I am grateful for that.
When they were reading it, I was all ready to have a discussion about the use of certain words in the pieces and some of the attitudes portrayed. They looked at my like I was crazy and said “Mom, everyone knows you don’t say and think that nowadays. This is just a book about what it was like back then.”
I don’t believe in censorship nor does the leadership of the ALA. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books many times, as did my children, and I wouldn’t discourage other people from reading them. But I think it’s okay her name was taken off the award. Some commenters here equate “it’s okay to take name off the award” with censorship. It’s not.
I think that children in upper elementary school are on the whole discerning enough to deal with past realities, and I think it is good for them to read the Little House books. TheGreyKing was pretty advanced to be doing this at 7, but I don’t doubt it.
I also think that it is good for children to see that people in the past did not necessarily hold the values that the very great majority of people do today. It is part of validating the idea that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” not just to see the times when greater justice was in the process of prevailing, but also to see the times when greater justice was not yet ascendant. Otherwise the present could be despair-inducing.
Someone asked whether Mark Twain would be next. Of course, Huck Finn has already been banned in a number of a libraries and schools (mostly high schools).
As far as naming the award for Laura Ingalls Wilder, it seems to me that the group giving an award can rename it at will. People don’t go looking for books by Newberry or Caldecott, as far as I know, so I doubt that there will be a significant impact on the readership of the books (although there might be, not merely from the renaming of the award, but from the publicity around it). Aside from the books’ contents, there seems to have been some controversy about the role that Laura’s daughter Rose, a journalist, may have played in writing them.
My spouse and I visited DeSmet, MN, years ago with our daughter who was somewhere between 7 and 9 at the time. The people of the town were bitterly opposed to the people who were running the site where the Ingalls’ house was. So there were sparring Laura Ingalls Wilder tours.
Several of my stupidest purchases are connected with Laura Ingalls Wilder. At the site of the sod home, I bought a few jars of dirt (baby-food jar size). Yes, dirt! It was labeled dirt, but still . . . For some reason, I thought several friends would be captivated by the actual dirt from the home site. Not so much. Also, I have a set of Ashton Drake Laura Ingalls Wilder porcelain dolls that are never going to be worth what I paid for them.
Policing the past leads to very dark things even beyond censorship. There’s no need to compare Laura Ingalls Wilder to some of the names posted above ( KKK, Nazi’s etc).
We’ve always raised our kiddos to understand that the world, like nature, evolves. And hopefully improves. What is acceptable to some many years ago may no longer be acceptable. People have different opinions about what is important in life. They make different choices. You cannot jump back two hundred years and decide what someone’s choices should be. Nor can someone from the past understand what our challenges are today.
We recently had the kids watch Roots. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was good for them to see the violence and effects of slavery on a single family. It ties into what they are learning about race in school. It gives them another perspective. It generated a lot of questions. Personally, I think if it was made today I think the messages would be different.
So reading Huck Finn or LIW in 1950 might be different than reading it in 2018, but that doesn’t diminish its power and voice. Perhaps, what rewriters want to do is erase the whole of society so they can rewrite it in their own voice. This has also been explored in literature ( Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm, etc). Never really works out so well in the end.
A lot of us older adults weren’t discerning enough when we were kids, though, so I don’t know why we would expect better of our children. Happytimes2001 writes that they didn’t remember anything racist about the books. Neither did I; I loved the books as a girl. Then I reread them as an adult, at which point Ma’s shocking racism toward the Native Americans became obvious. Obviously, as a girl I was missing a lot of racism that was right in front of my eyes. If I were responsible for a child now reading those books, I would point out the racism. I wouldn’t let her imbibe it without having it be pointed out, the way I imbibed it.
Another book I loved as a child, but now find appallingly racist, is C.S. Lewis’* The Horse and His Boy,* one of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe series. I still like the book. Maybe I shouldn’t, because it’s awful.
I think it is disingenuous of the organization to claim that they are renaming the award to bring it more in line with their “core values”; they are the ones who chose the name
in the first place, and one would think that if these values are “core”, then they haven’t changed; so what has? If the views of this group have “evolved” in the limited amount of time that they have been giving this award, your would think they would understand “historical context”.
I LOVED the Little House books, bought them again as an adult, and also had zero luck interesting my children in them. My children are living a normal, middle-class life. They don’t know want. Maybe that is why.
I was hungry as a child, and we didn’t get the piles of presents my friends got, even though we were twice as good. A candy cane in your stocking with an orange WAS a treat in my house, so I savored details of Laura’s Christmas, because mine seemed rich in comparison,
and because she was so overwhelmed and grateful. I loved details of maple sugaring, sewing and needlepoint, and mostly, for me, Almanzos life as a boy. He had so much FOOD! The descriptions of his breakfast were amazing. The PIES. I tried to make fried apples and onions myself. Saving the potato crop. The long winter. The Sabbath. Whippings. Perhaps some very 21st century people don’t realize how some of those details could actual resonate with a kid in the 1970s. My Dad was racist as hell; a black friend who was wildly popular asked me to a dance in 8th grade, and my Dad threatened to break my legs if I went with him. This was not an idle threat. He didn’t realize the boy was being kind, because I was in a rather awkward stage. These books helped me understand my actual life, living with poor, uneducated parents who could be racist, and violent, while growing up among the children of college professors, cleaning their houses and babysitting their children. Pa was a terrible farmer! His family starved, where other fathers provided. Ma was racist! Almanzo’s Dad waited until after the sun set on the sabbath to beat him with a switch!
These were foundational books.
Was I “shocked” by the description of the minstrels? I am going to assume that it was a very accurate depiction of what minstrels looked like. So…why should I be shocked? It is good to know WHERE stereotypes come from. Should we pretend that there were no black minstrels, because the term “minstrel show” makes us somehow uncomfortable today?
Different people have different foundations. I loved LIW’s books when I was a child but I don’t consider it a personal attack (on me) that the award’s name has been changed.
Does anyone else think that Almanzo’s mother was Superwoman? My gosh, that woman did everything. All the FOOD she cooked (I had plenty of food growing up in my upper middle class household, but I was a hungry girl and I too loved the description of the FOOD). Plus she sewed their clothing out of cloth she herself wove out of yarn she carded, spun and dyed.
I do. Or at least I paid attention to who was winning. At my kids elementary school they had a poster with all the Newbery winners and there were always a handful of kids who were determined to read them all.
I read a very funny piece about Farmer Boy. Maybe in the Little House Cookbook? Anyway the writer’s theory was that it was Laura’s fantasy about what a childhood would be like where there was actually enough to eat all the time.
Weird that you say you “don’t consider it a personal attack in you” that the name of the award was changed.
I don’t think I implied that at all. I think I was saying that unless the organization has completely (and explicitly) revised their “core values” , it is a bit precious of them to belatedly claim that this award, which they invented, doesn’t reflect them.
And yes, people DO have different foundations. Great books are great because they speak to people on different levels. The point I was making was that these books helped me make sense of my family (without understanding that at the time). Do you really believe that just because some people are uncomfortable with any acknowledgement of racism, that there aren’t children today growing up in households where racist sentiments are freely expressed? It is hard to
love someone AND fundamentally disagree with some things about them. Loving these books, and reading of Laura’s love for her family despite the difference in attitude towards Indians, among other things, was helpful to me as a child, and I think there are children like my younger self out there. I love my parents, and even they have “evolved “. Butnyes, my Dad can still be racist, while also loving my black sister in law. Life is complicated, love is complicated, and we don’t do anyone favors by taking books out of children’s hands because our grown-up selves are more “woke”.
I never knew the prize existed, so I hardly care what it is called. I am simply pointing out that you invent something and name it, and then pretend it doesn’t reflect who you are? The books haven’t changed. What has?
Also, I have a set of Ashton Drake Laura Ingalls Wilder porcelain dolls that are never going to be worth what I paid for them.