The ‘Little House’ Books Aren’t Just For Girls
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels speak to boys, too, a Pulitzer-winning critic rightly argues
My childhood friends who loved the Little House on the Prairie books had only one thing in common: They were girls.
Why was this so when the series had so much going for it, including wonderful pictures by Garth Williams, who also illustrated a book beloved by boys, Charlotte’s Web? I never thought to ask.
A critic who did ask was the Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Yardley, who reviewed for three decades for the Washington Post. He argues in a collection of his columns, Second Readings, that “Wilder’s books are open and accessible to readers of both sexes”:
“The girls whom she portrays are thoroughly feminine, but they also know how to load guns and do chores in and out of the house. Indeed, the chief trouble with the Laura Ingalls Wilder industry as it now exists is that it idealizes the girls of the frontier far more than Wilder did. The front cover of my copy of Little House in the Big Woods shows two cute-as-buttons girls in a bright, sunny woods, wearing clothes that look right out of Ralph Lauren. That may be good TV, but it’s bad Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
