The American Pioneer Woman as Rugged Individualist: How Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane Forged Libertarian Ideas

Christine Woodside, University of Connecticut

To many of her fans, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her charming “Little House” books about the American frontier define individualism. But Wilder herself did not see herself as a strong individual until the Great Depression and the writing of her life story began. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was Wilder’s secret collaborator. She shaped Wilder’s character into a girl who valued freedom from government control above most other values. The two women wrote the Little House books during the politically charged 1930s and 1940s, so they helped create an undercurrent of libertarian, anti-big government thought in America. My talk will highlight sections of the Little House books where Wilder’s real life was edited or rewritten into an individualistic quest. These rewrites were quietly done by her daughter, who soon helped found the libertarian political movement. I will connect these scenes to Lane’s developing political ideals for herself and others in the 1930s and 1940s. The Little House project celebrated the past but also galvanized its two authors. Wilder thought people were complaining too much in the 1930s, and she limited her complaint to why Mrs. Roosevelt could not do her own work. Rose thought the country, in its policies and government, was broken. In the Little House books, Rose Wilder Lane tried out theories about freedom and what being American really means. These ideas became the central ideas of her libertarian treatise, The Discovery of Freedom, published in 1943—the year the last Little House book came out. In this way, both of the Little House book collaborators embodied, foreshadowed and underscored the libertarian movement.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 74. Women in American Individualist Politics