Polite Paradise

I also think that focusing on "obvious" problems like racist language--which you can find in a book with a keyword search, without even looking at the context--misses a lot of questionable content which is more subtle but also deserves discussion, and of courses misses things that the author omitted but should have included. Asking "why" this was the author's choice is incredibly important.

I already mentioned a "shame" attitude in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books--relating not just to "proper" behavior for a girl but also moral behavior in general. Laura carried a LOT of conflicted feelings about being inferior, not good enough, not the boy who could really help her father out on the farm. She saw the attitudes of her day that were acceptable--often epitomized by her sister Mary--and realized she didn't feel the same way inside, but felt like she was a bad person for that, and forced herself to conform outwardly. There's also things like Laura being forced to teach at a school, when she was barely older than her students, while living in a bad situation away from home, because her family needed the money--at what point is a sacrifice unreasonable? She tends to write as though things are perfectly normal, or if she resents it then she is the bad one--a modern reader will likely feel a lot of disconnect about that.

Something I realized when I started reading the books about her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was how much of the drudgery and difficulty and frustration of life Laura was actually leaving out. So that's another choice that could be discussed. Rose didn't seem to have the same inhibition about her feelings that Laura did--if Rose was mad about something, it was okay for the narration to be mad, too. (I forget if those books were actually written by Rose, or by her son based on her recollections.)

What gets me is that if someone is responsible for an award named after LIW, you would think they'd be familiar enough with her books to realize that they are so much more than just a few hot-button remarks--the whole picture of life they present is complicated, fraught with discordance to modern readers, and ripe for critical thinking and questioning by young readers. Plus, LIW's works are an entire saga spanning much of her life, growing in complexity along with the narrator and reader. I think I was introduced to Little House in the Big Woods in maybe second grade? But a kid that age isn't going to care about the adult issues in a later book like These Happy Golden Years, and something like The Long Winter would probably be too dark for them. To dismiss her entire canon instead of seeing it as an opportunity to discuss how attitudes change, but some human stories still endure across the ages, seems very short-sighted to me.

Okay, I'm sure I come off as an obsessive LIW scholar at this point; but honestly, it's been 10-15 years since I last read her books. I read them all as a kid, then reread later and was just struck by all the stuff I had missed. I think if someone only remembers them vaguely--yeah, cool stuff about making head cheese and playing catch with a pig's bladder, and nasty Nellie Olsen--they might be inclined to dismiss them as lightweight kid's stuff that can easily be jettisoned if Some Authority says it has problematic content. (One guy my age said he'd never read those books because they were only for girls. Your loss, pal.) They're really quite rich and sophisticated, especially the later ones, and it would be a shame if people never tried them because of publicity about the award downgrade.