The Bechdel Cast - Introducing: Wilder

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

Jack Kerouac but make it a girl with braids. Carrie Bradshaw, but without the sex, and also braids. An American Icon. An American Odyssey. American propaganda. Violently so, in some cases. Laura Ingalls Wilder is evergreen. For better or worse. Since the first Little House book was published in 1932, generations of readers have flocked to Laura’s cozy stories of the Ingalls family settling the Western frontier. The series inspired a TV show, pageants, and entire fashion lines. Behind this franchise is a woman who experienced almost a full century of American history. She’d made her first trips in a covered wagon, and eventually flew on a jet plane. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and legacy remain as powerful, mesmerizing, controversial, and violent as the America she represents. In a country currently at odds with itself and its history could there be a better time for an exploration of this woman? Listen to Wilder on the iHeartRadio App or wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-wilder-112847598/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

She's a Hollywood Western. She's Jack Kerouac, but in a nap dress with braids. She is one of the most important American children's authors of the 20th century. She's the basis for a television show still watched around the world. I literally wake up in the middle of the night and go, somebody somewhere is watching Little House on the Prairie. Women will come up to me and cry and say, my childhood was miserable and Little House on the Prairie was my escape.

She's been called a hero, a racist, a feminist, and a propagandist. Consider a native child in their classroom, reading it aloud, and they come to that sentence, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. She is Laura Ingalls Wilder. Did you know she was a real person? In the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the nine Little House on the Prairie books based on her childhood on the American frontier. And in one way or another, she's been with us ever since.

Oh, I love them. I loved Little House on the Prairie. It's just a perfect book. I've loved Laura for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I used to map out her travels on my parents' atlas. And I'm not alone. Every summer, thousands of people from around the world pilgrimage to her little houses in tiny towns in the middle of the country.

Now I'm going too. We're literally on the ferry. I went in search of Laura. The real Laura. Who is this person I love so much? Should I love her? The story of Laura is just as complicated

as the story of America. Because she is America. for better and worse. If we pretend the past was not as controversial and difficult and racist as it was, then how are we going to deal with the racist issues we're grappling with today? In a country currently at odds with itself and its history, could there be a better time for this exploration? There's never been a better time than now. I'm Glynis McNichol, and this is Wilder. Listen to Wilder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.