Just Call Me Ma: How “Little House On The Prairie” Awakened the Feminist Within

Like so many girls born in the '70s, I was unapologetically obsessed with Little House on the Prairie. But unlike so many of those girls, it wasn’t Laura who was the object of my affection, with her freckles and braids and buck-toothed charm. It was the life. The prairie. The barn and the egg-collecting and the black horse named Bunny. Laura was fine, but she always seemed a little earnest to me. I wanted the life of a pioneer, not the life of a pioneer child. It was a desire that never left me, and since we abandoned city life for a small town, I get to play out my romanticized version of pioneering for real.

Urban homesteading is what the marketers call it.

“All of the canning without the cholera,” is what my husband calls it.

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So why did I feel so hesitant to share my beloved Little House on the Prairie with my own children? To shake them out of their highly convenient, 21st-century digital lives and into the 19th century (as imagined in the 20th)?

My kids just thought they were lucky to have a mother who bakes bread, and, being children, didn’t really care about the genesis of my desire to do the thing that ultimately benefitted them.

Ma was not the boring saint that I had thought she was when I watched in my youth.

But I wanted them to know the Ingalls like I did; to appreciate pioneer life like I did. So when I received DVDs of the first six seasons of LHOTP as a birthday gift, I put aside my fear that my kids may not love the thing I had loved at their age, and we watched.

We watched as crops failed and neighbours feuded; as cast members and seasons changed in Walnut Grove. My kids laughed at the antics of Laura and her friends, and it occurred to me that watching somebody jump up and down because a frog had been deposited in their drawers was just as funny today as it had been 30 or 100 years ago.

They watched with a child’s eye, but I watched with an adult’s. Yes, I still loved scenes of pioneer life, and I felt a warm glow when the congregation started singing Bringing In the Sheaves, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ma.

Ma was not the boring saint that I had thought she was when I watched in my youth. Yes, she was soft-spoken, but she had more to worry about than just getting dinner ready. She got frustrated. She desired more gratitude than she received. She stood up to a woman with more power and less grace than she had. And she dealt with the antics of her husband and her children without relying on luxuries like electricity, money and indoor plumbing to make life easier.

Ma was a pioneer woman on television in the 1970’s, and that she was a character benefitting from second-wave feminism was something I could only now recognize, even if it had been there all along.

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Ma was capable. Whether dealing with a barn fire while Pa was out of town, battening down the hatches during a blizzard, or navigating a social situation where other men (not Pa) expected a woman to be seen and not heard, Ma held her own. She protected herself and her family with a fierceness equal to any man around her.

Re-watching the show with my kids, a lightbulb went off deep within my psyche: Yes, I gleaned a love of history, homesteading, and hand-made candles from the endless hours I had spent watching LHOTP as a child. But in all those hours spent watching Ma, a small seed of feminism has also been planted, taking root and ready to break the surface. Some girls had Charlie’s angels. I had Caroline Ingalls. And now, my girls do too.