The Little American Homemaker: Domestic Education of Girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books

Due to their representation of the Western myth, Native Americans, and women, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semiautobiographical Little House novels have been a topic of debate since their publication between 1932 and 1971. However, scholars have overlooked the role the domestic education of girls plays in Wilder’s novels. The domestic education can be seen as a method for conveying myths of the Western woman to the Depression-era juvenile readers. In this essay, I shed light on the portrayal of domestic education of the daughters in the novels. I argue that the domestic education teaches problematic lessons of womanhood that align with Wilder’s own ideas and values of women. These lessons are taught to both the fictional daughters and the real 1930s/40s children who consumed the books. Scholars have analyzed womanhood and relationships between children and parents in the novels, but I want to add the aspect of domestic education to those discourses by asking how do the parents raise their daughters to become American women. I argue that this can be seen through lessons on physical appearance, practical skill, and the American citizen. Through looking at primarily the latter half of the series, I aim to deconstruct the lessons represented and connect them to ideas of womanhood, both during the time they aim to represent and the time in which they were published.