A friend and I were discussing the Little House on the Prairie books, and the thing that we really liked about it was that it showed just how much work went into running a house. Normally books set on the frontier go for the whole heroic 'clearing the land', 'fighting the enemy', 'taming the horses' sorts of stories, and the housework just magically gets done in the background. In LIW's books, you can feel how hard it is to lift a soaking wet quilt in order to get it through the mangle and then out to dry.
gee we have it easy these days
There's a collection of her daughter's short stories in which Rose Wilder Lane talks about a conversation between her mother and father, who must have been in their 60s (I think it was about 1920s?) at that point. They were talking about how easy they had it compared to their parents - they had much more mobility and a wider social life as a result, they had electricity, they weren't having to go out and hunt food to make ends meet, they weren't spending three months worth of evenings sorting out seed potatoes - luxury!
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Date: 2008-05-05 05:06 am (UTC)gee we have it easy these days
There's a collection of her daughter's short stories in which Rose Wilder Lane talks about a conversation between her mother and father, who must have been in their 60s (I think it was about 1920s?) at that point. They were talking about how easy they had it compared to their parents - they had much more mobility and a wider social life as a result, they had electricity, they weren't having to go out and hunt food to make ends meet, they weren't spending three months worth of evenings sorting out seed potatoes - luxury!