In On the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura and Lena go to pick up the laundry from another woman who's a bit frazzled due to her daughter having just gotten married the day before. The daughter was 13, only a year older than Laura, and both of the girls are completely freaked over the idea of getting married so young.

Oh, and the dugout near Walnut Grove has been reduced to just a small depression in the bank, from the photos I've seen in a book called Little House Country," which is photos of all of the homes and towns mentioned in the books. The Surveyors House that they lived in the year of On the Shores of Silver Lake is the only remaining house from the original books, and it's been moved to the center of DeSmet and is now a gift shop/museum.

Women had far fewer public rights and responsibilities, though. If they were never going to be judged capable of voting their consciences anyway, then the transition between answering to a father and answering to a husband wasn't that big a transition. (If you'll recall, Laura notifies Almanzo with great care that she will not be reciting the "obey" segment of the standard marriage vow for women, which kind of made her radical.)

Lack of sexual maturity is one of those weird ways in which the past is a different country: I strongly suspect that marriages were considerably less sexually active, in that time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if marriages were, especially at first, a matter of finding a helpmeet and an extra pair of hands for the household. Which is... not very romantic. Then again, not a very romantic landscape, what with the wolves and the starvation.

After she tells Almanzo that she won't be promising to obey him, he asks her if she's a suffragette, like his sister Eliza Jane (the one Laura had issues with when she was her teacher), and Laura assures him she doesn't want to vote, but just doesn't feel like she should be making promises she knows she would not be able to keep. The undertone of that conversation to me is that he was raised surrounded by independent women, so it makes sense that hardheaded, forthright Laura would attract him.

I always wondered if Laura ever resolved those issues as time went by, because EJ (as she preferred to be called) ended up as Rose's favorite aunt whom she spent the final two years of her education with in Louisiana, since she couldn't get those final two years of high school education in the small town they lived near in Missouri.

Oh, the maple syrup, and the candy they made by drizzling the syrup on a frying pan filled with snow.

I loved those books, too. I should read re-read them at some point.

Laura is a wonderful character--she is smart, capable, jealous, impatient, brave, loyal and funny. The books are definitely worth a read.

I have many of the same good memories of the books, especially The Long Winter and Little Town on the Prairie- and a LOVED Cap Garland, so I am so sad to see he died so young. I remember Laura helping Pa with the Hay, and being happy because she did not have to wear a corset, and in the Long Winter, them making logs out of hay and straw, and grinding the seed wheat that Almanzo and Royal hid so they had bread and mush. And a snowball fight with cap Garland, which was unladylike!

The thing about the past that confuses me is that it seems from boooks and such that there was no gradual change from being a child to being an adult. Just Boom! You are a lady!

It's great to come back to so much Little House love. I was remembering when Mr. Edwards brought Christmas, Laura's first orange, and the signs of the author-to-be as she described things for Mary. I don't know if any other Jericho watchers noticed, but when the teacher tried to start up a class, post-apocalypse, she began by saying, "Let us begin as we mean to go on," which was what Laura said her first day of teaching.

I got the first four or five as a boxed set when I was, oh, nine-ish, and pretty well disliked them. I think I read 1.5 of them, tried again later, and gave them away.

Raq is me, except I don't think I even got that far. I should try again.

How funny that the Litle House books are the discussion in here and I was heading over to ask about any other "pioneer girl" books to read because my final project in my Children' Lit class is going to be centered around the pioneer girls.

You all know of any others in the same age-range reading-wise about pioneer girls?

Carrie Woodward (I think) - it's been a long time since I've read it. I'll check the title.