Megyn Kelly was not a little girl growing up
or she's a Moronic Right Wing nutjob with amnesia
Netflix, the insanely large monolith of re-working or re-tooling old shows as something “new”, announced it would reboot the television classic, “Little House on the Prairie”.
Megyn Kelly, never one to not step into a losing battle with reality, immediately stated that she hoped Netflix would not “woke-ify” the series.
The response was rather quick and epic from Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls in the series. It was basically “you have not watched the original show”.1
Some context is necessary to illustrate what makes me wonder, if Megyn Kelly was actually a little girl.
Megyn, who was born in 1970, was between the ages of 4 and 13 when the series aired. I have never met a woman born between 1960 and 1975, who did not watch this show.
And I lived with a woman named Karla for 9 years, who was born in 1969, who was absolutely crazy about the show. It was, in her words, “a really, really feminist show.” She loved the show and would watch reruns of the show all the time. So you might say, I have more than a vague recall of the show, its episodes, and the issues the Walnut Grove community grappled with in the 1870s.
And yet, here I am writing that serious doubts must be considered if Megyn Kelly was, in fact, ever a little girl in the 1970s or early 1980s.
“Little House on the Prairie” aired from 1974 until 1983. Not sure how Megyn Kelly, who loves to hate anything that does not ooze Trump cultism, male toxicity, christian nationalism, or anti-LGBTQ+, missed her chance to attack this show before now.
As noted by Melissa Gilbert, the show tackled bigotry and sexism constantly. Some historical context should be here. The women’s suffrage movement was in full swing by the late 1870s and people were well aware, at the time, of the grievances women had in the late 19th century (They simply disagreed that it needed to be changed).2
And by the way, the producers of the show made it that way, because Charles Ingalls was much more pro-Native American than his Plains States3 neighbors. (In the eponyous book of the series, a minor character says, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." To this, Pa responds, "he didn't know about that. He figured that Indians would be as peaceable as anybody else if they were let alone."4). And Charles Ingalls was not exactly anti-”colored man” as a black doctor cared for his family when they were seriously ill.5
Most of the women I grew up with read at least one of the books of the series (it was the Harry Potter series of the decade for young girls).
It is possible that someone at FoxNews, who was little girl in the 1970s, might have fed Megyn this bit of red meat or saw an opportunity to “own the libs” over a huge corporation deciding to make money retellingg the life story of a bootstrap libertarian (yeah, the author was one).
There was an attempt by conservatives in the 1980s to adopt the bookseries as an example of the morality of self reliance and family values. That attempt failed primarily because it was well-known in publishing circles that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had taken a heavy hand in editing the series to make it far more anti-government, pro-homesteading than it actually was.6
Rose Lane, if you read the footnote, was a hardcore anti-FDR, anti-New Deal, and anti-Democratic Party ultra-conservative. It didn’t hurt the Political Left that Reagan was supportive of the first two and remained a Democrats until after the 1960 election
But enough book-learnin’.
If you want to know how “woke” the TV show was, just watch the pilot.
I’ll walk you through it because a combination of a great memory and Karla quoting a key line from the pilot often (Karla was a Minnesota farm girl through and through).
Charles Ingalls buys farmland from a local land speculator of sorts. The terms required that Charles have the land tilled and planted by a set date. Failure to have the land tilled and planted on time would allow the land merchant to auction off the land to someone else.
If you have never been to the tall grass prairies of Southen and Western Minnesota, it’s bumpy and rough and often littered with large boulders. Tilling is no easy task…not even with modern farm equipment. With a 19th century tiller and only a horse or ox, it’s even harder.
Charles, worried he might not have the land tilled and planted on time, decides to till 7 days a week instead of a mere 6.
Caroline Ingalls critizes and attacks Charles for working on the sabbath to which Charles say “God understands farmers.”
Well Charles falls out of a tree and injures himself and suddenly finds he can’t work the land and will lose his sweat equity and his farm as a result of a hard bargaining sleazy land merchant.
So Caroline goes out and tills the land while her husband mends and Charles tells her she can’t do the farmwork…to which Caroline says (wait for it, Karla!)
“God understands farmers’ wives."
It doesn’t get much woker than that and the show never pulled back the reins of pushing pioneering into some fairly liberal storylines.
Megyn, get your girl pants on, watch the orginal show, and get “woke-ified”.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/little-house-on-the-prairie-star-torches-megyn-kelly-reboot_n_679d06d2e4b0bbaed17efaf1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage#Suffrage_movements
The book series takes place in Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie
Idid.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43587224