The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Page A

Children’s book reviewer Christine Heppermann, in an essay in Horn Book Magazine, describes a typical frontier experience for girls, one that matches Laura’s almost exactly:
    . . . while mothers fretted that pioneer life was turning their daughters “wild”—i.e., making them lose all sense of propriety—the girls stepped in to do the jobs that needed to be done. . . . They spent more time outdoors than their eastern sisters, removed from the watchful eyes of their overworked parents, developing a familiarity with the land that frequently proved advantageous.
    These hard-working, nature-savvy girls couldn’t have all just happened to be tomboys, could they? I loved that Laura trapped fish with Pa and rounded up oxen run amok because she had to. Or maybe I loved that she had to and still got to be a girl.

    My earliest years were spent watching my brother Steve’s life and trying to decipher all the ways in which I could or could not follow his example. I was often fascinated with his Cub Scout activities but eventually figured out that my interest could only remain vicarious: there would be no Pinewood Derby for me. My parents were fairly progressive and I doubt they ever discouraged me from so-called boy things like sports and other pursuits, but I could intuit, the way kids seem to understand, that my brother’s world wasn’t quite mine. I distinctly remember sitting in his room and flipping through one of his magazines feeling profoundly bored and left out. Never mind that the magazine was Boys’ Life ! It still didn’t seem fair.
    This is not to say I rejected “girl things”—dolls and dresses and so on. Rather I pursued them fervently, partly out of the need to distinguish my existence from my brother’s, and partly out of the terror that perhaps I wasn’t Enough of a girl.
    I was particularly obsessed with both long hair and long dresses. The hair was really the sore point. Mine was cut in a very short pageboy because my mom had found my fine, straight hair difficult to manage; it was different from her own, which was thick and wavy. Sometimes, especially when I wore my brother’s hand-me-down clothes, strangers in restaurants would mistake me for male. I thank God and the ’70s that maxi dresses were in style, allowing me to own a floor-length pink gingham dress that I would’ve worn every day if given the chance.
    But being the ’70s, it also meant I was part of one of the first generations of girls to grow up hearing the message that we could be whatever we wanted. So much well-meaning children’s programming, like Sesame Street and Free to Be You and Me , encouraged us to defy social rules we had yet to fully understand; all the while, the pink and pretty trappings of conventional girliness called to us, too. Years after I wore out that gingham dress I had a college job at a preschool and watched one of the four-year-old girls, whose hair was as short as mine had once been, race around the playground with a skirt on her head to simulate a wig. “Don’t tell her to take it off,” the teacher told me. “She gets upset.”
    I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was “simpler,” as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura