Tradwives and ‘anti-woke’ backlash: can Netflix reboot Little House on The Prairie for a new generation?

Skywalker Hughes, Crosby Fitzgerald, Luke Bracey and Alice Halsey in Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie. Photograph: ERIC ZACHANOWICH/NETFLIXView image in fullscreenSkywalker Hughes, Crosby Fitzgerald, Luke Bracey and Alice Halsey in Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie. Photograph: ERIC ZACHANOWICH/NETFLIXTradwives and ‘anti-woke’ backlash: can Netflix reboot Little House on The Prairie for a new generation?

After the classic series became a pandemic-era smash, a glossy new adaptation aims to explore the complexities of frontier lifeEach incarnation of Little House on the Prairie has reflected the fears, hopes and hangups of its time – from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s novels, first published in the wake of the Great Depression, to the television series they inspired, which premiered amid a recession and an oil crisis in 1974.Netflix’s reboot, premiering on 9 July, is no exception. “The stories are able to transcend generations, which speaks to its basic nature,” says Luke Bracey, who stars in the new series as Charles “Pa” Ingalls, the rugged family patriarch.

“This is a family trying to get along in the world.”Sophomore slump: why is Netflix losing so many viewers for second seasons?Read moreCrosby Fitzgerald, who co-stars as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls, has a similar explanation for its enduring appeal.

“People grew up with it with their parents and their parents, and there’s a sense of familiarity that is cozy and heartwarming to a lot of people,” she says.The tale of survival on the American frontier has continued to resonate with audiences. The Little House books have sold more than 73m copies, while the original series has seen a resurgence in viewership in recent years and in 2024 alone reached 13bn streaming minutes, making it that year’s most streamed legacy show.

Netflix is betting big on its new adaptation, and a strange confluence of cultural trends and political circumstances could help to explain why. The original series saw an uptick in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, when families were navigating a new and uncertain reality, not unlike the Ingalls family did in rural Minnesota in the late 1870s. One writer described 1932’s Little House in the Big Woods (the first in the series) as feeling like “a manual for self-sufficient isolation” when she was reading the book to her son in the early days of lockdown.

You can see how the hoarding of toilet paper and masks, the emptied supermarket aisles and the suspicion with which people regarded their neighbors would have made this text all the more potent. The books and the shows may also be appealing to a rising resistance to technology and an interest in living off the land and homesteading, interests on the rise among Christian conservatives and environmentalists alike.Cottagecore, the online subculture and aesthetic that fetishizes agrarianism, could be seen as laying the foundation for the show’s appeal too, with its fixation on gardening, handcrafts, farm animals and foraging.

Another social media contagion that has possibly prepped audiences for Little House on the Prairie is the “tradwife”: avatars of domesticity and submissiveness, seen in TikToks and reels cradling babies or baking bread in gingham aprons. You could call these reactionary trends or an attempt to escape the chaotic and confusing nature of contemporary life, but either way it’s hard to not see these as conditions that helped make the resurgence of the show, and its reboot, possible.The books themselves were born out of a reactionary trend.

Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder’s daughter and a journalist, returned to the family farm following the market crash of 1929 and began to help her mother edit a memoir she was writing about her childhood on the frontier. Lane, considered a pioneer of the libertarian movement, slowly began heavy rewrites of what would become Little House in the Big Woods, transforming its real-life characters into hardened but optimistic heroes who rejected government assistance.View image in fullscreenThe original cast of the 1970s television adaptation of Little House on the Prairie.

Photograph: NBCUPHOTOBANK/Rex FeaturesIt was a powerful, intoxicating myth of American resilience at a time when so many were struggling and losing faith in those in power. Lane appealed to an emerging rage over Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal and social security programs, which struck her and other aging pioneers as handouts and entitlements, and emphasized the power of the individual to transform his circumstances. Met with immediate success, the mother and daughter published the follow-up, Little House on the Prairie, two years later.

The series soon ranked among the bestselling children’s novels of all time. Lane would later help fund a libertarian academy in Colorado, the Freedom School, which counted the Koch brothers, architects of modern conservatism, as its alums.Conservatives have long felt some ownership over Little House on the Prairie.

It’s