“Well, the [original] show was about as woke as you could get for 1974,” says Arngrim. “We dealt with … everything on Little House on the Prairie from drug addiction to racism, to sexism, to spousal abuse. Women’s rights, we absolutely had the episode where the women held out for right to own property … Every possible cutting edge social issue was absolutely discussed … but it was done in such a ‘Little House on the Prairie, what would the Ingalls do’ kind of way, that I think people just didn’t even think of it as being a big deal.”
“Little House was incredibly woke,” Butler notes. “It’s just woke in a very simple, sweet way. It’s not beating you over the head with it, but it’s really woke — and from that, I’m going to say I think woke is a good thing. I don’t think woke is a bad thing. Woke has been turned into a dirty word. It’s not a dirty word. Woke is aware, it’s progressive, it’s understanding that the world ebbs and flows and changes.”