Rose Wilder Lane (1886 – 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelsit, and and political theorist and the daughter of American writer, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Patterson, Lane is noted as one of the founders of the American Libertarian Movement.
In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing, save for her collaboration on her mother's books. At this time, she became known among libertarians as influential in the movement. She vehemently opposed the New Deal eschewed "creeping socialism," Social Security, wartime rationing, and all forms of taxation. Lane ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. Living on a small salary from her newspaper column and no longer needing to support her parents or adopted sons, she cut expenses to the bare minimum, living a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury.
After experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her travels with the Red Cross, Lane was a staunch opponent of communism. As a result, Lane's initial writings on individualism and conservative government began while she was still writing popular fiction in the 1930s, culminating with the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943). After this point, Lane promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Lane's friend, Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Because of these writings, the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.
Writer Albert Jay Knock wrote that Lane and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of iindividualism that have been written in America this century." The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally...they don't fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre." Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson, and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.
As Lane aged, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian. Her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom were seen by some as harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane
