"As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours. We need not to be the vessels of another woman's self-denial and frustration. The quality of the mother's life-however embattled and unprotected-is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist. Because the conditions of life for many poor women demand a fighting spirit for sheer physical survival, such mothers have sometimes been able to give their daughters something to be valued far more highly than full-time mothering. But the toll is taken by the sheer weight of adversity, the irony that to fight for her child's physical survival the mother may have to be almost always absent from the child, as in Tillie Olsen's story, "I Stand Here Ironing."30 For a child needs, as that mother despairingly knew, the care of someone for whom she is "a miracle.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Short story writers from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesStanford University facultyMembers of the Communist Party USA
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Adrienne Rich, “Motherhood and Daughterhood”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1913–January 1, 2007) was a Jewish American writer who was associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.
65 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Tillie Olsen →
Related Quotes
"Tillie Olsen's Silences will, like A Room of One's Own, be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in whic…"
"I learned a lot being around cows," she recalled in 2002. "It seemed to me they were so damned patient."
"Public libraries were my sustenance and my college."
"Sad is the country that requires women's studies, black and ethnic studies."
"Sometimes the young-discouraged, overwhelmed-ask me incredulously: "You mean you still have hope?" And I hear myself …"
"For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one…"
"beginning of the short story "Tell Me a Riddle" (1960), also included in Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I and Other Works (2…"
"She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others."
"It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched."
"I think a lot of what she writes is really for others, she's speaking for other people, and she feels their pain keenly."