"Tillie Olsen's short story "I Stand Here Ironing" shows the ways in which a woman's ideas about change and progress and growth may be interpreted through her own experience...This is a personal story of a woman's problems, as my friend wrote. But it is also a political overture orchestrated out of the dailiness of Olsen's life and of the women she knew. This story tells us that change comes slowly, across the generations; that there is often damage in growth, some of it irreparable; that men, self-absorbed in their own turmoils, often abandon women and children; that help, however well-meaning, is often steeped in privileges of class (or race), and may in any event, as in this case, be too late."
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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
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Sources
Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen
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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.
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