"She's about ten years older than I am, and she really grew up into the Depression, and was married at that time, and had kids at a very hard time. She went into really hard times when she was at that age, which I didn't. But we come from very similar backgrounds, really. Our families were Socialist Russian Jews mostly and we have very political feelings in common, and the sense that that tradition and that history have been really subverted and mocked, and a strong feeling for the lives of women. We have disagreements, too, I have to say, but of course I admire her an awful lot. And I think she's really our scholar, our own. I mean people have spoken to me and said I haven't done enough work; that I've been doing all this politics and stuff, and that's true. But she hasn't been doing a lot of her fiction work; she's been doing a lot of feminist scholarship. She's really done that for everybody, for all of us. So she means a lot."
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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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1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley
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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