Tillie Olsen’s I Stand Here Ironing
Tillie Olsen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, the child of political refugees from Russia. Olsen dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to help support her family during the depression. She became politically active in the Young Communist League and was involved in the Warehouse Union’s labor disputes in Kansas City. Her first novel, Yonnondio, about a poor, working-class family, was begun when she was nineteen. While writing the novel over the next four years, she gave birth to her first child and was left to raise the baby alone after her husband abandoned her. She married Jack Olsen in 1936 and had three more children. She remained politically active and held down various jobs while raising her family throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1953 she was finally able to return to writing after her youngest child started to school.
Olsen enrolled in a fiction writing course at San Francisco State College in 1953. She won a creative writing fellowship for 1955 and 1956 from Stanford University. Her first book of short stories, Tell Me a Riddle, was published in 1961, which established her reputation as a feminist writer. The 1970s brought Olsen more notoriety with several grants and creative writing fellowships. In 1974 she published the still-unfinished Yonnondio. A collection of essays about various circumstances which silence literary creation, Silences was published in 1978. Though Olsen’s body of published work is considered small, her short stories from Tell Me a Riddle, which include "I Stand Here Ironing," have been included in over fifty anthologies and have been translated into many different languages.
"I Stand Here Ironing" is an autobiographical story of the r...
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Olsen works in numerous details to illustrate the sacrifices she made in her life. But instead of guilt, anger, or martyrdom, the author exudes a sense of powerlessness as she sees her daughter drift out of her mother’s emotional reach. As the title suggests, Olsen is literally ironing clothes in the story, but she includes the iron as a metaphor for the helplessness she feels as a woman struggling to support her family in a male dominated society. In a sense, Olsen is the clothing lying helpless before the iron of society and she lives for the day that her daughter will overcome the life-draining domesticity of generations of women who precede her.
Work Cited
Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and It’s Writer. Boston: Bedford, 1999.
Olsen, Tillie. "I Stand Here Ironing." The Story and It’s Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford, 1999. 1129-1134.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
May, C. E. (2012). Critical Survey of Short Fiction: World Writers (4th ed.). Ipswich: Salem Press.
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