I Stand Here Ironing By Tillie Olsen

I Stand Here Ironing
The story, “I Stand Here Ironing”, written by Tillie Olsen is a masterful use of first person. The story gives an insight into the life of a struggling woman who faced motherhood, poverty, and the hardship of life. Due to the great depression, she was without employment and had the need to get a job and raise her infant daughter. This situation brought about guilt, regret and an unspoken burden on what is supposed to be the joy of motherhood.
The first line that opens the story depicts the central metaphor of the story: “I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron” (Kirzner and Mandell 190). The simple act of ironing shows how the narrator, Emily’s mother, though in the present

Women get stuck in a life of toil and responsibilities instead of receiving help to achieving self-actualization. The story shows a representation of motherhood in a harsh and bitter way particularly in the aspect of the bond between a mother and her child. Emily’s mother, like all mothers, will not willingly neglect her child or leave her child to go through unnecessary suffering that will later on become a big scar in the child’s life. Due to the circumstance that surrounds her at the time, she had the urgent need to survive and take care of her child. Unknowing to her that her action would create a distance and an emptiness between her and her daughter, Emily. Linda Ray Pratt discusses in her publication “Mediating experiences in the scholarship of Tillie Olsen” the feminist themes of motherhood among the working class , “I Stand Here Ironing” introduces a feminist literature that scrutinizes mother-daughter relationships in a modern world where women must work and children are not absorbed in an extended family. In the story Emily suffers the consequences of her mother's economic struggle, and her mother cannot pretend that good intentions and a loving heart have put aside the numbing loneliness of bad day care, foster homes, and latchkey childhoods. This mother's rebuttal to the teacher who wants her to "manage the time to come in" to talk about the harm her implied negligence has done her child catches all the guilt of a woman who tried to do "like the books then said."4 By recasting the daughter as a child of her age as well as of her family, and the mother as also victimized by a society that judges her as a mother without assisting her in the effort, opened the door to new understandings of the interrelationships between family and the world, between class and gender (Pratt