Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing

“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen demonstrates the power of the short story form. While studying journalism in college I used elective units for a class on the short story. Our textbook was You’ve Got to Read This, edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard. When we parsed “I Stand Here Ironing” in class, I remember the professor saying he didn’t get why the story had garnered so much attention. Well, I did. It was poignant, wrenching, lyrical, tragic, a bundle of raw emotions in twelve pages. It showed me how a short story could take a moment in time and reveal a whole world in that one glimpse. I’ve been a humble fan of the genre ever since.

In the story, the narrator, who is also the mother, worries about her nineteen-year-old daughter, Emily, after she gets a call from one of her daughter’s teachers. While ironing her daughter’s dress the mother agonizes over what the teacher might want. She remembers the choices she made, was forced to make, raising Emily. It was the Depression and times were hard for a single mother. 

“She was a miracle to me but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes to the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all.”

As a result of being shuffled from one daycare to the next, Emily grows up anxious and fragile. Times get better when the mother remarries, but sisters and brothers come along, and Emily is forced to help raise them. While Emily eventually emerges as a happy young adult, with a gift for comedy (funnily enough), it doesn’t stop the mother from wishing she had done more, fretting over all the ways she could have been better. This resonated with me as a parent, and would, I think, to anyone who, despite their best intentions, sometimes comes up short. 

“Let her be,” the mother says in the end. “So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

Brilliant. Beautiful. Unforgettable. I just reread it for the umpteenth time. It holds up.

Tillie Olson was influenced by the Depression and an early feminist. “I Stand Here Ironing” appeared in Olsen’s first book, Tell Me a Riddle (1961). Since then, it has been widely anthologized. •