We Women Ironing: Tillie Olsen Has Died

I read in the New York Times that Tillie Olsen has died.

I read her story, As I Stand Ironing, for a literature class, and I have schlepped that anthology around for over thirty years. I pulled it out again today.

“As I Stand Ironing” is the story of a working woman at her ironing board when her daughter comes through, hellbent on going the same way her mother did, and all the mother can do is stand there ironing.

Last June Dick and I were in Marfa, Texas, at the Brown Recluse. Great food, an old house, a young NYU grad owner with a great used book collection on old bookshelves against the walls. In short, heaven.

In that café I spotted Tillie Olsen’s Silences and, without reading what it was, bought it with a pile of books that we had no room for. Weeks after I got home I realized what I had. A book on the gut-wrenching, driven attempts to write after 60-hour work weeks and children and households, despite continued skepticism and “kind” loved ones who tell you to lighten up, to not get your hopes up, that you are not Kafka or Melville. How Kafka wasn’t even Kafka when he was writing and he died too soon, sick and unrecognized. She wrote about how all the great women writers of this century either had no children or had people to take care of them.
A friend asked just this morning what drove me to write my book. I said that I got tired of the psychological approach to relationships, that I was sick of watching perfectly wonderful, intelligent people needlessly struggling. Life is hard enough without getting misinformation and bad advice. The same kind of thinking that creates problems in marriages creates wars and poverty. In short, I want to win the Nobel Peace Prize and save the Earth.

Tillie Olsen dropped out of her junior year of high school, worked in factories and shops, had four children, and protested for workers’ rights. She was in the first group of winners of the Ford Foundation grants. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship. She taught at MIT and Stanford. She died at 94.

My children are launched, I have both money and time, and I have my laptop and broadband.

As I sit here typing, I pray: May I have half of her grit, imagination, and, most of all, grounding in the everyday lives of women and men. That’s where I can make the difference. And maybe I too will have 40 more good years to do it.