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I Stand Here Ironing By Tillie Olsen

544 Words3 Pages

Within “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, Olsen has us follow a single mother's struggle through raising kids and specifically her oldest, Emily. Olsen uses societal expectations and reforms to highlight the struggles of both the mother and the oldest daughter, Emily.
Throughout the story, we see a lot of instances of Olsen highlighting the disempowerment of women to showcase the true struggles of being a single mom. We first see this at the beginning of the story when we read about a character, most likely a therapist or teacher, wanting to help Emily. This may seem like a good idea however this assumes that the mother has not been doing a great job at raising her kid. This showcases the disempowerment of single mothers. We also see this disempowerment when we …show more content…

We see this once again when the mother is persuaded into having Emily go to a convalescent home, or in other words an assisted living home. The only time that parents could go and see their children was on Sunday and they were not allowed to touch the parents and the students had to stay on the balcony and shout down at their parents, this is a great example of disempowerment in society of when this was written in 1961. This was post world war 2 and soldiers were returning home and women had to go back to being the housewife instead of the breadwinner however a lot of women were also used just for sex. We see this in this very story with the mother being left by the father mere months after
Emily was born, and getting a job was harder with men taking back over after returning from war. We also see the mother struggling with this when she says, “for I worked or looked for work” We see a lot of disempowerment in this story as well as women having to conform to the societal norms of their

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