In "I stand here ironing", Olsen adopts with a narrative way to analyze the female voice boldly and directly. The unknown mother in the article received a phone call from her daughter's teacher when ironing clothes and asked her to go to school to talk about her daughter's situation. As a result, the exhausted mother began to recall her daughter's 19 years of growth. Through the personal narrative of this ordinary working mother in the form of stream of consciousness, the plot of the story can be unfolded, allowing readers to glimpse the complex changes that this seemingly ordinary housewife has experienced in her life.
Mother's memories clearly showed that the physical space where she and Emily lived was the place where countless hard working class people lived: "For myself, I had to go to work, find work, or find Emily's father. When he left, he left a note saying that he could no longer bear to go hungry with us", "And it was during the Great Depression, and Roosevelt's new economic policy had not yet been implemented. Every day when I got off the tram, I ran up the stairs emitting stench." In addition, in the family, "I breast fed her. Now everyone is preaching the importance of breast feeding. My five children are breast fed, but at that time, I was pregnant with the obstinacy of being a new mother and blindly followed everything in the book. Although her cry made me tremble with pain, and although my breasts were swollen and painful, I stubbornly waited until the clock struck to feed her". This also shows that the mother was oppressed in the social environment at that time and could only follow the dogma.
She has multiple identities: marginal group, working class, single mother, female, unable to have an independent subject identity. In order to make a living, the mother had to go out to find a job, so she adopted her daughter in other people's homes, and she had to bear the pain of separation. But the mother did not immerse herself in this identity crisis, but constructed her own identity through a series of efforts. In order to be financially independent, my mother went to work to create a better life for herself and Emily. Due to the lack of maternal love in Emily's growing up, her soul was greatly traumatized. After her mother found that Emily's psychology was hurt, she took the initiative to care for Emily and did her best to give Emily a complete family. She finally chose to marry again.
However, during Emily's growing up, her mother listened more to others' opinions. When Emily had problems, she listened to others' opinions and sent Emily to the nursery. Later, she listened to the doctor's opinion: "They suggested that I send her to the rehabilitation center in the suburb." We can see that, although the mother put a lot of efforts to build her own identity under the big social environment at that time, she finally chose the family and married again - depending on male power, and did not really build her own identity.
Tillie Olsen's works focus on the living plight of contemporary women, especially those at the bottom. The female characters she portrayed have gone beyond the old model, and female consciousness has begun to awaken in them. In this article, the mother and Emily had their own identity crisis in the patriarchal society. They built their own identity through their own and external efforts, but it was difficult to completely have their own female identity construction in the social environment at that time. Therefore, Olsen wrote at the end of the novel, "There are many things worth living for in life. I just want to let her know - I have reason to let her know - that she should not wait helplessly for the fate of being ironed like the skirt on the ironing board.
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