I Stand Here Ironing depicts the life and hardships faced by a young mother and her daughter Emily through the difficult years of the Great Depression and WWII in the 1930s and 40s. Olsen explores the detrimental effects poverty wreaks on the family, the burdens on motherhood, and feminism through the patriarchal social system.
Throughout the ages, life was always harsh for impoverished families, and the Great Depression of the 1930s paved the way for universal destitution and suffering. Life was not in any sense idyllic; in a world where everyone, especially the poor, struggled to make end meets, there were no happy, proud, and responsible fathers playing ball with their children, no happy, cleanly dressed housewives, and no happy, well-fed and well-mannered children. Instead, for Emily and her family, the exact opposite was reality. When she was just one, the father abandoned the family, unable to bear the poverty they faced. Being a single mother is already thorny by today's standards, but Emily's mother struggled to find a job in pre-WPA America to support their family. Because of this economic hardship, Emily was forced to be away from her mother, living with her father's family, her stepfather, preschool, or nursing school, all of which had a detrimental consequence on her happiness and development. Consequently, the time and bond between mother and daughter became strained due to the mother's having no choice but to abandon her daughter due to work obligations. In preschool, Emily cried every time she would see her mother when she was picked up, and her time in her father's home and convalescent school was rife with illness, weight loss, and misery. Due to the economic status of the United States that forced Emily's family into poverty, both mother and daughter suffered through countless tribulations, severely hampering their lives and happiness. Nonetheless, poverty does not bring the family into despair; the mother is still hopeful that her best efforts, while flawed, have allowed Emily to live a better and happier life than she herself did.
Through Emily's mother's experiences, it becomes apparent that motherhood is inherently burdensome and full of hardships, especially during the Great Depression. Emily was born when her mother was only 19, an age when she was in no way physically, mentally, or economically prepared. Raising Emily, her mother had to give up all hopes of higher education, job prospects, and a significant portion of her independence and happiness. While raising Emily has given her some level of happiness, her mother constantly worries about her daughter's future and happiness. In addition, her attention to her children was extremely divided after having Susan and then Ronnie; she reflects that during such a time, her ears were not her own since she was always listening for crying. The socially accepted "perfect" motherhood was that of cooperation and cohesion between both parents, leading to the happy nurturing of children. However, how could this be the case when the fathers of Emily and her siblings were always absent and not helping her mother take care of the kids? The mother has also somewhat lost hope for Emily's future and happiness, accepting that Emily would face hardships brought about by society that she could only hope that Emily would figure out on her own. Lastly, in the phone call with Emily's counselor, her mother confesses that through Emily's 19 years of life, she does not fully understand her daughter or have a solid emotional bond with her due to the circumstances that forcibly separated them. Filled with regret, Emily's mother's burdensome experience with motherhood portrays a bleak, regret-filled endeavor rather than one of joyfulness and hope.
During her experiences in school, Emily suffered through being held to unrealistic and impossible standards of beauty and perfection in a vastly patriarchal society. In the 1930s, the fame and proliferation of figures like Shirley Temple, a healthy American girl with fair skin and blonde curly hair, strained the self-esteem of those who did not match these "requirements," like Emily. Glum, foreign-looking, and skinny from her difficult childhood, Emily's inherent beauty was never recognized or appreciated, even by her mother, adhering to the lenses of society. In contrast, Emily's sister, Susan, blonde and chubby like Shirley Temple, reaped the benefits of being conventionally beautiful, bringing the two sisters to odds with one another. Aspiring to meet beauty standards virtually impossible for her due to her upbringing, Emily goes through considerable misery and hardship due to her appearance being inadequate. For example, there was a time when Emily was in love with a boy from her school, even buying him his favorite candy, yet the boy irrationally and incomprehensibly never noticed her, instead pursuing other chubby, blonde-haired girls. Like the boy, once the object of Emily's affection, Olsen explores several male characters, either absent or helpless--failures. Emily's unnamed father had abandoned the family, allowing poverty and his absence to impact Emily and her mother for years detrimentally. In addition, her stepfather essentially ignored her when she lived with his family, leaving Emily skinny and miserable. Furthermore, Ronnie, Emily's infant brother, is utterly helpless and dependent on his older sister and mother, mirroring Olsen's projection of men in society as helpless and dependent. These male figures, remaining incomprehensible, absent, and unhelpful, cast women like Emily and her mother to suffer the world's burdens.
Through the nature of Emily and her mother's lives and the society they are confined in, Olsen highlights the crippling poverty and burdens of society's expectations placed on women, which men either do nothing to alleviate or further aggravate. Nevertheless, while the world has been harsh on the young single mother and her socially out-of-place daughter, I Stand Here Ironing ends with a message of hope for Emily and her future.
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