Draft:I Stand Here Ironing (short story)

“I Stand Here Ironing” first appeared in Pacific Spectator and Stanford Short Stories in 1956 under the title “Help Her to Believe.” The story was republished in 1957 as “I Stand Here Ironing” in Best American Short Stories. The work was first collected in Tell Me a Riddle published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. in 1961.

Along with “Tell Me a Riddle” (1960), “I Stand Here Ironing” is by far the most reprinted and anthologized of Olsen’s fictional work.

Plot
The story is told in a  first-person confessional narrative. Presented as an “interior monologue” or an “imagined dialogue,” the work incorporates autobiographical elements from Olsen’s early adulthood to her middle-age.

The narrator is a working-class woman in her early forties who has four children, all daughters. At 19-year-of-age she had given birth to her first child, after which her husband abandoned them, coinciding with the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Her narrative concentrates on recollections of raising Emilyunder these harsh circumstances. The hardships the young single mother endured to find work necessitated frequent absences from her daughter during her infancy and throughout her childhood. Emily was sent to her father’s relatives for extended periods, as well as to a country convalescent home for children of indigent parents. These episodes are painful to the mother and particularly the daughter.

The mother fervently hopes that her daughter, now an adult, will surmount her difficult childhood and achieve a measure of happiness.

Background
While attending a course taught by Arthur Foff at San Francisco State University in 1954, Olsen submitted an early draft of “I Stand Here Ironing.” Foff was so impressed by the story that he encouraged Olsen—who was often preoccupied with providing for her young children—to cease attending his class and begin writing independently.

Biographers Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock describe Olsen’s circumstances while writing “I Stand Here Ironing”: "[Olsen] carried her writing with her on the bus, at work, at night, during and after housework: no wonder, she says, the “first work I considered publishable began: ‘I stand here ironing.’”"

Pearlman and Werlock add: “[D]espite the fact that she still had domestic responsibilities, she was able to spend three days a week writing - and then had to return to work where she took jobs at  Kelly girl and  Western Agency girl.”

The story was first published in the Pacific Spectator and Stanford Short Stories in 1956 under the title “Help Her to Believe.” In 1957, the work appeared in Best American Short Stories as “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Theme
Biographers Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock declare the story to be “the most overtly autobiographical fiction Olsen has ever published…”

Though “I Stand Here Ironing” comes the closest to autobiography of all her stories, the author-narrator is not a perfect equivalent to the character she presents. Literary critic Joanne S. Frye warns that such a parallel is “false and distracting…decidedly not the real issue.”

The story was informed by Olsen’s inability to write fiction while a teen-age single mother during the Great Depression through the   post war years. Olsen enumerated the factors influencing the composition of the story, while she was still raising her younger daughters: “T]he writing time available to me; what is happening in my work and family life, and in the larger environment, in society.”

On the domestic task of ironing clothing as a metaphor, Olsen offered this comparison: “written and rewritten and rewritten on the ironing board late at night…The very timbre, rhythm of the piece, the back and forth movement as the iron itself moves.” Indeed, Olsen once, in “a slip of the tongue” referred to her story as “I Stand Here Writing.”

According to literary critic Joanne Frye, the composition of “I Stand Here Ironing” was in part prompted by the 1945  Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the subsequent Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, from which Olsen grasped “the contrast between nurturing care and incomprehensible destruction,” a dilemma which Frye terms “the anguish of parental responsibility in an un-supportive society.”