the power within her to decide her own future and is not bound by her current or past circumstances--she is not "helpless before the iron," but rather, has the potential to shape her own life. The narrator only hopes that Emily sees that power within herself.

The last line of "I Stand Here Ironing" is a beautifully painful line. The narrator, who has been working away the entire time she's been talking to the listener, has been beat on by life. She's been "ironed," if you will, pressed flat by all she has been through. Her life is very hard and very sad, and what she expresses here is a desire for her daughter to know she's better than that, and that she can have a better life. She doesn't want her daughter to be "helpless before the iron"; she doesn't want her flattened and steamed by life.
Greg

I think it is towards the close of the story that we get the surprising, full import of the relationship between the mother, the daughter, and the iron in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” (1961). Before the last section, the impression we have received from the mother’s reminisces about her eldest daughter, Emily, is one of futile longing and regret. A dress can be ironed smooth and free of wrinkles, the mother seems to be saying, but it is not so easy to press away the flaws in a child or the mistakes a mother has made. For the duration of the story, the mother is bent at her ironing board, lost in the physical act of pushing and pulling the iron. Mirroring the movement of the iron are her thoughts about nineteen-year-old Emily, the most troubled of her children. We conflate the physical action and the memory, imagining that it is really Emily whose troubles the mother wants to iron out.

That is, till we come to the final lines of the story, when the mother’s true wish for Emily is unveiled. Directed to a school official who has suggested to the mother that Emily needs "help," at another level this line is the mother's own secret desire for her daughter's future.

Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

Now this is a volte-face, a twist, because for most of the story we have heard the mother lament the ways in which Emily is “wrinkled," as we can see in these lines on two-year-old Emily's return from the house of her paternal grandparents:

When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks.

The mother also reminisces about the specific ways in which she herself has rumpled up Emily’s life and personality. As a nineteen-year-old single parent, the mother had no choice but to often neglect Emily in order to make a living, she tells us. The coming of a “new daddy” and siblings, all of them quicker and more energetic than Emily, further alienated the girl, driving her into loneliness.

She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her, but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend.

Yet, we now have the mother wishing Emily understands that she is more than a dress on the ironing board. If Emily is so troubled, why does the mother want life never to iron her out? How do we interpret the mother’s actual feelings for Emily and the iron? A closer reading of the story throws up some clues to the mother’s wish at the end. Very early on, the mother has expressed worry about Emily becoming too docile because of her desire to placate the grown-ups in her life.

But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness—the explosions, tempers, the denunciations, the demands—and I feel suddenly ill. I put the iron down. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

In this light, the mother’s biggest worry for Emily is not that “no one seemed...to be a best friend” for her, but that she grows up to be “helpless” and beaten down into “goodness.” Secretly, the mother wants Emily to retain her individual peculiarities and her spirit. We also sense the mother’s pride in Emily’s achievements as a comedian in theater, her “control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience.” Note the strong words used to describe Emily on stage—“command, convulsive, deadly clowning”—and contrast these with the mother’s earlier descriptions of her as “stick-thin” and “stiff,” and rasping with asthma. It is also interesting to note the many details the mother includes to flesh out Emily’s character for us. In her “foreign, dark appearance” and her “legendary appetite,” we see Emily emerge as her own person. Compare the mother’s descriptions of Emily with her generic description of Susan, her second child.

Susan, the second child, Susan, golden-and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not...

Not only does it become clear that Emily may be the child whom the mother most identifies with, but she is also the daughter who represents the mother’s own unrealized potential. There are quite a few suggestions that the mother and Emily may be doppelgangers: for instance, Emily is nineteen in the story, the same age at which the mother was abandoned by her first husband. As a single mother during the "world of the depression" who went on to remarry and have four more children, the mother has never had an option but to live life mechanically, like the iron’s motion. She has always had a course laid out for her, a purpose defined by financial constraints and domestic minutiae. Even in the course of the story, we see her interrupted by her youngest child, Ronnie, who is “wet and demanding to be changed.” In a feminist reading, we can also see that the iron represents both the mother’s discomfort with the confines of domesticity and her desire for Emily to escape its weight. Earlier in the story, she expresses happiness that Emily is "slow" to develop physically, which has kept her away from the grown-up, demanding world of vanity and romance. In the mother's mind, this world can be said to be linked with the world of domestic chores and mundane life. She wants Emily to be on life’s stage instead and not behind the ironing board.

In a sense, the iron signifies the regret and sadness that the narrator feels for not being able to engage in her daughter's life. The iron is a symbol of all of the mundane chores and tasks that had to be completed just to get by, the same jobs that anchored her to her work and allowed her no time to spend with her growing child.

The back and forth of the iron is indicative of the conflicted nature of the narrators position as a mother. Everything she does is for the better of her daughter's life, and yet everything she does takes her further away from an emotional connection with the same daughter. The entire story is an attempt for the narrator to reconcile these two contradicting points, all framed by the movement of the iron.

One key principle in this monologue is the powerlessness the narrator feels over daughter.  There is a pervasive feeling of disappointment in this relationship despite the narrator's best efforts otherwise.

The iron of course is the most prominent symbol in the story, and it can be interpreted in a couple different ways.  First, the iron represents the role of women and particularly, mothers.  In this story, it also represents the chores that kept the narrator from interacting with her daughter Emily on a more regular basis.  The repetitive back and forth motion of ironing represents the monotony of the narrator's emotions, desires and dreams which will never come to pass no matter how much work she puts into them, and the endless cycle of helplessness she feels.

Later in the story, the convalescent home in which Emily recovers from tuberculosis comes to have symbolic meaning as well.  It represents the care the narrator could not provide for her daughter.  Emily's balcony at this home represents both the physical and emotional distance between mother and daughter.

The iron represents the life of hard work and drudgery the single mother who narrates the story endures as she raises her children. The mother, as she irons, dwells on her oldest daughter—who she feels didn't get enough of her love and affection growing up. The iron represents everything harsh that kept this poor woman from giving her daughter the kind of life she wishes she could have offered her.

To her daughter, the iron and act of ironing becomes symbolic of her mother. She says to her mother:

Aren't you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.

If Whistler showed his mother at leisure, sitting in a rocking chair, this mother is shown to always be working. The mother's work never seems to be finished, and the work itself seems to always stand—like the ironing board—between the mother and the child.

At the end of the story, the mother hopes her daughter can have a better future (a better adult life) than she had. She wants her to have more control over her destiny:

make it so there is cause for her to know--that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

In Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" the mother's act of ironing is a metaphor for an examination of the past in an effort to reconcile her responsibilities to and relationship with her daughter Emily.  In her stream-of-consciousness, the mother passes back and forth in time, like the iron, and attempts to "iron out" her feelings and actions.  For instance, she tells the official from the school,

I nursed her.  They feel that's important nowadays....I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.

After this statement, the mother goes back over the daughter's childhood, admitting that she had to put Emily in a nurseries "that are only parking places for children"; later, she confesses to having to place Emily in an orphanage. As she irons and remembers, the mother returns to stages in Emily's life with added explanation of her actions, "What could I do?"  At times she even says, "I put the iron down" as she reflects upon Emily's character and comedic talents.  Indeed, Tillie Olsen's short story "I Stand Here Ironing" fuses both motherhood and experience in the metaphor of ironing.