"I stand here ironing" begins the narrator in Tillie Olsen's short story that takes its title from that opening line. These are words that would never introduce a male narrator, and the facts of her woman's life, its emotional as well as economic exigencies and constraints, provide the context for this unnamed mother's meditation on her daughter Emily. A school counselor has asked to meet with her to discuss Emily, a child the counselor finds troubled and in need of help. The mother's unspoken response, "what good would it do?", introduces the questioning note on which the story expands. It is a tale of virtually unalleviated strain on the mother and daughter. But the conflicts in the story are not between them; they are within the mother. She weighs her own responsibility for the circumstances of Emily's life, acknowledges both her own power and powerlessness. And she looks with dread toward her daughter's future, afraid that it will be a joyless, meager existence consequent upon a childhood when there was not enough money or time for emotional nourishment. She fears that her daughter's life will be merely an extension of her own, the bitter fruit of labor and privation. Indeed, throughout most of the story Emily seems to reflect, in her complex and fragile psychological state, her mother's lifelong economic precariousness. But Emily comes to embody not only the immediate effects such a mother's life can have on a child, but also her mother's strength, the still living impulse toward life and harmony that she has maintained and protected.

Her mother's evocation of Emily's past life is an attempt to understand her daughter's character. Emily we are told repeatedly, has been an unhappy child. Although beautiful and joyous in infancy, nurtured by her mother, sensuously alive to light and music and texture, Emily was soon left with neighbors, then with relatives, and finally with day-care institutions to allow her mother, abandoned by her husband, to go out each day to work. It is this displacement and deprivation, Emily's being shunted off to indifferent, unresponsive strangers, that her mother feels have created the somberness, the passivity and repression that seem to characterize the present Emily.

Part of the mother's analysis, then, is a sorting out of responsibility for Emily's personality. Her child is troubled and this mother searches through the experiences of her own life to see if she could have done better. But the narrator does not take on a burden of excessive guilt. She is acutely aware of the brutal restrictions on her life. Economically alone and lonely, overworked, tired, she gave Emily all she could. But she could not give her the abundant time allowed to those in easier circumstances.

In this story, time is the first casualty of poverty. And Olsen emphasizes lack of time as the first and last restriction in the mother's consciousness. "I wish you would manage the time to come in," says the counselor. "When is there time?", thinks the mother. The tyranny of the timetable is felt repeatedly in the story. Though her infant cries and the mother trembles with the urge to feed her, she "waited till the clock decreed." For those authorities, medical and sociological, who set models of behavior for others, often define those models in terms of time; natural impulses must give way to a schedule. Jobs have their appointed hours too, and at the end of each day the mother rushes home on the streetcar to pick up her baby at a neighbor's and spend a few evening hours with her. Emily, too, suffers consciously under time's insistent power. It is the clock that she throws away when she lies awake waiting for her mother and stepfather to come home. "The clock talked loud," she explains; "it scared me what it talked." The clock, a symbol of our communal agreement to measure our lives inexorably, is placed against human rhythms that do not scare but create a natural medium for the mutual love between a mother and child. The luxury of that kind of time did not exist for Emily, although it does for the narrator's other children. We see the mother at leisure with her youngest child: "we sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light." Her quiet sitting, looking outward peacefully, holding the baby in her arms until he falls asleep, contrasts forcefully with the one scene we have of Emily's infancy. The narrator, at the end of a working day, would rush to the babysitter's to retrieve her child; "when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet." Giving the claims of motherhood their due time allows those claims their proper fulfillment; a tired child falls asleep in his mother's arms. But Emily's weeping, the result of her mother's absence at work, is a sound that is never silenced; her mother hears it forever.

Lack of money and lack of time constitute the dimensions of the mother's powerlessness. She describes her decisions repeatedly in terms of having to do something. "I had to leave her daytimes"; "I had to bring her to his family"; "I had had to send her away again." The story is filled with expressions of compulsion and lack of choice: "It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job." And Emily shares these constrictions. Sent away to a convalescent home, she received "letters she could never hold or keep." Back home, "she had to help be a mother and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal." Emily, like her mother, must accept the hard realities of life and act within its limitations. In this, they differ from Emily's father, who gives up the struggle and abandons his family. Emily and her mother do not give up.

Indeed, the mother and daughter share strengths of which the mother is not always aware. The narrator has struggled through intensely difficult times. Without money, education, skills, deserted at nineteen with an eight-month-old child, she worked to support the two of them. She reared, often while working outside the house, several other children, seemingly without much help from her second husband. And she has lived through it all. But she fears that Emily's life will be simply the grim reprise of her own impoverished existence of struggle, fear, too little time, too little money, that Emily will come to share her look of "care or tightness or worry." And, indeed, the mother sees herself in Emily; "her face is closed and sober." She sees too the ways that Emily differs from her younger brothers and sisters in both appearance and personality. Susan, the next youngest, grows into a blonde, lively, lovely child with a talent for being companionable and attractive to others. Emily, thin, dark, silent, awkward, is always aloof. For the younger children are the products of less austere times, members of a family with its attendant noise and comfort. Emily spent her young life without such easements. Like her mother, she has known long years alone and has felt their toll. Her mother understands this and fears for Emily. If much modern fiction reveals a daughter's dread of reliving her mother's life, Olsen's story dramatizes a mother's dread of that fate for her daughter.

But the reader sees the mother's strength more fully than the mother does herself. Indeed, the narrator's ability to survey her life and apportion responsibility for it shows her keen intelligence; her ability to meet life's demands without succumbing to either a paralyzing guilt or an emotional dessication shows her strength of character. And Emily shares some of her mother's power.

Emily, however, also possesses qualities all her own. She is nineteen in the story, the same age her mother was when she was deserted. But Emily's life at this moment is very different from her mother's. She is in school, and although the counselor is disturbed by her, we do not readily see why. The one glimpse we have of her is the laughing, witty young woman who teases her mother before running off to bed, "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." And, in fact, her mother is surprised by the energy and spark that Emily possesses. Emily has a comic talent, a gift for pantomime that shocks her mother. The first time she saw Emily on the stage, her mother could not believe it was her somber daughter. "Was this Emily? the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives." Emily's talent for mimicry and movement, the comic exaggeration that is pantomime, cannot be accounted for by her mother's memories. And although her mother fears that Emily's gifts will never be fully developed because the family lacks the money and resources to aid and encourage her, we see, even in the small flowering of her talent and her youthful, high spirits, a sign of hope for Emily.

In the story's powerful final paragraph, the mother utters a kind of prayer. "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to believe—help make it so there is cause for her to believe—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." Throughout the story the mother has acknowledged how little she could do for her daughter, at first how little money and time, and, in a larger sense, how little self-confidence and joy she could provide. But Emily has withstood her privations and proved her strength. Human life contains the possibility of the inexplicable gift, the spark for which others can take neither praise nor blame. The mother, in surveying her daughter's life, sees the threads that form the pattern, but she is still surprised by the figure that emerges, and is still able to hope. And the reader, perhaps because we do not know what occasioned the counselor's fears, perhaps because the only Emily we see directly is this laughing young woman, has reason to believe that the mother's prayer may be answered. Emily's character may bear the mark of her childhood's deprivations, but she has talent and strength, an auspicious alliance.

Olsen's story resists easy optimism, however. The author makes her characters' circumstances as difficult as possible. Theirs is a world of poverty, monotonous labor, estrangement, and sickness. Children are taken away; friends are taken away; when people most need each other, the quarantine of illness separates them. The mother's life is economically and spiritually hard, and her sense of human existence reflects that. She speaks of her children as "needing, demanding, hurting, taking"; she defines motherhood as the time "when the ear is not one's own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry." Although she is only thirty-eight years old, she sees her productive life as past. Olsen's art depicts a world of physically exhausting, spiritually enervating labor and its psychic and domestic costs.

In Yonnondio, her unfinished novel, Olsen explores the lives of the poor on the farm and in the factory during the 1930s. But in that fragment, Olsen's characters never achieve the self-knowledge that can make meaning out of pain. Acutely but inchoately aware of their plight, they yearn for a finer reality, but never move beyond the life they know. In Silences, her book-length compendium of reflections on creativity and the forces that impede it, she speaks of the particular burdens attendant upon being both poor and female: the toil, responsibility, triviality, and distractions that prevent such artists from expression. These are her subjects—the forces in the lives of the poor, especially poor women, that are inimical to life and voice. In "I Stand Here Ironing," however, the reader, moving through memory to vision and finally to prayer, can contemplate not just the iron, the force of fate, but the desire for fulfillment that begins to find an answer in reality.

Olsen's story is a dialogue between circumstances and desire, constraint and love, absence and presence, silence and speech, power and helplessness. Much of what the mother sees is negative. But the inner world, the domain of love and desire, are not entirely helpless before the outer world. Emily has her own personality. People respond to her and want to help her. The physical beauty that she had as a baby has returned; her early love of motion, light, color, music, and textures has found a resurrection in art. And that state which Olsen so often uses as a metaphor for repression and silence, here exemplified in the mother's reluctance to speak with the counselor, is transformed through Emily's medium, pantomime, into the creative expression of art.

Olsen portrays powerfully the economic and domestic burdens a poor woman bears, as well as the sense of both responsibility and powerlessness she feels over her children's lives. Olsen sees, however, the particular tie between a mother and daughter, explored both here and in Yonnondio. In "I Stand Here Ironing," she develops a mother's two vantage points, reflection and projection. She can review her own experience and wish her daughter to escape it, to break the pattern, be released into a fuller intellectual and emotional life. The biological tie between mother and daughter is often extrapolated into a cultural presumption that defines girls' lives as following their mothers'. But this mother does not define Emily in traditional female terms; she does not, for example, focus on her daughter's likelihood of becoming a wife and mother. Instead she hopes for a defined selfhood for Emily, a core of self-confidence, a sense of self-worth. Even in the flinty world that this story traces, Olsen demonstrates enough faith in human resilience to hope that a daughter might find a better path than her mother trod.