SOURCE: "'A Child of Anxious, Not Proud, Love': Mother and Daughter in Tillie Olsen's 'I Stand Here Ironing,'" in Mother Puzzles: Daughter and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, Greenwood Press, 1989, pp. 35-9.

In the following essay, Bauer remarks on the themes of hope and despair within the mother-daughter relationship in "I Stand Here Ironing."

"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...