“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen is a story of a young single mother reflecting about her attitudes when she was raising her elder daughter, Emily. The story contains several feminist elements since the narrator is a working-mother, who is not able to spend a lot of time with her children as women were supposed during the 1930s. The narrator breaks gender roles of the time; she is the one who provide economic support to her family. Besides, Olsen was a feminist and published her story in 1961, a time in which several laws supporting women at work were passed. The story has numerous autobiographical elements: she had her older daughter when she was 19, she was abandoned by her daughter’s father, she was a working-mother, and she had more
