Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen possessed an enormous amount of conviction. Her writing, her activism, her work raising her family were all part of a life of conviction. Olsen died on New Year's Day at the age of 94.

Many know Olsen's great short story "I Stand Here Ironing," a lulling work of fiction in which a working-class woman reflects on the circumstances surrounding her imperfect mothering and hopes her daughter might somehow thrive. Few, unfortunately, have read the rest of Olsen's compelling, often sobering, body of work. Yonnondio, her only novel and a work of grim realism, recounts the suffering of the Holbrook family attempting to survive the Great Depression. In the novel Olsen doesn't hesitate to represent all forms of abuse and dehumanization as by-products of injustice. "I Want You Women Up North to Know," a topical poem about sweatshop labor, begins with the emphatic

i want you women up north to know
how those dainty children's dresses you buy
at macy's, wannamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, "where sunshine spends the winter."

I want you women up north to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
"exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats"
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh.

The poem closes with the radical threat:

Women up north, I want you to know,
I tell you this can't last forever.

I swear it won't.

I met Olsen in 1997 when she spoke at Youngstown State's Working-Class Studies Conference. She visited a graduate seminar at YSU devoted to her work and I was lucky enough to be a student in that class. In tears she recounted a story of being arrested for civil disobedience and separated at the jailhouse from her husband. In cells on two different floors, they sang to one another through heating ducts. I shook Olsen's hand after the class and she told me to never leave home without a copy of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and to never stop demanding the rights and freedoms the document outlines. Shaky with old age even a decade ago, her voice as she gave that advice was unwavering and defiant. The same voice as the voice of the closing lines of her poem.