Olsen, Tillie

OLSEN, TILLIE (1913-2007). Few American women authors have more forcefully exemplified in their own lives and explored in their writings the integral connections between feminist politics and working-class realities than Tillie Olsen. In nearly everything she wrote since the 1930s, Olsen revealed the fundamental conviction that women throughout history have suffered silencing hardships and neglect in their struggles for self-expression, and in her works she grappled with the deep-rooted societal and cultural obstacles confronting women seeking to be writers, especially mothers. Her career spanned more than half of the twentieth century, making Olsen a central figure in the development of a feminist movement concerned not just with gender, but also with class oppression. Olsen’s own life experiences reflected these developments.

Olsen was born Tillie Lerner in 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of seven children. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who fled Russia in 1905 after the failed rebellion. Her father worked at menial jobs while he pursued political activism as state secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party. The family could not support itself, and Olsen left high school after the eleventh grade to work. When she was seventeen, she joined the Young Communist League (YCL), the youth organization of the American Communist Party.

The economic crisis of 1929 and the decision to join the YCL appear crucial in the young author’s life. The YCL sent Olsen to Kansas City, where she was arrested for her participation in organizing a packinghouse strike. These experiences led Olsen to begin a novel about a migrant worker family, the unfinished novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties.

In 1934, the twenty-one-year-old Olsen published all she would publish during the 1930s. This included two poems, two journalistic accounts (notably “The Strike,” a first-hand account of the San Francisco general strike), and a brief excerpt from her novel-in-progress. After that, there were no publications from Olsen for the next twenty-two years.

It was only in 1956, when the short story “I Stand Here Ironing” appeared, that Olsen’s writing career resumed. “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children,” Olsen wrote, “[I] usually had to work on a paid job as well, [and] the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” Finally, with the assistance of a creative-writing fellowship to Stanford University in 1955, Olsen again turned to fiction writing. In 1961 she published her collection of short stories Tell Me a Riddle, and the title story won the O. Henry Award as the best story of 1961.

This success was followed by a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1962–1964), which allowed Olsen to begin her second book, Silences. With this nonfiction work, Olsen explored the special difficulties experienced by women who create. This book quickly became a foundational text and an inspirational point of departure for many in the then-emerging second-wave women’s movement.

In the 1970s, Olsen finally published her unfinished novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974), Silences (1978), and a long afterword, “A Biographical Interpretation,” to a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis (1861, reprinted 1972).

In later years, Olsen maintained her political identity mainly as an educator and leader within the women’s movement, and through numerous benefit readings for a variety of progressive causes. In addition, Olsen put together Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: A Day Book and Reader (1984) as well as an introduction for Mothers and Daughters (1987), a photography book on this same theme. This work continued Olsen’s lifelong commitment to women’s studies, and her dedication to “discovering” neglected aspects of women’s cultural history.

Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Guide to the Tillie Olsen Papers, 1930-1990. Stanford University. Online Archive of California. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft1d5n97qw/

Roberts, Nora R. Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Rosenfelt, Deborah. “From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition,” Feminist Studies 7 (Autumn 1981): 371-406.