People of the Book 101: Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen was born on January 14, 1912 and died on January 1, 2007. To honor the 100th anniversary of her birth and her fifth yortsayt, we continue our “People of the Book 101” series with this portrait.

by Jules Chametzky

Leo Marx brought Tillie to Amherst College for a year’s visiting lectureship in 1969, where she precipitated a revolution whose effects are felt to this day. A grandmother in mini-skirts, she had already published a decade earlier the incomparable Tell Me a Riddle. Much has been written about that pioneering and deeply influential work, especially its title story. Less has been written about “I Stand Here Ironing,” the monologue that opens the book. It became a mantra for the emerging feminist movement with its iconic image of an ur-mother wielding an iron instead of the patriarchal knife of Abraham, explaining and justifying her life, importuning her daughter to free herself from the ancient victimhood of women. It is no exaggeration to say Tillie Olsen kicked off in her year there the feminist movement in the Pioneer Valley, home to five institutions of higher learning.

She was capable of three hour lectures — especially on the plenitude of writers and works she introduced in a course she offered called “Broadening the Canon.” I brought her reading list as the basis for the course of that name I gave in Berlin the next year, 1970-71, when I was invited as a guest professor to the Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University. The young woman assistant professor I asked to give a lecture on women in literature, Beate Schopp-Schilling, went on to become the arbiter of women’s issues in the Bonn government. The other assistant I asked to talk, on Black writers, was Werner Sollors, whose dissertation director I became a few years later. Werner has been for several years director of the Graduate Program in American Civilization at Harvard. His 1986 book, Beyond Ethnicity is the most frequently cited and influential work in the field. So the ripple effect, the radiation, of Tillie Olsen’s influence goes on and on.

At dinners with her cousin and my colleage Arlyn Diamond, she could be highly entertaining, lively, always “on” about feminism and related political matters. But she did have a kind of obsessive quality that I think slowed up her writing productivity. Of course, in Silences she makes a strong case for the reasons slowing up or suppressing many women writers and putative writers: no rooms of their own, the pressures and traditional restraints upon women, forbidden education, little money of their own, the stereotyping of women’s roles. She had experienced all of that, plus the stultifying working class jobs desperately needed to survive and raise a family during the Depression. Still, her painstaking scrupulousness in writing, the vast stores of references she accumulated in her minute handwriting on scraps of paper, illuminating, when put together, many dark or forgotten places in our literary past (as in her ground-breaking work on Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills), did slow her up. My wife and another friend once spent an entire day with Tillie in Boston, searching for just the right 2H pencil she liked to use.

What Tillie Olsen did, what she accomplished, how her work still resonates, remain unique, and she is assured a place among the most important and influential writers of her generation.

Jules Chametzky is an emeritus professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and editor emeritus of the The Massachusetts Review. His books include Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (co-editor, 2000) and From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan and Our Decentralized Literature.