Adrienne Rich on Tillie Olsen

“Tillie Olsen's Silences will, like A Room of One's Own, be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible.”

“As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours. We need not to be the vessels of another woman's self-denial and frustration. The quality of the mother's life-however embattled and unprotected-is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist. Because the conditions of life for many poor women demand a fighting spirit for sheer physical survival, such mothers have sometimes been able to give their daughters something to be valued far more highly than full-time mothering. But the toll is taken by the sheer weight of adversity, the irony that to fight for her child's physical survival the mother may have to be almost always absent from the child, as in Tillie Olsen's story, "I Stand Here Ironing."30 For a child needs, as that mother despairingly knew, the care of someone for whom she is "a miracle."”