“I Stand Here Ironing” is best understood in the context of two social forces that gripped the United States in the twentieth century: the lean years of the Great Depression and the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1950s and beyond. “I Stand Here Ironing” is highly autobiographical, and the narrator, a single, teenage mother raising a daughter in the depths of the Great Depression, is a double for Olsen. “It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression,” the narrator notes when she describes the reality into which Emily was born. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a relief agency that provided work rather than welfare to the nation’s struggling families. Without employment assistance or financial relief, the narrator was left to her own devices, forced to face the grim specter of poverty and the need to work while raising her infant daughter alone. Those trying years have left an indelible mark on the narrator, who openly cites the permanent effect that this inescapable crisis had not only on her family but also on her psyche. Olsen also raised a child alone in the early 1930s and, like the narrator, faced economic hardship that led to great emotional strain.
In America? It's mostly true. You don't hear many people say "If you wire my house, I'll do the plumbing." In other countries, it may be what is said, but not very often in Canada or the United States.
