Poverty and its Affects

Paper Summary:

This paper introduces, discusses and analyzes the short essays Dorothy Allison's "A Question of Class," and Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," Specifically, it shows how the impact of poverty shapes the personality of the individual and how this theme is developed in both essays. The paper shows that poverty affects each person differently. Some people simply accept poverty, and have no hope for the future. Others, like the two women characterized in the essays, do not accept poverty, but see it differently, and therefore react to it differently.

From the Paper:

"The author of "I Stand Here Ironing," Tillie Olsen, was born in 1913 to immigrant parents. As a young woman she worked in factories, as a waitress, and a laundress, so she understood the poverty and oppression she writes about in this work. This story was originally published in 1961. The story illustrates the grinding poverty during the era of the Great Depression in the United States, and how difficult that poverty made life for women and their children. It also shows its affect on later generations, when it affects the daughter Emily's life, too. She has to take care of the younger children, and really never has a childhood of her own. Her mother remembers, "I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding" (Olsen). In the story, it is obvious that it was mostly poverty that created the situation that forced a mother to neglect her young child. As the mother irons, she remembers, and the story draws the reader into her world."

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