Gender Roles

Introduction

Jamaica Kincaid has published poetry and short stories, written on travel, and even edited an essay collection on gardening, but she is best known for her novels. Her fiction often takes the form of semi-autobiographical bildungsroman (a novel about character growth), and it deals broadly with motherhood, daughterhood, independence, colonialism, sexuality, and shame. Her tone is often angry, with her sharp social critique aimed at her own and her protagonists' oppressors: mothers who invariably fail to love daughters enough and who are unable to prepare their offspring for healthy sexual maturity; the colonist and the colonial subject alike; men of all stripes who use women; and white women with whom a true sisterhood is inevitably impossible in her works. Most of the work of Kindcaid has discussed the gender wise distribution of social role of women. Similarly, Tillie Olsen's own life informed her work as she did not publish her first book Tell Me a Riddle until she was 50 years old. The pressures of work, as well as her own commitment to domestic responsibilities and civic activism, left her only pockets of time to write. Only after raising her four daughters Olsen goes on to become one of the most well-respected short story writers of the 20th century. The subjects of Olsen's and Kindcaid novels are unique but the theme of writing of both writers is quite identical, as both have discussed the gender base role of women at that time. The following discussion, in this connection will explore the similarities between Olsen's “I stand here ironing” and Kindcaid's “Girl”.

Discussion and Analysis

In her much-anthologized short story I Stand Here Ironing from Tell Me a Riddle, the narrator, mother of 18-year-old Emily, receives a phone call from Emily's teacher. It seems that her teacher is concerned that Emily is not receiving proper support at home; the teacher sees potential in Emily, which the teacher does not want to see wasted. The narrator's response to the call, as she stands ironing clothes, is to reflect upon her mothering of Emily, from the sacrifices that she made for her child to her own perceived failures, such as leaving her in subpar day-cares in order to work to pay the bills. What readers glean from the narrator's visitation of her past is not Olsen's indictment of the narrator's mothering, but rather an indictment of a system that is not cognizant of the overwhelming responsibility of motherhood, especially amidst economic deprivation (Olsen, 27- 34). That Olsen's narrator is engaging in manual labor—ironing—as she speaks to the teacher belies her engagement with the very real world of work. She is inextricably tied to menial labor, and in Olsen's working-class world, a woman who works outside the home is often without a man or a support network to aid in the rearing of children. When she writes of Emily's withdrawn nature and apprehensions, Olsen indicts not the narrator but a host of social ills that make it virtually impossible for working-class women to mother and work ...