"Part of what Olsen shows in her writing is that to varying degrees, women wield power even in patriarchal society and are, therefore, partially responsible for shaping and misshaping the lives within that society."—Literary critic Mara Faulkner in Protest & Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (1993)[19]
Biographers Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock declare the story to be "the most overtly autobiographical fiction Olsen has ever published..."[20] Though "I Stand Here Ironing" comes the closest to autobiography of all her stories, the author-narrator is not a perfect equivalent to the character she presents. Literary critic Joanne S. Frye warns that such a parallel is "false and distracting...decidedly not the real issue."[21]
The story was informed by Olsen's inability to write fiction while a teen-age single mother during the Great Depression through the post war years. Olsen enumerated the factors influencing the composition of the story, while she was still raising her younger daughters: "T]he writing time available to me; what is happening in my work and family life, and in the larger environment, in society."[22][23]
According to literary critic Joanne S. Frye, the composition of "I Stand Here Ironing" was in part prompted by the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the subsequent Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, from which Olsen grasped "the contrast between nurturing care and incomprehensible destruction," a dilemma which Frye terms "the anguish of parental responsibility in an unsupportive society."[24]
