Tillie Olsen's Reading Lists

From 1972 to 1974, over four issues of the Women's Studies Newsletter (published by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), the feminist writer Tillie Olsen spooled out an epic journey through women’s lives in books. These four reading lists—growing off of each other, at times repeating—came from her own study of women writers and how women were discussed in books. A study that formed the basis of her 1978 nonfiction book Silences, “an examination of the impediments that writers face because of sex, race or social class,” and which informed her work as a professor where she sought to “democratize the literary canon to the works of Third World writers, working class writers, and women.”

From Rose Kamel’s “Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction,” MELUS (Autumn, 1985) Vol. 12, No. 3:

Born in 1913 to East European Jews living in Nebraska, Olsen had no formal college education, but read voraciously. She became a longshoreman's wife raising four daughters in working-class San Francisco, taking low-paying jobs, becoming active in radical politics, and organizing unions. Only when the last of her children entered school could she concentrate on writing. A Ford grant apparently allotted Olsen the solitude she needed but "time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.' Dishearteningly often, writer's paralysis diminished her productivity.

In 1954, when she was fifty, Olsen published the brilliant short story "I Stand Here Ironing," having served a prolonged apprenticeship during which "there was a conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing" and always "the secret rootlets of reconnaisance.” This reconnaisance involved not only obsessive reading but internalizing the lives of women writers, especially writers who were also mothers.

The lists are sprawling in time, place, class. As I was going through them, I was surprised by how many writers or books I had never heard from—forgotten novels published in the 19th century, Austrialian authors little known in America. Though some are still out of print, others are now considered rediscovered classics.

Tillie Olsen with her daughter Laurie. Photo by Jill Krementz, via the New York Times.

The first list provides “a spectrum” of readings on women, whereas the subsequent lists are divided up by themes or periods in a woman’s life; as a mother struggling to find time to write, “Mothering (as distinguished from Motherhood) and Wifehood” were of particular catalyzing importance to Olsen, as were also themes around servitude and labor.

Where I could I included links to read online or to download a PDF.

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Tillie Olsen's Reading List I

Women's Studies Newsletter, Winter 1972, Vol. 1, No. 2

Tillie Olsen is well-known as the author of Tell Me A Riddle, a volume of stories about the lives of working-class women and men used frequently in women's studies courses. She is also a self-taught scholar and teacher who has offered to share her reading lists with the Newsletter. In future issues, we will print lists on such themes as "mothering," growing up, aging, "the hard work of women." We begin here with a list called "A Spectrum.”

A Spectrum

Novels

Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Cement by F. Gladkov

Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

Ultima Thule by H. H. Richardson

Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Put Off Thy Shoes by Ethel Voynich

Stories

"The Revolt of Mother," in Best Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman

"A Jury of Her Peers," by Susan Glaspell in U.S. Stories ed. by Martha Foley

"Nor-Bibi's Crime" by Vera Inber in Short Stories of Russia Today

"Wagner Matinee," in Willa Cather's Youth and the Bright Medusa

"Old Mortality" and the Old Order stories, in Katherine Anne Porter's The Collected Stories

"Prelude," "At the Bay," and "Six Years After," in Katherine Mansfield's Collected Stories

"Babushka Farnham," in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Fables for Parents

"The Bed Quilt," in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Vermont Lives

"Story of an Hour," in Kate Chopin's Collected Works

"Between Men," in Doris Lessing's A Man and Two Women

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (shortly to be reprinted by The Feminist Press)

"The Darling" by Anton Chekhov

"The Sky is Gray," in Ernest Gaines' Bloodline

Lives

Eighty Years or More by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A Mortal Flower by Han Suyin

Literature

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Thinking About Women by Mary Ellman

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Tillie Olsen's Reading List II

Women's Studies Newsletter, Spring 1973, Vol. 1, No. 3

Women: A List Out of Which to Read

... MOST WOMEN'S LIVES: lives, history, realities largely absent from literature (read as balancer, corrective, of prevalent images of women as protected, passive, parasitic, decorative, narcissistic, primarily sex object, "the other," etc.). Each entry should be read with the following in mind: