In the following excerpted essay, Kamel discusses "I Stand Here Ironing" and its theme of women whose potential for creativity, growth, and opportunity has been denied them due to their race, sex, religion, and socio-economic status.

In 1954... 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 reconnaissance." This reconnaissance involved not only obsessive reading but internalizing the lives of women writers, especially writers who were also mothers.

Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature, I fear because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened...