I Want You Women Up North to Know

Tillie Olsen

"Let's Start at the Very Beginning, A Very Good Place to Start"- The Sound of Music, (great musical btw).Tillie Olsen starts the poem with a direct call out to her audience, northern women, specifically those that shop at the major department stores. She then exposes the cute image of "dainty children's dresses" to their real origin- the blood of working women. This juxtaposition is made through the imagery of "blood" and "wasting flesh"; and through the metaphor of the process of fabric-making using the words "dyed" and "stitched". The image is also ironic because San Antonio, the place where the dresses are so painstakingly made, is "where sunshine spends the winter"

The second stanza starts in a similar way with "I want you women up north to see" (instead of know). This shows Olsen's desire for northern women not just to have a factual understanding of the suffering of southern worker women, but to see their faces so it as personal of an issue to northern women as it is to southern women. If they were to look through the sales woman's cheery facade they would see one getting rich at the expense of others getter more destitute. The "bloated face" shows that one is getting fat by "ordering more dresses", consuming more and more, as the workers are wasting away from "consumption". Consumption is defined as the progressive wasting away of the body. So in other words southern women suffer from consumption (wasting away) because of northern women's consumption (consuming resources). At the end of stanza two Olsen employs repetition with the phrase "in blood, in wasting flesh".


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There is a tonal shift going into stanza three as Olsen now describes the woman of the south that the northerners should now be picturing when they go into a northern department store. "Dawn to midnight" is repeated as well as the sewing metaphor; the "blood embroiders" and the rain is "stitching the night". She also uses descriptions of weather (in San Antonio) to show the plight of the working women. There is a "fog of pain", "parching heat", and "white rain".

This poem is similar to I Stand Here Ironing in theme and imagery. Both contain themes of sacrifice, desperate situations, and the strength of women through adversity. Also both works use a repetitious motion to move the piece along. In I Stand Here Ironing it was through the motion of ironing and in I Want You Women Up North to know it was through sewing/fabric-making.

To be continued......