0;dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind” (428). There was only one reparation in Mrs. Mooney’s mind: marriage. “To begin with, she had all of the weight of social opinion on her side: she was an outraged mother” (429). Being the respectable man Mr. Doran was, he could not afford to run from this situation “having had his moment of pleasure.” Mrs. Mooney was satisfied, having Mr. Doran agree to the resolve that was to be. “She thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands” (430). The actions of the mother in this story of steered fates may not have been in the right, but she made her decisions with reality in mind.Not every mother can meet all of the needs of her children. Sometimes she must compromise resources and juggle realities in order for things to work on a day-to-day basis. Such instances occur in a single mother’s situation. After all, the job of raising children, keeping house, paying bills, and feeding mouths is not a task easily met by one person. Even tougher the task is if the single parent is a woman living in a male-dominated society during a depression era, such as the mother in “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olson. In the story, a mother who was young and inexperienced recounts with almost painful honesty her forced neglect of her oldest child, Emily, during the Depression when poverty was unrelieved by the maligned welfare state:And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been, and what cannot be helped. (474)3As the mother stood there ironing, flashbacks of Emily’s early years flood in her memory. She recalls the difficulty she endured while rai...
