| | The rich things I could have said are unsaid, what I did write anyone could have written. There is no Great God Dough, terrible and harassing, in my poems, nothing of the common hysteria of 300 girls every 4:30 in the factory, none of the bitter humiliation of scorching a tie; the fear of being late, of ironing a wrinkle in, the nightmare of the kids at home to be fed and clothed, the rebelliousness, the tiptoe expectation and searching, the bodily nausea and weariness ... yet this was my youth. 8
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Late in 1932, Olsen moved to Faribault, Minnesota, a period of retreat from political and survival work to allow her recovery time from the illness that by now had become incipient tuberculosis. It was there at nineteen that she began to write Yonnondio, the novel that for the first time would give full expression to ''the rich things" in her own and her family's experience. She became pregnant in the same month that she started writing, and bore a daughter before her twentieth birthday. In 1933, she moved to California, continuing her connection with the YCL in Stockton, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She also continued to writepoems and reportage and more of the novel that would become Yonnondio. In 1936 she began to live with her comrade in the YCL, Jack Olsen, whom she eventually married; in the years that followed, she bore three more daughters and worked at a variety of jobs to help support them. Gradually she stopped writing fiction, concentrating on raising the children and working, but remained an activist into the forties, organizing work related to war relief for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), serving as president of the California CIO's Women's Auxiliary, writing a column for People's World, and working in nonleftist and nonunion organizations related to childcare and education, including the Parent-Teacher Association. During the late forties and fifties, she and her family endured the soul-destroying harassment typically directed at leftists and thousands of suspected leftists during that period. It was not until the midfifties that Olsen began writing again, her style less polemic, more controlled, her vision deepened by the years, her consciousness still profoundly political. In the years that followed, she
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