Tillie Olsen Silences PDF 15: The Impact of Silence on Literature and Culture

The next year, Olsen was awarded the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters award for a distinguished contribution to American literature. In 1978, she published Silences, a nonfiction work about the obstacles to writing some people face: poverty, child rearing, and prejudices against color, class, and gender. She lamented the literary void created by the silences of these people.

As a feminist educator, Olsen has used her position to shine the spotlight on other important women writers. Her college courses "have introduced male and female students to long-forgotten works by women," noted Marleen Barr in Dictionary of Literary Biography. "After it was published in the Women's Studies Newsletter, the reading list she developed was used widely in women's studies courses." Furthermore, "she has encouraged women and minorities to write their own stories and to break through the encoded silences that surround the lives of the powerless," wrote Pearlman and Werlock. "Her appearances across the country, where she talks about such silences, empower, support, and encourage writers and women in ways that she herself was not empowered, supported, or encouraged until very late in life." Concluded Barr: "Although Olsen's output is small, her work is important because it gives a voice to people who are routinely not heard."