Less than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation declared African Americans free, Tillie Olsen views the American working class as enslaved by poverty. Their plight is further exacerbated by the fact that America, in its capitalistic pursuit of wealth, seems unwilling to recognize this dilemma preferring this class of people remain invisible while providing the benefits of their labor. Yonnondio: From The Thirties speaks, in narrative form, to the inability of the silenced poor to individually rise above the overwhelming obstacles of a capitalistic society and suggest collective efforts as an attempt to remedy this ill of capitalism.
Yonnondio is set in the twenties; however, Tillie Olsen describes this book as "a novel of the 1930's" because this prose is a forum to address political and social conditions of the thirties. Further, the work is semi-autobiographical about working class family struggles and economic woes of the twenties, which culminate into the Depression of the thirties. Yonnondio is a complex text about Olsen's family, the Holbrooks, and the policies that impacted every family in 1930's America. The Depression extenuated the fact that impoverished Americans were helpless in a capitalistic system that denied them any voice; while, squashing their hopes for their share of the American Dream. Yonnondio goes beyond telling one family's story of the 1920's to espouse Olsen's political ideology about 1930's Depression America.
This book is about poverty's mandate that people work and the harsh conditions presented by this poverty. Jim, father of Tillie's character Maize, goes from unskilled job to unskilled job in an effort to provide tolerable living conditions for his family. Anna, the mother, is portrayed as having equally exhausting and overwhelming work. Olsen goes to great length to.
illustrate how poverty causes family and societal deterioration.