Tillie Olsen, an activist and feminist writer who is widely studied in college classrooms, died on Monday at the age of 94. Ms. Olsen’s understanding of ordinary women and their work and her lifelong fight for workers’ rights have made her a favorite in feminist-studies and college-writing courses, although she published only two works of fiction: Tell Me a Riddle (1961), which contains her best-known story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” and the novel Yonnondio, which was begun in the 1930s, set aside, and finally appeared in 1973. It was republished in 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press.

In a nonfiction book, Silences (1971), Ms. Olsen took up the question of the artist’s struggle to produce, a theme that haunted her all her life. “Well, I’m going to be one of those unhappy people who dies with the sense of what never got written, or never got finished,” she told the Associated Press during a 2001 interview.