When Women Ironing first appeared in public, critics were startled by its raw honesty—Edgar Degas had turned his gaze from the ballet stage to the backbreaking world of Parisian laundresses. This painting belongs to a series Degas began in the early 1880s, returning repeatedly to the subject of working women at their most exhausted. The model for the yawning woman is believed to have been a real laundress from Montmartre, and Degas is known to have sketched and painted her in several poses, sometimes even in the steamy heat of the laundry itself.

The unvarnished realism of the scene challenged the conventions of beauty and decorum in French art, prompting one contemporary to call it "a painting that smells of soap and sweat." The moment Degas chose is one of utter fatigue: one woman leans heavily on her iron, her arm slack, while the other, mouth wide in a yawn, is caught between labor and the need for rest. The table is cluttered with linen, the air thick with the suggestion of heat and effort. Degas’s loose, rapid brushwork and muted palette reinforce the sense of weariness, while the harsh light falling from the left exaggerates the women's pallor and the shadows beneath their eyes.

Unlike Jean-François Millet’s idealized peasant women, Degas offers no sentimentality—only the unfiltered reality of daily toil. The yawning gesture, so rarely depicted, becomes a quiet act of rebellion against the demands of endless labor. Women Ironing is one of several versions Degas produced on this theme, using both oil and pastel, and today it stands as a key work from his later period, when his interest in modern urban life deepened. The painting’s exact early provenance is unclear, but it is known that Degas kept many of his laundress scenes in his studio for years, reworking them and showing them only selectively.

Today, versions of this subject hang in major museums, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, testament to their lasting impact. The series marks a turning point in Degas’s career, as he moved away from the polished surfaces of his earlier works toward a more experimental, expressive handling of paint and subject.