Mary Cassatt: A Feminist Painter of Domesticity?
Emily Turner, Princeton Class of 2008On the surface, Mary Cassatt's paintings of women and children appear to undermined her title as a feminist. In the late nineteenth century, Cassatt painted a number of repetitive paintings of women in the home caring for children. This seems on the surface to be surprising and contradictory because she was a staunch feminist yet painted women almost solely in these domestic roles. Due to Cassatt's insistence on painting conventional subjects, many art critics such as Norma Broude have questioned her identity as a feminist (Broude, 4.) Such critics as Broude view Cassatt's paintings as hindering the feminist movement of women into the public realm and workplace. Even in the nineteenth century it was a feminist goal to break free of stereotypical roles as mothers and wives, yet these are the very roles that Cassatt chose to paint, which seems to suggest that Cassatt was encouraging women to accept their assumed roles as domestic mothers and wives in society (Witzling, 7.) Because Mary Cassatt was a feminist, Tamar Garb, among other critics, believes these paintings to be uncharacteristic of her style and beliefs.
“Is there a way of claiming the power of motherhood for women, of acknowledging its force and proclaiming its significance, without reinforcing patriarchal ideology which projects motherhood as the only legitimate form of fulfillment for women?” - Tamar Garb, Modernity and Modernism
Although Mary Cassatt's paintings of women and children may seem as though she was reinstating domesticity, what critics such as Broude and Garb fail to recognize is that she was in fact reclaiming the power of motherhood for women, making her an important feminist of her time. Maintaining great respectability, Mary Cassatt was, as Art Historian Nancy Mathews proclaims, “an individual always rising to meet new challenges, and we see within her the rare original ingredient that enabled her to leave a legacy that transcends the particularities of her time and speaks quietly but effectively to our own” (Mathews, 7.) What this means is that Cassatt was a contemporary woman who stood for what she believed in and used her paintings to influence contemporary Paris. Even in her depictions of mothers. So even though it may appear that Cassatt's paintings of domesticity contradict her role as a feminist, actually Cassatt lends a great hand to feminism through her paintings of women in the revered role as a mother. Mary Cassatt's maternal paintings brought importance back to the role of a mother, a value that Parisian society was too readily forgetting at this time. In depicting maternal nurturing, Cassatt highlights how mothers play perhaps the most important role in holding society together through conveying knowledge. Mary Cassatt's paintings of mothers intimately interacting with their children bring value and respect to the overlooked importance of a maternal role model in society. It is through Cassatt's use of instructive gestures that she advertises the value of a mother as a mentor in a child's life. It is imperative to realize these feminist intentions of Mary Cassatt in her depictions of women in domestic roles in order to understand how she contributed to Parisian society by bringing importance back to the family in a way that was perfectly in keeping with her feminist politics.
