First we should understand that Mary Cassatt’s movement to bring praise to the role of the mother was imperative for Parisian culture. In the late nineteenth-century, France experienced a rapid population decrease as well as a diminishing family eminence. Broude’s article "Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Motherhood?" reveals how the successful feminist movement brought on divorce and a devastation of family ties. Broude states that it was “woman’s desire for autonomy and access to the public sphere� (Broude, 2) that broke up the French family home and tradition. Women wanted to be free of their assumed roles as mothers and wives and experience the liberated world. It became common for women to refrain from taking up motherhood due to the hardships they feared they would face in the process. Indeed according to Getlein in France “a liberated woman was the same as a loose woman� (Getlein, 7,) meaning, abortion rates began to increase and the French population and family culture continued to decline (Broude, 3.)