Cassatt’s later works truly represented her role in the feminist movement by depicting mothers as role models for their daughters in the generation to come. Many of Cassatt’s women were portrayed with a gaze of astute pride in which the women acted as an exemplar for their impressionable daughters. This advertisement of instructive gestures was created in hopes of giving women the incentive to return to the home and teach their daughters the morals and importance of life and womanhood. For instance, in Cassatt’s "Pensive Marie Looking up at her Nurse" (1897) there exists more than a tending relationship. Art Historian Griselda Pollock recognizes how the mother’s “body and gaze physically envelop the child in a visual embrace? (Pollock, 203.) The connection between the two subjects represents far more than a loving hug. The child shares a connectedness with the woman and looks up to her as her educator. Pollock investigates how “The girl child, born into a world of change, looks to the generation that came before her and asks: ‘What is to become of me, “in the feminine??’? (Pollock, 205.) Cassatt is illustrating a period of childhood self-discovery, one of vulnerable innocence and impressionability during a time of feminine subjectivity. Similar depictions of children looking up to their mentors is seen in "Nurse and Child" (1897) and "Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child" (1880.) Being an active feminist and representing her views through an atypical angle, “Cassatt uses the figure of the girl-child as the means to pose questions about identity and subjectivity that were central to the project of late nineteenth century feminism? (Pollock, 205.) Cassatt leaves those questions to be answered by the women of France to recreate their identity and raise fruitful minds to dissolve subjectivity.
Women were furhter encouraged back into the home through Mary Cassatt's depictions of an appealing view of intimate love between a mother and child and lending the title of mother new meaning. Cassatt's movement, to bring women back to the home and honor the role mothers play in society, was particularly represented through "Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child" (1880.) Cassatt's painting, "Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child", “expressed very clearly her own view of the highest achievement a woman could attain,” which was the love of a child (Getlein, 36.) This engaging tenderness is found through the interlocking gaze of mother and child and the circular enclosing of their bodies, constructing an image of engaged intimacy (Frascina, 267.) Through the subject's intimately connected eyes, Cassatt illustrates an extraordinary loving connection, one exclusive to that of a mother and child.