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Often derided as sentimental or inconsequential by male art historians, Cassatt’s work not only holds up well, formally, in comparison to other Impressionists, but she elevates the place and importance of the wife and mother within the emerging concept of the family as constituted and constrained by the ideology of the middle class. We have accepted them as normal or natural without fully understanding that they were really new constructions of what it means to be a “good woman.” She establishes the confines of a public and private “lady,” in sharp distinction to the women of the demimonde that male artists like Manet and her mentor Degas frequently portrayed.

Later, she was to become active in the Suffrage Movement and even supported the Parisian Communards from a safe distance in the United States. What remains largely silent in her work is the question of class that alone would have allowed her to challenge the rules of intimacy in the reproduction of social values.

Ideology is at work wherever human relationships are frozen into the natural—like motherhood. We fail to see that they are really social constructions whose meaning has fluctuated over the course of time, class, race, etc. As scholar Rita Felski puts it:

The so-called private sphere, often portrayed as a domain where natural and timeless emotions hold sway, is shown to be radically implicated in patterns of modernization and processes of social change. The analysis of modern femininity brings with it a recognition of the profoundly historical nature of private feelings.

—Maureen P. Sherlock

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