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Over the past 150 years, the very idea of the woman imagined has gone through monumental and often contradictory changes in both our ideological apparatuses and the practice of being a woman taken up by individual subjects. Recently, in the news from Afghanistan, we saw how fragile our autonomy can be in changing political fortunes.

The mobility of women was also restricted in the West through much of the nineteenth century. In 1859, Jules Michelet wrote: How many irritations for the single woman! She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute . . . if she should find herself delayed at the other end of Paris and hungry, she will not dare to enter a restaurant. She would constitute an event. . . .

[In the Paris of 1832, Cassatt,] found a complicated city marked not only with clear distinctions between lady and whore but a political and class system that had forsaken the values of the French Revolution in fear of working-class demands for equal rights. Working women were seen not only as sexually loose and available but also as dangerous incendiaries and political radicals after the collapse of the Paris Commune of 1871. . . .

Cassatt’s women, however, belong to a new class, the bourgeois wife—whose role was just beginning to emerge as a salve to male anxiety and a corrective for political terror. Much of the work done on Cassatt reveals both the prejudice of the time and our own systems of “naturalizing” its focus, as if motherhood was everywhere the same.

The mother and child relationship was, in fact, a newer social formation and clearly localized in a middle-class that could afford to sustain it. Many of her portraits of women in their domestic private sphere reveal a woman who is tender to her children and actively involved with their care.

Motherhood and its containment in the family was being posed against the first apparition of “The New Woman,” the woman who enters a public sphere belonging to men. She surfaces in Cassatt’s work as reading the political journals of the day instead of those romances Zola gave Nana to read. Appearing at the theater or in parks, Cassatt’s women must be situated in the crosscurrents that are redefining woman in this moment of history. Her women appear strong, not subservient, and strike poses that seem familiar to us now but not to her French audience at the time. . . .

Childhood itself is invented in history for specific reasons, just as my generation are the first adolescents or “teenagers,” or my graduate students are the first of that breed known as “young adults.” Since the work of thinkers such as Philippe Aries and Roland Barthes, we have come to understand that the mother-child totality is relatively new in human history—and class-biased. Motherhood is not eternally the same, and a distinctly feminine sensibility is a social construct that undergoes constant revisions.

—Maureen P. Sherlock

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