102

  • Mother's Kiss

  • From the 1890-91 original
  • Mary Cassatt (American 1844-1926)
  • Color intaglio — aquatint and drypoint, published 1991 by the Bibliothèque Nationale
  • 33.8 x 22.6 cm., 13-5/16 x 8-15/16" sight
  • Lent Courtesy of Private Collection through Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Meg Gillette, Associate Professor of English

So familiar are Mary Cassatt's idealizations of mother and child that her paintings can seem natural. Docile, selfless, middle-class — this is what motherhood looks like, isn't it? But of course, artists don't just reflect reality; they help create it. And at the turn of the century, Mary Cassatt helped promote and shape changing attitudes towards motherhood.

In the nineteenth century, attitudes towards motherhood and childhood underwent a dramatic shift. As men followed the new manufacturing jobs of the Industrial Revolution, women, who had once worked alongside their husbands on family farms and shops, got new jobs as a new standard of womanhood — called the Cult of True Womanhood — came to the fore. According to the Cult of True Womanhood, all women were naturally pure, pious, and domestic, and thus, ill-suited to the business world. Reassuring men that while they confronted the materialism and competition of the industrial economy, their women were back at home rearing the children in the morals of western civilization and providing a cheerful place to which the men could return, the Cult of True Womanhood helped ease men's entry in the business world. Meanwhile, because large numbers of children were no longer necessary to work the fields, nineteenth-century women also started having fewer children ("quality, not quantity" was the motto of the day), and as advances in medicine meant more and more children were surviving past infancy, parents came to invest more emotionally in their children. The result was a redefinition of childhood. Where children were once viewed as mini-adults ready for work, they came to be viewed after the Industrial Revolution as precious innocents to be petted by their selfless and virtuous mothers.

The mother and child in Mary Cassatt's Mother's Kiss give form to these beliefs. With everything around them erased, Cassatt's mother and child exist in a domestic sanctuary, and sharing a common border (neither possesses her own space), merge into one unified shape. Still, other details in the print raise questions about this maternal ideal-are these skies blue or grey? is the home really a sanctuary? who is the child looking at? are these two safe? Here, Cassatt thoughtfully questions the images of the maternal she helped reproduce.