Women in the 19C United States of America: An Unusual Cassatt Portrait

Friday, October 14, 2022

An Unusual Cassatt Portrait

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Portrait of a Woman 1872

Here is a Mary Cassatt portrait much more similar to the early 18th-century portraits of colonial American women. Cassatt painted Portrait of a Woman in 1872, during an 8-month stay in Parma, Italy.

It was during this, her 3rd trip abroad from her home in Pennsylvania, that Cassatt decided to settle in Europe permanently.

Painted several years before Cassatt eagerly adopted Impressionism, this portrait shows the influence of Italian Baroque painting, with its golden light, classical drapery, & monumental proportions.

Portrait of a Woman is one of several paintings the artist made of monumental, costumed women during her studies in Parma. Its sense of depth differs from Cassatt's later work, in which space is more flattened.

Later, like other Impressionists, Cassatt became more interested in painting everyday subject matter & natural gestures, than she was concerned with theories about light & brushwork technique, which she was concentrating on in this early portrait. Around 1876, Edgar Degas painted a portrait of Cassatt, as she was just beginning her career as an Impressionist.

For additional works by Mary Cassatt click here..

About this blog

In colonial America, men were considered superior to woman in all ways. In a strict patriarchal hierarchy, men controlled not only wealth & political power but also how their children were raised, religious questions, & all matters of right & wrong.

In the early part of the 19Cy, however, many Americans experienced a revolution in gender. The doctrine of “separate spheres” maintained that woman’s sphere was the world of privacy, family, & morality while man’s sphere was the public world -– economic striving, political maneuvering, & social competition. But women were interested in equality.

In 1848, New York passed the Married Woman’s Property Act. Now a woman wasn’t automatically liable for her husband’s debts; she could enter contracts on her own; she could collect rents or receive an inheritance in her own right; she could file a lawsuit on her own behalf. She became for economic purposes, an individual. By 1900, every state has passed legislation modeled after this, granting married women some control over their property and earnings.

In 1870 after the Civi War, the 15th Amendment was ratified, saying, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” African-Americans could vote, but women could not.

But it was not until 1920, that the 19th Amendment was ratified granting women the right to vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”