Steadying the Future: What Mary Cassatt Knew About How Modern Women Are Made

We discuss empowerment extensively in our time. We put it on conference panels. We print it on tote bags. We frame it as rupture, as declaration, as a door kicked open. But stand in front of The Banjo Lesson long enough, and you begin to suspect that real empowerment does not begin with a speech. It begins with proximity.

Look carefully at the bodies. The woman sits forward, the banjo angled across her lap, shoulders set in quiet concentration. She is not turned toward the girl. She is not theatrically guiding smaller fingers into place. She is playing, or about to play, demonstrating something she already knows. The young girl does not face her as a pupil across a table. She leans from behind, almost folded into the woman’s back, peering over her shoulder at the fingerboard. Her chin hovers near that shoulder. Her eyes track the exact placement of fingers. She is not yet performing. She is studying.

That spatial decision is the thesis.

Mary Cassatt painted this pastel in 1894, drawing on imagery from her mural cycle Modern Woman for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The exposition itself was a hymn to American spectacle, electric lights, industry, imperial ambition dressed in white façades. But inside the Woman’s Building, the argument shifted. Modernity was not simply steel and rail. It was education. It was intellectual growth. It was female competence made visible. Cassatt’s contribution did not shout. It insisted.

The medium matters. Pastel over oiled pastel on tan wove paper does not allow for grand illusion. The strokes remain visible. The surface breathes. The tan ground warms the figures without dissolving them into nostalgia. There is labor in the marks, an immediacy that keeps the scene from becoming decorative. The woman’s face is focused. The girl’s expression is intent, absorbing. The shared gaze toward the instrument creates a closed world. Nothing in the background competes. The lesson is everything.

Critics once labeled Cassatt’s work charming, as if intimacy were a minor key in the symphony of modern art. Meanwhile, men like Edgar Degas were granted the mantle of daring observers of modern life. But what is more modern than this, a depiction of how one generation internalizes the competence of another? The domestic sphere was long treated as peripheral, but Cassatt understood its structural power. The public sphere produces speeches and policies. The private sphere produces people capable of delivering them.

The banjo deepens the argument. By the late nineteenth century, it had become a recurring symbol in American visual culture, associated with female accomplishment and refinement in Anglo middle-class settings. Women with banjos appeared across paintings and prints as emblems of cultivation. Yet the instrument’s roots lay in Black musical traditions, transformed and often distorted through minstrel performance before being absorbed into white domestic interiors. That layered history hums beneath the image. The banjo signifies autonomy and skill for the figures we see, even as its broader cultural journey complicates any tidy narrative of progress.

In Cassatt’s hands, the instrument becomes a bridge between generations. The woman does not need validation. She is already self-possessed. The child’s position behind her is not one of weakness but of becoming. Before you act independently, you must see independence embodied. Before you claim a skill, you must watch it performed. The girl’s proximity is strategic. She is close enough to map the movement in her own muscles, close enough to imagine her hands replacing the ones she studies.

We prefer stories of empowerment that begin with rebellion. Cassatt offers one that begins with an apprenticeship. This is not a rupture. It is continuity. The woman’s back becomes both shield and standard. The child leans into that steadiness, not to be corrected but to observe what steadiness looks like.

Time has sharpened our reading of Cassatt. Exhibitions at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art have reframed her not as a painter of sentimental interiors but as a central voice in discussions of gender and modernity. What once seemed merely maternal now reads as architectural. These are not scenes of idle affection. They are blueprints.

The painting resists spectacle. No one looks out at us. There is no invitation for applause. The focus is inward, disciplined, self-contained. In a culture that increasingly equates visibility with value, that self-containment feels almost subversive. Competence does not require an audience. Growth does not demand a headline.

I think about how much of what shaped me came from watching. Watching how someone handled criticism. Watching how they carried themselves into a difficult room. Watching how they finished what they started. No one declared those moments historic. They were quiet. Repetitive. Formative. I leaned in, often without realizing it, memorizing posture before I ever claimed it as my own.

Two figures share a single line of sight. A wooden instrument stretches across the space between them. Pastel dust clings to textured paper. A world’s fair celebrating empire gives rise to an image about interior cultivation. Cassatt compresses a philosophy of modern womanhood into a domestic frame. Empowerment here is not loud. It is absorbed. It grows in the shadow of example.

If most revolutions are narrated as thunder, this one is whispered. Modernity, Cassatt suggests, is not announced. It is learned at close range, over a shoulder, in the steady rhythm of someone who already knows how to play.