ART | WOMEN’S HISTORY | POLITICS

Mary Cassatt Has News for the Republican Party

‘Whistler’s Mother’ was so yesterday. Today women need more than an aspirin between the knees and a pack of Virginia Slims.

Andrew Jazprose Hill
5 min readMar 21, 2024

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Mary Cassatt, Reading Le Figaro (aka) Portrait of a Lady (The Artist’s Mother Reading Le Figaro)1878 (detail) via Wikimedia Public Domain in US.

When GOP Senator Katie Britt delivered her rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union speech, she was apparently unaware of Mary Cassatt’s mother. Britt’s rebuttal told American women their place is in the kitchen. And she has been universally pilloried for it.

I’m not here to add to the piles of ridicule already heaped on Alabama’s junior senator from places like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live. But I do want to let her know that she and the party she represents is about 146 years behind the times.

Although I could list everything from women’s suffrage to the pill to the US Women’s National Soccer Team, I’d like to add to her knowledge of art history by introducing her and the GOP to American Impressionist Mary Cassatt.

What the Post Office Says

As of this date, the US Post Office has issued several stamps honoring Cassatt. There’s the 5-cent Boating Party stamp of 1966. The 23-cent stamp featuring a portrait of the artist in 1988. And there’s the…

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Andrew Jazprose Hill
Andrew Jazprose Hill

Written by Andrew Jazprose Hill

I write about Art, Culture, and Race in The Jazprose Diaries on Substack. My short stories are there too in The Fiction Fix. Read me, Seymour, read me.