Femme au tournesol

When Mary Cassatt pinned a large sunflower to this woman's dress around 1905, the flower carried a charge an American viewer would have caught at once. The sunflower had become the badge of the campaign for women's suffrage, ever since the vote was first put to the men of Kansas back in 1867. Cassatt lived in France but followed the cause closely, and in 1915 she lent this very canvas to a New York exhibition held to raise money for it. The picture itself is quieter than its politics. A woman holds a small round mirror up to a little girl, who studies her own reflection in it. The child looks at herself while the grown woman looks at the child.