Women reading in art

[1] In Western, patriarchal societies, Conlon argues, the act of reading takes a woman out of subservient role and into a context where personal pleasure, knowledge, and enjoyment is literally in her hands.

Other images implied the danger in tempting women with books as explicitly linked to their sexuality, like in Antoine Wiertz's The Reader of Novels (c.1853), where the figure of the devil literally supplies the female subject with pleasurable reading material.

[3] As Conlon argues, the self-reflective act of reading becomes conflated in these depictions with distraction and longing for someone - presumably a male lover - ultimately undermining the subjectivity of the woman reader.

[1] Male artists have also depicted women readers within pastoral settings, like in Claude Monet's Springtime, perhaps in an attempt to tame or domesticate the otherwise wild act of reading.

All three are fixated on the text, and Cassatt may be emphasizing that reading comes just as naturally to women as motherhood, by painting the young girl encircled by the woman's arms and drawn literally into the book.