Her father, Robert, was vehemently opposed to her becoming a painter and abhorred the bohemian lifestyle associated with the artistic world. He did not stop her moving to Paris in 1866, aged 21, with her mother and various female relatives as chaperones.
The show covers her career and includes many works from private European and US collections that have not been seen before, along with unpublished private letters.
Cassatt was recognised during her lifetime. In the century after her death, only one retrospective has been held in France, where she lived for 32 years.
As a result, in the 100 years since her death she has been frequently overlooked in the country where she produced her best work.
Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, an exhibition curator, said:"She was overlooked because she was a woman and a foreigner."She added that Cassatt's choice of subjects, mostly women and children, means she was also stereotyped.
Cassatt specialised in mother-and-child paintings, a genre in great demand in 19th-century Paris, and in pictures of women, depicting their social and private lives, often severely constricted by the conventions of the time.
As a woman, she faced restrictions in an era when painting was considered a social skill, not a career option.
Cassatt met Degas at an exhibition held by rebel artists who had rejected the formal strictures of the Beaux-Arts academy.
Degas invited her to exhibit with the group, nicknamed impressionists by the press.
Cassatt later introduced America to Degas and other impressionist artists.
The exhibition sets that transatlantic role against a long French silence, and against a body of work long narrowed, curators said, to the women and children she painted.