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Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer
and the Politics of Art
American Quarterly 56:2 (June 2004)

April Frances Masten

>>>In her 1854 painting Shake Hands?, Lilly Martin Spencer depicts a lively, self-confident woman standing in a dark kitchen, amidst produce and wares painted in the style of a richly detailed Flemish still life. (fig. 1) Disturbed while mixing bread in a pan, the young woman grins broadly and extends a hand caked with dough to the viewer. Shaking hands was a ritual of equality in early America, a symbol and assertion of the male citizen's status in a democracy. Seemingly ensconced in the domestic realm, the woman in the painting asserts her own sense of equality through her gesture. Therein lay the humor. Shake Hands? was a huge success. Spencer exhibited it in several cities, had it lithographed, and in 1857 sold it to the Cosmopolitan Art Association, which engraved it again for distribution to its subscribers. Why were Lilly Martin Spencer’s paintings so popular in the 1850s? Art historians, in general, claim that Spencer’s work appealed to the public because it operated both in and against sentimental culture. They have deftly charted the influence of domestic ideology on her choice of subjects, and pointed to ways Spencer poked fun at, sexually enhanced, and enshrined the domestic realm. In these analyses, it is Spencer’s embrace of domesticity, albiet uncertain and ambivalent, that dominates the construction and reception of her imagery and allows for its multiple and contradictory messages.
>>>This paper begins with a different focus – the origins of the humor in Shake Hands? – and argues instead that Spencer’s paintings were popular because they expressed a democratic sensibility shared by her public. Situating nineteenth-century women’s art within the tradition of sentimental culture and domestic ideology has obvious advantages. But I want to challenge that practice by allowing other conditions of production and reception to take the ascendant position. Art comes to its particular form within a complex cultural situation that changes over time. In the 1850s, sentimental culture was unfinished, the product of conflicting and complimentary political changes and economic forces that had momentous consequences for both men and women, especially those entering the middle classes. But it was only one condition of social life within a network of relations with which art and artists interacted. It therefore yields but a limited understanding of the world in which Spencer worked.
>>>While other historians have used Spencer's biography and art to complicate the cultural politics of nineteenth-century domesticity, this essay uses them to critique and in part rewrite the monolithic construction of Jacksonian democracy. Although women were excluded from the franchise as it was extended to include more men, they were mightily affected by the ideas behind it – democracy, liberty, independence – and by the markets that accompanied the democratization process. Women too looked for equality in relationships and institutions, and many men included women in their vision of a democratic society. Furthermore, visual art, like other forms of printed media, participated in the social debates of the 1840s and 1850s – decades of intense social reform and sectional unrest in America. By painting Shake Hands? Spencer joined those debates and commented on the nation’s idealized self-image. The popularity of this picture, the style and content of Spencer’s work, and the vicissitudes of her personal and professional life, provide important clues about the character of the nation at mid-century. They demonstrate that women were laying claim to democratic equality in realms other than the political, and more surprisingly, that other Americans enjoyed it when they did so.
>>>The origins of the political message embedded in Spencer’s work and life have not been documented. However, other historians have demonstrated how art was democratized in America between 1820 and 1860. They show how (through the itineracy of painters, the proliferation of cheap prints, and the creation of egalitarian art institutions) works of art, art appreciation, training, and exhibition sites were made available to more Americans. But they have not examined the effects of that democratization on women artists. Most scholarship suggests that, in general, women's status was unaffected by the political elevation of the common man in Jacksonian America due to a gender-defined franchise, legal restrictions that accompanied the marriage contract, lower wages, and exclusion from higher education and certain professions. And while art was made available to more Americans, the art profession remained virtually a male domain. These suppositions support the view that women who pursued professional art careers in the nineteenth century were gender rebels. I argue quite the opposite.

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