Woman, Know Thyself: Phrenology, Gender and Nineteenth-Century Cultures of Science
A message from our 2018 Fellow, Carla Bittel
Carla Bittel, Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University, was our fellow in 2018. She took the time to share her experience – as well as some of her insights – with us.
Today, it might seem puzzling that so many people once believed health and true character could be determined by feeling and measuring protrusions on the skull. Yet, phrenology was a very popular form of knowledge about the mind in nineteenth-century America and Europe. It maintained that the brain was not one organ, but many, and each organ represented particular traits and faculties which could be assessed on the exterior. As historians have shown, though heavily contested, phrenology captured the imaginations of many Victorians, looking for accessible and material ways to comprehend their own minds and the minds of others.
My own research focuses on phrenology’s users and practitioners, going beyond phrenology as a theory to understand how it was utilized in the everyday. I examine why so many of those phrenological followers were women. Phrenology claimed that women’s brains were smaller, and weaker, with less power and mental force. If so, why were so many women of the middle class readers and consumers, practitioners, and proselytizers of this “science of the mind?” Phrenology maintained that men and women were essentially different, and yet, women and men shared the same phrenological anatomy. As my research shows, many women found it allowed simultaneously for both rigid and variable notions of womanhood. As phrenology instructed readers to “know thyself,” various women read the science to their own advantage, and sometimes to the disadvantage of others.
Thanks to the generous support of the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation Fellowship, I was able to pursue this topic by conducting extensive research at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. At its Center for the History of Medicine, I made use of its impressive collection of phrenology materials, along with artifacts from the Warren Anatomical Museum. From manuscripts to printed books and charts, to an assortment of “symbolical heads” mapped according to phrenological anatomy, the Countway is an excellent resource for all things phrenological.
First, I made use of Countway’s phrenology books and pamphlets, of which the Library has hundreds. I focused on several texts that directly addressed gender and were directed toward women readers, including Joseph A. Warne’s Phrenology in the Family and multiple editions of Orson Fowler’s, Creative and Sexual Science, or Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations. The collection of Orson Fowler’s Works on Phrenology, Physiology, and Kindred Subjects contained his writing on “Hereditary Descent,” with theories about the transmission of mental and physical characteristics from parents to children. Certainly, Fowler’s works on heredity underscore phrenology’s troubling role as a racial science that reinforced hierarchies in the nineteenth century.
Some of Countway’s many print sources double as manuscript sources, containing charts completed by phrenologists, recording the results of an examination. For example, an 1889 copy of Lydia Folger Fowler’s Familiar Lessons on Phrenology, Designed for the Use of Children and Youth shows the interactive nature of phrenology texts, containing a completed chart of character and inserted personal lecture notes, along with penciled interventions and strikethroughs of particular measurements. I also examined how phrenological and healing practices materialized in texts, including the work of women phrenologists. For example, Deiadamia Chase’s biography encapsulates her practice as a phrenologist and healer, with an appendix of her medical recipes, as well as a blank chart, which awaited her entries after evaluating a client.
Next, I studied several completed phrenological charts and written delineations, which captured individual examinations. For example, Orson Fowler’s 1858 analysis of a Mrs. Sweesy contains observations of her lively character as well as recommendations to diminish her nervousness. Lorenzo Fowler’s Phrenological Cards (1834-1835) each contain an analysis of an individual, with numerical evaluations and notes. Documenting a variety of subjects, including the criminal and the insane, Fowler also analyzed many women who surprised him with their unusually large organs of intellect and reason. Such analyses reveal how gender role expectations were built into phrenological charts.
During my fellowship, I also made use of manuscript collections, especially the Papers of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, one of the earliest and most important theorists and popularizers of phrenology. I was particularly interested in his letters to his wife, Honorine Perier Pothier Spurzheim, in which he discussed building his phrenological enterprise, along with the large number of women interested in phrenology who attended his lectures. At the same time, his letters reveal his negative impressions of some “scientific ladies” and his belief that the female sex is not “govern[ed] by superiority of intellectual powers.” These private communications correspond to the very public contradictions of gender and phrenology.
Finally, I examined phrenological artifacts housed in the Warren Anatomical Museum, particularly the various “symbolical heads” or phrenology busts. These ambiguously gendered heads, based on constructions of “Caucasian” models, represent the tangibility of the knowledge system, as users could feel the model in relation to their own heads. They also reveal the science’s commercial leanings, for these were bought and sold in cabinets and via mail, as they became domesticated objects for personal use. I have combined Countway’s collection with materials I had gathered from other Harvard libraries, including the Schlesinger Library’s records of the Ladies’ Physiological Institute and an issue of “The Magnolia,” a hand-written women’s magazine.
Ultimately, the Countway’s materials have helped me better understand particularly how women of the middle or aspiring middle classes engaged with phrenology. When there were many barriers to women entering orthodox medicine, some became users and practitioners of the knowledge system, as they blended it with other forms of medical and domestic knowledge, connecting mind as matter with the materials and mechanics of daily life.
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