title: "Assuming the privilege" of bridging divides: Abigail Fowler-Chumos, practical phrenology, and America's Gilded Age.
abstract: Nineteenth-century phrenology is often presented as a failed or pseudoscience. Based on erroneous anatomical assumptions and indirect observation, phrenology as such offers historians of psychology an object lesson in what scientists ought not do (e.g., Boring, 1929). As a practical profession, however, phrenology presents a more complicated narrative. This is particularly true in the United States where in the hands of practitioners including and influenced by the Fowler family, phrenology maintained a cultural presence long after being rejected by the scientific and medical mainstream (Janik, 2014). The prevalence of women practitioners, whose work and lives have yet to be adequately explored, represents another complication. Abigail Ayers Doe Fowler-Chumos, third wife of America's "great gun of phrenology" Orson Squire Fowler, is one practitioner worthy of closer examination (Davies, 1955, p. 46). Using the separate spheres concept (Kerber, 1988) and newspaper announcements, articles, and advertisements spanning the 1870s to 1920s, this article explores Abigail Ayers Doe Fowler-Chumos' development as a practical phrenologist. Her story suggests much about the unrecognized capacity of practical phrenology to create concepts and practices of selfhood capable of moving women beyond the private and domestic, while also preparing all Americans for modern psychology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: Erica
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lilleleht
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010792:Phrenology / Q000266:history*; D011584:Psychology / Q000266:history; D014481:United States; D014931:Women, Working / Q000266:history