Cranial Compatibility: Phrenology, Measurement, and Marriage Assessment

This paper demonstrates how phrenological tools of character assessment were used to measure marriage compatibility in the nineteenth century. It will examine how the knowledge and practices of cranial measurement produced character “profiles" for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology articulated a relationship between the mental and the physical, and maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring “organs” of the mind, or protrusions on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage, mating and motherhood, and how its epistemic practices supported a model of courtship based on numerical and empirical assessment of gendered and racialized character traits. Focused on the North American context, this paper will use phrenological materials -- advice literature, personalized charts, photographs, mail order submissions and testimonials -- to illustrate how phrenology packaged cranial knowledge, promoting it as superior to other forms of matching. Many “practical” phrenologists claimed expertise on marital harmony, and sold their analyses as more accurate and reliable than personal experience or familial knowledge. Many consumers pursued this knowledge, hoping to find a partner with compatible crania, but more often to assess themselves and the fitness of a current suitor or spouse. Ultimately, this paper will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and sexual “relations" were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements.