Shalyn Claggett. Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press, 2023. Pp. 272. $99.00 (paper).

Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing opens with an anecdote about professional phrenologist Mrs. Hamilton delivering a speech on women's rights, which functions as an expansion point into Shalyn Claggett's argument that the prefix pseudo now attached to the popular science of phrenology has served to obscure its cultural importance as a point of feminist resistance to nineteenth-century biological determinist claims about women's inferiority.In the hands of women practitioners and writers, phrenology became an equalizer on which to build a case against women's oppression when it was used to subvert essentialist arguments.Claggett makes a compelling claim that to understand this aspect of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, we must recognize the cultural impact of the popular sciences.She begins Equal Natures by orienting the reader to the history and practice of phrenology, and its suitedness as a tool of subversion.Subsequent chapters focus on how the work of Charlotte and Anne Bront, Harriet Martineau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot uses phrenological principles to combat oppressive theories of innate identity "that to them seem dangerous, inequitable and immoral" (17).Equal Natures is a valuable addition to the body of scholarship that calls our attention to women writers' engagement with aspects of nineteenth-century popular culture to challenge existing power structures and advocate for equality.In "Feminist Phrenologists and the Battle for the Brain," Claggett illustrates the environment that allowed women to thrive in phrenological communities.Phrenology was a science in which biological essentialism could be used to advocate for rather than against social equality.Phrenology also offered women an opportunity to gain status as scientists in phrenological societies and publications, whereas this access was denied by institutional gatekeeping in other areas of scientific exploration.The example of Lydia Fowler demonstrates Claggett's argument on the erasure of work done by women in the phrenological movement.Fowler, the first American woman to earn a medical degree and "the first female professor at the American medical school" has been "largely erased from medical history due to her association with phrenology" (37).Important to Claggett's argument is that phrenology did not establish different methods for reading the male and female skull.Phrenological training materials offered a gender-neutral skull, allowing women to read their own heads for the same faculties as men.Domestic roles and duties of the private sphere were absent from the lists of mental "organs" and professions that could be read on the skull.Claggett concludes by recalling the reader to her central claim that while