A Woman Ahead of Her Time

Josephine P. Cranston and the 1866 Character Delineation from Dansville

A study of one document in the Cranston family papers

Among the possessions found after the death of Josephine P. Cranston in 1905 was a small set of pages, written in a careful hand, that she appears to have carried with her for nearly forty years. It is not a letter, a deed, or a will. It is a description of her character — a written portrait of her mind, her health, her temperament, and even the man she ought to marry — prepared for her at a famous health resort in the spring of 1866. Of all the documents in the family archive, it is the closest thing we have to a photograph of who Josephine was.

What the document is

The pages are a “character delineation” — a phrenological and constitutional assessment — prepared at James Caleb Jackson’s celebrated water-cure sanitarium, “Our Home on the Hillside,” in Dansville, New York, and dated March 13, 1866. The calligraphic cover sheet attributes the reading to “James C. Jackson, M.D.,” while the manuscript itself is signed “S. Barrows.” The most likely explanation is institutional authorship: the assessment was made within Jackson’s system and under his authority, and written out by an associate at the establishment.

The document also answers a question the rest of the archive only hints at. Josephine’s letters return again and again to her fragile health — the recurring “bilious fever,” the illnesses that struck her whenever she was away from home. Years later, in 1874, she would write to a Scottish cousin from Dansville itself. This 1866 delineation explains why she was there: she was a patient at the water cure, and this was her constitutional assessment, the diagnosis on which a course of treatment and living would be based.

What the evaluator observed

The reading is detailed and, in its own nineteenth-century vocabulary, remarkably thorough. It describes Josephine as possessing a compound temperament of high order, giving her a constitution of real underlying strength — but a constitution unusually sensitive to hardship, so that she “readily becomes sick” and, once sick, recovers only slowly. In a striking genealogical aside, the assessor records that she possessed in large degree the physical qualities of her father and his ancestry: “emphatically she is his child.” It is a line that ties her, in body and temperament, directly to the Cranston line.

On her intellect the verdict is emphatic. Her brain is called “of high order, both as regards size and power,” of fine quality. Her limitation, the writer is careful to say, is not any want of power to conceive ideas, but a want of stamina to sustain and apply them: “she can think far ahead of what she can accomplish.” Her mind, in other words, outran her body. The assessment catalogues a long list of physical vulnerabilities and concludes that her chief difficulty at the time was debility — a general exhaustion of the nervous system — for which freedom from care and a hygienic manner of living were prescribed.

Then come the faculties, named in the phrenological fashion of the day: large perceptive and reflective powers; strength in mathematics; “first rate in structural composition”; great Constructiveness; fine Acquisitiveness — an ability to make and keep money and to keep her own counsel. Against these the writer set a single defect: a lack of Self-Esteem, paired with more love of approval, and more Caution, than served her well.

The verdict and the advice

The conclusion is generous and, for its era, surprising. Josephine is judged “a woman of very much more than ordinary intellectual ability” — a phrase the writer is moved to repeat. Her limits are deemed constitutional and practical, never intellectual: a frame that could not keep pace with her mind, and a character that undervalued itself.

The recommendations are more surprising still. She is urged to become not a teacher but a lifelong learner — “to be a teacher is not half as valuable to her as to be a learner” — and to pursue an active, observant life of wide and varied knowledge. She is to cultivate her physical stamina deliberately. And she is told, in plain terms, the kinds of work for which she was suited: civil engineer, railroad conductor, telegraph operator, printer, merchant, architect, or professor of the arts of design. The reading closes, as such readings conventionally did, with counsel on marriage — a detailed description of the man who would suit her, should she ever marry.

Why such a document existed

To a modern reader the exercise can seem strange, but in mid-nineteenth-century America it was an entirely ordinary thing to seek out. It stood at the meeting point of two enormous popular movements.

• The first was phrenology, the belief that character could be read from the faculties of the mind; from the 1830s through the 1870s, written “character readings” were a thriving national business, sought for self-knowledge, for guidance in choosing work, and even for matching husbands and wives.
• The second was the health-reform and water-cure movement, and Dansville’s “Our Home on the Hillside” was among the most famous resorts of its kind in the country. There, hydropathy, diet, hygienic living, and temperament assessment were woven together into a single program of care.

A constitutional delineation like Josephine’s was simply part of the regime.

The man whose name gave the reading its authority, Dr. James Caleb Jackson (1811–1895), was nationally known — a journalist and abolitionist who became a hydropathic physician and one of the most prominent health reformers of his century. He is remembered today as the inventor of the first manufactured breakfast cereal, and his Dansville establishment stood near the headwaters of a reform tradition that would later run through Battle Creek. His system, and very likely his oversight, lie behind these pages, even if the hand that wrote them was an associate’s.

It should be said plainly that phrenology and “temperament” diagnosis are, by modern understanding, without scientific foundation. The value of this document is not medical. It is biographical — a vivid, sympathetic, contemporary portrait of a particular woman’s mind and circumstances, set down while she sat in the room.

A woman ahead of her time

And it is as a portrait that the document becomes quietly extraordinary, because a tension runs through every page of it — the tension between what Josephine was equipped to be and what her century would allow her to become. The assessment names that collision out loud.

Consider what the evaluator actually recommended. He told her — a woman, in 1866 — that she had the capacity to be a civil engineer, a railroad conductor, a telegraph operator, an architect, a merchant, a professor of the arts of design. He judged her strong in mathematics and “first rate in structural composition.” He believed she could make money, hold property, and keep her own counsel. And then, in nearly the same breath, he conceded the wall in front of her: she could do all of this “if it were not that she is so unfortunate as to be a woman after our society,” and “of course she will labor under disadvantage because she is a woman.” He was describing a professional woman — and then admitting that the world around her had no place to put one. The vocations he listed were, with few exceptions, simply closed to women in her lifetime. They became ordinary careers for women only a century later. That gap, between what she was made for and what she was permitted, is the most poignant thing in the document.

Even the smaller judgments read this way. He prized her as a learner rather than a teacher and urged her into a life of continuous, self-directed inquiry across many fields — which is to say, he described the modern knowledge worker, the lifelong autodidact, the generalist who synthesizes across domains. It is also, not by accident, the life Josephine actually built in the narrow margin available to her.

She became her family’s archivist, genealogist, researcher, and chronicler — the one who gathered, transcribed, cross-referenced, and preserved the very letters and records through which we now know them all. She did the work of a documentary editor and a family historian a hundred years before those were recognized callings for a woman.

Consider, too, the single defect the reading names: a lack of self-esteem, joined to too great a need for approval and too much caution.

Read with sympathy, that is the portrait of a gifted woman who had absorbed her era’s steady message that her abilities were not quite permitted to her, and had turned that message inward. Her self-doubt was less a flaw of character than a reasonable response to a world that kept telling her she was “unfortunate as to be a woman.” In a later century, with the doors open, one suspects that caution and that hunger for approval would have looked very different — or would simply have fallen away.

So this is the heart of it. Josephine functioned well in her own time precisely because she found the one role a capable, unmarried, intellectually serious woman could occupy — keeper of her family’s memory — and poured a first-rate mind into it.

But the document makes plain that she was built for more than her century would allow. Set her down in the late twentieth century, or in our own, and the engineer, the systems-minded analyst, the researcher, the professional archivist the evaluator glimpsed in her would have found open ground to run on.

She would not have needed to be ahead of her time.

She would simply have been of it.

The thing she kept

There is a final irony worth holding onto. The one document that most clearly recognized Josephine’s exceptional mind also diagnosed her as not valuing herself — and it is the single piece of paper she carried for the remaining thirty-nine years of her life, until her death in 1905. A woman told that she lacked self-esteem kept, to the end, the assessment that called her “a woman of very much more than ordinary intellectual ability.”

Perhaps that is the truest measure of what it meant to her to be seen.

Description of Character of Mrs. Josephine P. Cranston

Woodstock, Ohio

Given by James C. Jackson, M.D., “Our Home,” Dansville, N.Y.

March 13, 1866

Verbatim transcription. Original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation preserved.

 

Miss Josephine. P. Cranston

This lady has a sanguine encephalic bilious temperament, a compound temperament of high order and efficiency, making her to possess a constitution in its organic relations to life of enduring capacity. Unfortunately however, her functional constitution is particularly susceptible to the influence of unfavorable circumstances, and so under such conditions of living she readily becomes sick. It is her fate to be so related to life as that if she is sick to live a good while and be sick.

She possesses in large degree the physical qualities of her father, and of his ancestry; emphatically she is his child. Her brain is of high order, both as regards size and power, it being of fine fibre and therefore excellent in its natural adaptation to the absorption and expression of power. If her organic nervous system were as well endowed as her brain, she would be a woman of remarkable intellectual force. Her incapacity lies not in want of power to conceive, but in want of power to make long and enduring and persistent applications of her conceptions. She can think far ahead of what she can accomplish; her power to work is not equal to her power to conceive and organize thought into ideas.

She is predisposed by the nature of her temperament and general structure to diseases of the glands, of the blood, and of the nervous system. Readily she can be made to take on dyspeptic conditions of the stomach with torpidity of liver, congestion of the kidneys, constipation of the bowels, and involvement of the genital system, all overshadowed by congestion of the brain. She, therefore, when once sick necessarily must have both the very best circumstances, and plenty of time to get well, else she will remain sick. Her chief difficulty at this present time is debility, caused by cerebral congestion, inducing what is termed general exhaustion of the nervous system. Freedom from care, together with hygienic methods of living is needed in order to induce recuperation, and thus to give her proper and substantial health.

Intellectually she possesses both the Perceptive and Reflective faculties in large endowment. If she were educated to understand the knowledge which comes by observation, if she were trained into information of things in detail, if she were familiarized with a large and varied class of facts she would be much more than an ordinary reasoner; for, give her data upon which to base a reason or a system of reasoning, and her Reflective powers will absorb all the force of truth which the facts present; and she would organize them symetrically and make them of great service to the cause of truth and right reason. I think she may congratulate herself on being a woman of very much more than ordinary intellectual ability, abstractly considered.

Now it is of great importance to her in the direction of growth in ideas and permanent moral impressions, that she should know as much as possible in regard to material things. Life, therefore out of doors, with a pursuit or profession that gives her opportunities for varied knowledge, is of the highest importance to her. To be a teacher is not half as valuable to her as to be a learner. Student life, studying objects as they present themselves to her sentient faculties is of great value to her. I should advise her by all means to set about henceforth to make herself acquainted with everything that she can possibly learn. Of course she will labor under disadvantage because she is a woman, but nothing should escape her eye that can by any means quicken her observing powers.

She is good in mathematics, first rate in structural composition; has capacity to make a fine civil engineer, conductor on a railroad, telegraph operator, printer, merchant, speculator, architect, or professor of arts of design. She has great Constructiveness; ought to be able to whittle anything out with a knife. Has fine Acquisitiveness; can make money, acquire property, keep her own counsel, and do well if it were not that she is so unfortunate as to be a woman after our society. But one defect she has even in her present relations, is that of a lack of Self Esteem. She has more love of Approbativeness and more Caution than she ought to have, with less Self Esteem.

She is well endowed in the spiritual faculties; enjoys the contemplation of spiritual things; but it would be better for her if she would give more attention to things practical. She is generous, reverent, conscientious, upright, good tempered, and not obstinate.

Her capacity for life is not as large as it ought to be, though she is not by any means the shortest lived. She needs to cultivate her capability of physical life, and to work it up into as much capacity as she possibly can.

Socially she is companionable and pleasant, though a little disposed to have her own way; is better related, on the whole, to the opposite than to her own sex; likes the society of gentlemen, especially if they are well bred and highly cultivated.

Should she ever marry she ought to marry a man above the medium height with large chest, plenty of organic nervous power, blue eyes, light hair or light brown hair, large open countenance and of good general habits, with some property or capacity to make property; a man of liberal tone of mind, not conservative, nor indisposed to reforms. With such a man she ought to be pleasantly companioned, and related in every marital right and marital enjoyment to her own profit, and to their mutual good, and successfully to the duties of wife and mother.

S. Barrows