Temperance, Feminism, and Phrenology in Lydia Fowler’s Nora: The Lost and Redeemed

In both the U.S. and Britain, Dr. Lydia Fowler was a leader in women's political and health reform organizations and temperance associations. Her publications, which targeted a popular audience of women and children, included self-help medical lectures and guides, a book of poetry, and the temperance novel Nora: The Lost and Redeemed (1853). Nora represents the broader political fight surrounding temperance, but also the medical arguments about alcohol abuse itself. Fowler's phrenological writings, including Nora, served as a bridge between the nineteenth-century construction of "intemperance" as a moral failing and the disease model of "alcoholism" that came to dominate medicine in the early twentieth century. With Nora, Fowler employs the power and reach of Victorian fiction to dramatize the dangers of alcohol and the hopeful remedies of feminist-driven reform.