Harriet Martineau
1802 - 1876
Martineau enjoyed a radically unconventional career for a Victorian woman, and seems to have done so with little resistence from the rest of society - by the sheer strength of her own indomitable will. She was raised Unitarian and given a good education, but had a largely unhappy childhood. As a result of her undiagnosed partial deafness, her family considered her rather slow and inadvertently routinely hurt her feelings. In spite of this, she became a dedicated scholar, and bemoaned the fact that women writers and scholars are compelled to hide their activities from everyone around them, and to suspend their work in order to attend to darn socks and sew on buttons and other minutiae of household tasks.
During her years of young adulthood she studied Latin and published her first journal articles, on the subject of religion (in which she was rapidly losing faith). At the same time, she enjoyed her one romantic intrigue. She became engaged to a friend of one of her brothers, but it ended badly, and he was revealed to be mentally unstable. From this point, Martineau never seems to have looked back to the possibility of marriage, believing that her character was unsuited for it.
During these same years, Martineau was compelled by family circumstances to become self-supporting. She came up with the idea of a series of short stories illustrating the principles of political economy by means of short stories. This seems like a bizarre and unlikely genre to modern readers, but political economy was a major intellectual buzzword of the time, used to explain existing social conditions and to justify major policy decisions. George Eliot's ambitious reforming heroine Dorothea Brooke called it, "that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights. " Consequently, Martineau knew that ordinary people had both a need and a desire for some knowledge of the subject. Nonetheless, the many editors whom she initially contacted were skeptical; but by dint of persistent labor a publisher was a eventually found, and the series was an enormous success. It was produced under great pressure (some of it probably self-imposed, Martineau being something of an over-achiever), with its author awake from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. for the two years that the series was under production. From that time on, Martineau was financially comfortable, and had a solid reputation.
Thanks to this success, Martineau was called in to
advise Parliament from time to time, and enjoyed (or suffered) the process of
"lionizing," whereby a host serves up renowned figures to his or her
guests to be ogled and admired. In order to remain productive, Martineau
had to sharply curtail her social arrangements, never making "calls"
whatsoever. (Calls are those courteous visits that the neighbors were
expected to pay one another as a form of social acknowledgement. They
generally lasted a minimum of fifteen minutes, though if your hostess was out,
you could just leave a card and that would count as a visit. Then the
absent hostess would have to call on you. Later in the century,
most women adopted one or two days as their "at homes," during which
friends could expect to find them in. This was considered a great
advancement, as much of a woman's day could be consumed in entertaining
unexpected callers or in driving all over the countryside "paying off"
their obligatory calls. For a professional woman, a great nuisance.)
Another consequence of her fame was being pilloried by certain members of the
press famous for the 19th-century version of flaming - scandalous and witty
denunciatory articles about public figures. In this case, she was attacked
by one Croker for the supposed indecency of her number on
population - the mere subject being too sexual, apparently, for the mind of
woman.
Martineau's next big project, financed by the political economy series, was a voyage to America that she turned into the book Society in America, an exploration of American social and political life. This, too, was a financial success. There she met Maria Weston Chapman, her longtime friend and biographer, and gained insight into abolitionism and the political status of women. Her writings on the former were omitted from Society in America for political reasons, but the latter became a chapter called "The Political Non-Existence of Women."
Martineau's reputation enables her to meet any number of major cultural figures, from Wordsworth to Charlotte Bronte to Wollstonecraft's widow, William Godwin, to Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the actress Fanny Kemble. She continued to take on controversial subjects and projects. She traveled to Egypt and studied the various Mediterranean faiths. This became the book Eastern Life. She translated and explained the philosophy of Comte, providing an edition that is still standard. She became an agnostic and published The Atkinson Letters on the subject. She became ill and was treated by mesmerism, which seems to have stopped her from feeling the symptoms though, unbeknownst to her, it did not stop the large cancer tumor in her abdomen. She published on both her illness and cure, alienating her own brother (a doctor) in the process. "Philosophy in the Sickroom" provides guidelines for those confined to their beds for long periods of time.
After her recovery, Martineau became a journalist, and became more involved in the women's movment. She, along with Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, petitioned Parliament for women's suffrage. She also wrote some of the first articles denouncing the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed police to arrest women at will and subject them to gynecological examination for STDs. Although this cause is now associated with Josephine Butler, who dedicated her life to it, Martineau was the first to take a public stand on the issue.
After an incredibly active and productive life, often spent clarifying and examining issues and phenomena that others either ignored or failed to notice, Martineau died of bronchitis in 1876.
The
Woman who Thought Like a Man - Excerpt
from Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary
Naturalism in Social Scientific Thought (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1996) by Pat Duffy Hutcheon
Harriet Martineau - Guide to Resources at Transcendalists.com
Society
in America - Harriet Martineau, 'Women in the Anti-Slavery Movement,' (1838)
Society in America - Harriet Martineau, 'Political Non-Existence of Women'
Society in America, 1837."How to Make Home Unhealthy", 1850, Harper's
"International Copyright Question", with P.A. Towne, 1882, The Century
"Sketches from Life", 1851, Harper's
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely translated and condensed. 1853 (Martineau's preface)
"Sister Ana's Probation", 1862, One a Week
Nineteenth-century
views of Mary Wollstonecraft - Harriet Martineau Autobiography (1877)
Political
economy and the moral tale - Harriet Martineau, 'Demerara'
Political
economy and the moral tale - Summary of Principles for Demerara
Autobiography, Vol. 1 (1877) (size: 1,427K, 5 gifs)
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste ComteIllustrations of
Political Economy, 1832-34
Poor Laws and Paupers,
1833
The Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to
Produce Low Wages and of Union between Masters and Men to Ensure Good Wages,
1834.
Illustrations of Taxation,
1834.
Retrospect of Western Travel.
Deerbrook,
1839.
The Peasant and the Prince,
1841
The Hour and the Man,
1841.
Life in the Sickroom,
1844.
Eastern Life, Present and Past,
1848
Household Education,
1848
Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and
Development, 1851
Biographical Sketches,
1869
Harriet Martineau's Autobiography,
1877.
Hosted by Cornell University's library - facsimiles of original documents
"Harriet Martineau" by James Payn, 1876, Harper's
