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Notes
Unit 22: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage: Critical
Appreciation Cum Analysis

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
22.1 Analysis on Marriage
22.2 Views on Women
22.3 The Successful Author
22.4 Religion and Women’s lssues
22.5 Summary
22.6 Key-Words
22.7 Review Questions
22.8 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss Martineau as an Author
• Analyse Martineau’s views on Marriage

Introduction

Harriet Martineau authored the first systematic methodological treatise in sociology, conducted
extended international comparative studies of social institutions, and translated August Comte’s
Cours de philosophy positive into English, thus structurally facilitating the introduction of sociology
and positivism into the United States. In her youth she was a professional writer who captured the
popular English mind by wrapping social scientific instruction in a series of widely read novels.
In her maturity she was an astute sociological theorist, methodologist, and analyst of the first
order. To the extent that any complex institutional phenomenon such as sociology can have
identifiable founders, Alice Rossi justly celebrates Harriet Martineau as ‘the first woman
sociologist.’”
Harriet Martineau was the most astute female politician in England through almost four decades
of the mid-nineteenth century. She did her work as a writer, an investigative traveler, a
correspondent, and an interpreter of a multitude of intellectual trends. In all the vast number of
her works and interests she was ever conscious of being female. She knew that being a woman
meant that she had to do whatever she did differently from a man. Early in 1832 she wrote in a
letter to Francis Place from her native Norwich, “I wish I were in London, . . . I want to be doing
something with the pen, since no other means of action in politics are in a woman’s power.”
She was able to move to London within the year, for her monthly series of didactic fictional
accounts of the ideas of the new economics, Illustrations of Political Economy, had made her instantly
famous, and the income from the series made her self-supporting. She was to earn her living as a
writer, her reputation as a radical economic, political, and social commentator, and her historical
mark as a social scientist, current historian, and feminist. She is known today by scholars of
American society through her keenly analytic work, Society in America, published in 1837 after a

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