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Unit 22: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage...

two-year journey in Jacksonian America. She is known by English people as the renowned Notes
progressive journalist and leader writer (editorialist) for the London Daily News, author of a
history of a period through which she lived, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace,
1816-1846, translator into English of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, and proponent of
positivism and the social scientific method. In England she is even remembered locally as an
amiable resident-householder of Ambleside in the Lake District, the informal educator of local
workers through her winter series of instructive evening lectures and her personal lending library.
In this, as in all her work, she was the progressive, enlightening reformer, perpetually confident
in the rightness of her truth. Her feminism, perhaps because it was part and parcel of the whole
of her political philosophy, is not as well known as her other ideas. Yet she took a stand and
commented on virtually every campaign regarding women in England and America of her day
and addressed some women’s issues that were not identified so clearly as such until the women’s
movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Martineau’s politics included a thoroughgoing attention to women. It was an essential part of her
blend of radicalism, and it had emerged well before her declaration to Place a month before her
thirtieth birthday in 1832 that she must act with her pen, as that was the only access to politics a
woman had. Her feminist politics was to continue strong throughout her life. Sensitive to her own
womanhood and the limitations it imposed on her, the entry to feminism for many a woman
through several feminist generations, Martineau gradually turned this personal sensitivity to
social ends until the rights of women and advocacy of women’s causes became one of her lifelong
major efforts. The first piece she ever published—at age nineteen—was on women: “Female Writers
of Practical Divinity.” In 1869, while an invalid confined to her home The Knoll at Ambleside, as
her last public work she applied her mighty pen in support of the campaign by the Ladies’
National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. This campaign was an
organized effort by women to get Parliament to repeal a group of laws that they believed
incriminated women indiscriminately. Euphemistically named, the laws purported to control
syphilis and gonorrhea through controlling prostitution, while giving sweeping authority to police
in garrison towns to detain and examine women on mere suspicion of prostitution. Englishwomen
made the repeal of these laws a rallying focus for their first fully organized feminist operation. In
her sixties Harriet Martineau wrote the drafts for their petitions, wrote speeches for the campaign
leader, Josephine Butler, wrote the newspaper letters that launched the effort.
A London female journalist, Sarah Curtis, standing for Parliament in 1974 at the peak of the
contemporary women’s movement in Great Britain, called Harriet Martineau “the woman journalist
of our time, then.” Curtis encapsulated in that statement the reason we need a fresh look at
Martineau’s feminism. I think this can best be accomplished through reading her own words on
the subject, and to that end I present these selections of her works on women.
Harriet Martineau was a complicated female intellectual at a time when often the most a bookish
middle-class woman in need of employment could aspire to was a position as a governess. She
was full of contradictions, at times the advance messenger of a new movement, at times a reflector
of Victorian eccentric views and narrow morality, sometimes farsighted, other times petty,
sometimes mean, other times generous and wise, occasionally brilliant, but often verbose,
repetitious, and tedious. Yet she was surely what we called in the early days of the recent women’s
movement “a role model from history,” a woman of achievement, independence, and autonomy,
whose hard-won gains resulted from her own effort. For Victorian England the magnitude of her
accomplishment is astounding. She wrote without a significant break from early adulthood into
her late sixties, despite health obstacles, supporting herself all her life by writing, and publishing
well over 100 separately printed titles, scores of periodical articles, and some 1,642 newspaper
editorials. The content of all that she wrote was wide-ranging, substantial, and serious.

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