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Unit 22: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage...

contribution. Her radicalism was the consistent strand in all her far-flung efforts. Its tenets were Notes
rationalism, progressivism, organizational order, voice for the inarticulate, respect for the individual,
and faith in science, all of which determined right thinking. Hers was a singularly principled
posture. She held the position that human free will is limited. What free will there is rests on the
ability of the human to uncover the immutable laws of nature, physical, economic, and social. This
radicalism of the Victorian era became the twentieth century’s liberalism, and liberalism became
the idea that did more than any other conceptual nucleus to make room for twentieth-century
feminism clear into the 1980s. Harriet Martineau, I think, spelled out a feminist overview in the
nineteenth century in terms that were radical then, and did it better, more consistently, and more
often than most other feminists. I do not think she knew what she was doing, and I think she was
often “wrong.” I find some of her conclusions inadequate and even bigoted for my time and place.
As an English-language feminist intellectual, I think I would recognize her as my forebear and the
ancestor of my culture more readily than I would identify my illiterate Irish American great-
grandmother who came to America in 1850 to escape the potato famine—or Emma Goldman, the
Russian American anarchist feminist whom I would like a great deal, and whose radical twentieth-
century ideas I enjoy exploring. But Goldman and our great-grandmothers have had minimal
influence on what most American and English women think, and what we socially assume even
outside the range of our conscious deliberations, whereas Martineau spelled out a century ahead
of us these thoughts and deliberations. Harriet Martineau’s radicalism led her to make a cogent,
rational economic argument about conditions in Ireland in 1843 that included specific consideration
of the special poverty of women in the same decade that my great-grandmother Graham was
preparing for her boat trip to New Orleans to avoid starvation near Dublin. Martineau’s kind of
radicalism rattled the whole Anglo-American cognitive universe as well as the political one. Unlike
the radicalism of the Emma Goldmans, it set in place the cognitive assumptions the majority of us,
whether socialist, radical, or liberal feminists, operate under today, whether fully consciously or
vaguely from within our culture’s orientation to the world. These assumptions are the belief in
order, the belief that change will bring about betterment, the belief that knowledge is power, the
belief that the individual will do good if she or he is taught the good, and, above all, the substitution
of a science of society for a theological or speculative base, as the first premise for other individual
and collective ideas.
For the contemporary British journalist Sarah Curtis and me, and, I believe, the majority of the
world that looks to concepts originating in English, Harriet Martineau articulated the world view
that was formative, comprehensible, palatable for our feminism. For Martineau, it was very much
a part of a whole, of politics, of economics, of life-style, of philosophy, of a belief system. Being
inside the paradigm, she did not know this was so. She gave us our liberal faith in progress,
science, and order, a faith that included feminism, what she and her contemporaries called the
woman question, which would have as its “natural,” inevitable outcome rights of women
corresponding to those of men.
Although in our day challenges to the paradigm, both the undergirding philosophic one and the
feminist one, have arisen, making us conscious of the characteristics of that world view and
challenges to it, I believe that what Martineau gave us is an explanation of the fundamental
intellectual precepts on which most of our feminism is posited. A retrospective look at some of her
works on the subject of women and some of her advocacy of women’s causes will help us, I
believe, explain to ourselves where we have come from.

22.1 Analysis on Marriage
“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.
Even if we loved some one else better than—than those we were married to, it would be of no
use”—poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly—”I

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