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Unit 22: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage...

controversy that had her views on mesmerism. Conceived of as a work that would expound on the Notes
positive philosophy of Auguste Comte (in which she had become very interested), the reading
public and her critics instead chose to focus on her agnosticism.
After the controversy over mesmerism and her religious views, Martineau began a translation of
Comte’s The Positive Philosophy, which was then a great influence on her thought. Coming from a
French Huguenot background, and having studied French as a child, she was quite conversant in
the language. Martineau’s translation, published in 1853, was success, and not only introduced
Comte to the English-speaking world, but, when it was translated back into French, it substantially
increased Comete’s popularity.
After the Comte translation, Martineau turned again to the social problems of England-focusing
primarily on women’s issues. Using various publication outlets, such as newspaper editorials,
popular journal articles, and book reviews, she argued for specific policies that would help women.
One such policy was the Married Women’s Property Bill, which was passed by Parliament in 1857,
and which changed the divorce laws under which women had little, if any, rights. Another endevor
concerned attempts to repeal the Contagious Disease Acts of 1866 and 1869, which on the surface
had been passed to control prostitution, but in actuality “gave indiscriminate power to the police
to arrest and humiliate women”
When Martineau was in her early fifties, illness began to progressively limit her activities. She was
incapacitated again, and this time was confined to her home for five years. Her doctors told her
she not have long to live, so she hurried to finish her autobiography, leaving strict instruction that
it not be published until after her death. She outlasted the medical predictions by over twenty
years, reaching the age of seventy-three, and she continued to write prolifically, even writing her
own obituary two weeks before her death on June 25, 1876.
Self Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Sarah Curtis was a
(a) Warter (b) Novelist (c) Journalist (d) None of these
(ii) John Stuart Mill took the first petition for woman’s suffrage to Parliament in
(a) 1850 (b) 1866 (c) 1860 (d) 1870
(iii) Martineau was very much a woman of her time of a
(a) Romantic period (b) Victorian Period
(c) Classical Period (d) None of these
(iv) Society in America published in
(a) 1837 (b) 1845 (c) 1825 (d) 1840
22.5 Summary

• 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.
• 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

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