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Notes nobleness of your character...I respect and admire conscientious dissent and doubt...Heresy is the
only thing that will redeem mankind. (Pichanick,191) In 1851 Harriet translated Comte’s Cours de
philosophie positive into English, facilitating the introduction of positivism into American thought.
Later Life

Harriet Martineau spent her later years away from the bustling streets of London, moving to the
serene Lake District. This was a welcome contrast to the years of constant trial and controversy
that was characteristic of most of her life. There is no thorough bibliography of Martineau’s
reviews and journal articles. During her life, she wrote over 1500 columns, undertook pioneering
methodological studies in what is now called sociology. She was forgotten, in sociology, literature,
history, and journalism due to the male academic system. She died after years of illness in 1876,
but, in her usual fashion, had already written her obituary, nearly twenty years before:
Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness
within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing
approaching genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what
she had to say. In short, she could popularize, while she could neither discover nor invent. She
could sympathize in other people’s views and was too facile in doing so; and she could obtain and
keep a firm grasp of her own, and, moreover, she could make them understood. The function of
her life was to do this, and, insofar as it was done diligently and honestly, her life was of use,
however far its achievements may have fallen short of expectations less moderate than her own.
Her duties and her business were sufficient for the peace and the desires of her mind. She saw the
human race, as she believed, advancing under the law of progress; she enjoyed her share of the
experience, and had no ambition for a larger endowment, or reluctance or anxiety about leaving
the enjoyment of such as she had. (Pichanick, 239).

23.4 On Women’s Education

A central doctrine of Martineau’s feminist thought from the very start of her writing career was
the importance of education for women. Excerpts from her second Monthly Repository article,”On
Female Education,” written in 1822, open this section. In that piece, written when she was barely
twenty years old, Martineau made the claim, amazing for her youth and period, that women’s
intellectual inferiority to men is based on women’s lack of mental training, others’ expectations of
women, and women’s circumstances rather than women’s ability. She cleverly side stepped the
issue of whether women can be men’s equals, saying instead she was looking “to show the
expediency of giving properscope and employment to the powers which they [women] do possess.”
Similarly, she avoided the nature versus nurture argument of whether educational potential is
dependent on “the structure of the body” or “bodily frame.” Although in this youthful argument,
published in the organ of Unitarian Christianity to which she was then faithful, she allowed that
women should be educated to enhance their relationships to men and make them better mothers
and held that the greatest value of education is to give women a better understanding of Christianity,
she nevertheless had a very clear-sighted perception of the dreariness and degradation, the
retrogression that lack of education means in women’s lives. In later life, Martineau was to abandon
and even to repudiate the religion that this early essay relied upon, but she was always to believe
in the great importance of education for women.
Forty years later she was of a different mind on the purpose but not on the benefit of women’s
education. Writing in Once a Week in 1861, she deplored the justification of “good intellectual
training as fitting women to be ‘mothers of heroes,’’companions to men,’ and so on. . . . Till it is
proposed, in educating girls, to make them, in themselves and for their own sakes, as good
specimens of the human being as the conditions of the case allow, very little will be effected by
any expenditure of pains, time, and money.” Included here are pieces on basic education for

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