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Notes “lacks both the detachment and the structural clarity of Democracy in America, but its thorough
personal engagement is its peculiar strength.” As Deborah Logan has asserted, Martineau’s chief
desire as a writer was to “eradicate slavery in its various forms: racial slavery, seen in the abolition-
themed writings; sexual slavery, illustrated by her focus on world-wide oppressions of women;
and social slavery, demonstrated by her aim to educate the working classes about the forces
creating and perpetuating their economic exploitation.”
24.4 On Women

Harriet Martineau was a life long feminist, and she became one early and on her own. “The
woman question” was what she and other like-minded nineteenth-century thinkers and activists
called what we call feminism. In addition to giving her individual attention to women and women’s
concerns Martineau participated in groups in both England and the United States that were fertile
environments for deliberate efforts on women’s behalf. Probably not too much should be made of
the fact that she wrote admiringly of women writers in her first published piece (“Female Writers
of Practical Divinity”) or that she went to some length to establish the fact that the form she used
for her political economy tales was derived from a woman. Still, these attributions acknowledged
influences from women that she valued from the first. Her first intellectual groups, the Norwich
and then the London Unitarians and Utilitarians, were probably far more important in her
development, since a component of the thought of both Unitarian religion and Utilitarian philosophy
was favorable to women having a larger place in intellectual and public pursuits. Although the
first of Martineau’s several breaches with people she had once favored came with W. J Fox, the
Unitarian editor, because of his setting up a household with Eliza Flowers without marriage,
Martineau was surely influenced by Fox’s liberality toward talented women and the intellectual
role such women as Flowers played in Fox’s editorship. Her scruples about sexual liaisons were
more stereotypically Victorian than the views and practices of many of her associates. Yet sexuality
per se was not a feminist issue in the nineteenth century. To consider it an obstacle to the realization
of feminist goals is to interpret nineteenth-century views in light of twentieth-century feminism
which has made the link between sexuality and gender role assignment. It is ironic from a
contemporary feminist stance, if not from her own, that she regenerated or kept up correspondence
or a working relationship with the men in such affairs, but not the women. The American group
with whom Martineau found the greatest affinity during her 1834-1836 travels, the Garrisonian
abolitionists, like the British Unitarians and Utilitarians, valued the activity and importance of
women and was markedly more advanced on the question than many other groups. Anti-slavery
women’s groups in America were to provide leaders and formative ideas in its early years for the
movement for women’s rights per se, a movement for women as well as a movement of and by
women on behalf of slaves. The five pieces that follow are ones in which Martineau addressed
feminism in some general way. In the opening selection she questions the advisability of marriage
for everyone, a position that required considerable bravery in 1838. She raised the question as a
means of making judgments about the character of a society, but whatever its intent, it was a
courageous question to ask and one that anticipates such contrasting variations of the theme in the
1970s as Kate Millett’s “sexual politics” and Jessie Bernard’s study of “his” and “hers” marriages
that yield greater benefits to men and lesser benefits to women. Martineau was shrewd and
discerning to pick the place of women and the treatment of women in marriage as indices of a
society’s distinctiveness. In How to Observe Morals and Manners she set up criteria for analyzing
a society. Published after her books on the United States, Society in America and Retrospect of
Western Travel, it reflects the method of comparative study of societies used in those books. She
set down what she believed to be an appropriate set of principles, laws of right and wrong, if you
will, and then gauged the society by how well she thought it met the principles. As the title
suggests, these principles had to do with “morals,” deep values held and acted upon, and”
manners,” assumptions and practices of courtesy, kindness, politeness, or the absence thereof, the
surface manifestations of moral depth.

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