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Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

This work was indeed an early sociological work on method, as Alice Rossi has claimed. Martineau Notes
goes halfway toward what early anthropologists and sociologists several decades later hoped to
achieve. That is, her methodological approach involved the attempt to evolve some detached
criteria for objectivity. That far, she succeeds in being a primitive scientist. But the other half of her
approach provides her limitation. She inserts her own values, quite assuredly and dogmatically,
as the appropriate criteria. This was, however, four years before Comte’s Positive Philosophy was
published and at least thirteen years before she read it. She was herself to criticize this phase of her
thinking as “metaphysical” at a later time.
Her feminism and her social science may be in conflict in this article. To raise such questions about
women and marriage was important on women’s behalf however she did it, but to do it dogmatically
is not good enough. Calling monogamy of the English variety “the natural method” for all coupling
is application of an unexamined value system. Calling for removal of inferior treatment of women
is suggesting a new one.
The second selection, “Criticism on Women,” published in 1839, is ostensibly a review essay of
three items, but is in fact an essay on the abuse of women and the right of women to be respected
and honored or to be criticized according to standards of honesty and fairness to all people. One
of the persons she defends so splendidly in this piece is the young Queen Victoria, just come to the
throne in 1837. Another (this review is anonymous) is herself, attacked ad hominem for her
deafness and her womanhood after daring to write on population. She had received vicious
treatment in the reviews of “Wealand Woe in Garveloch.” Writing under the editorship of John
Gibson Lockhart in the Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker was the first to damn her. He
wrote, “and most of all it is quite impossible not to be shocked, nay, disgusted, with many of the
unfeminine and mischievous doctrines on the principles of social welfare. . . . A woman who
thinks child-bearing a crime against society! An unmarried woman who declaims against marriage!
! A young woman who deprecates charity and provision for the poor!!!” The attack was patently
unfair, not only for its rejection of the mild story favoring birth control, but also for its sexi
strebuke of Martineau personally as a woman who would dare to write on such a subject. In
“Criticism on Women,” she coins the word “Crokerism” to identify this particular kind of reputation
smearing. The very year (1832) of Croker’s article, in fact, she was still allowing for the possibility
that she might marry and, hence, bear children herself. Writing to her mother in anticipation of
her mother’s coming to live with her in London, she laid out, along with her claim to professional
independence as a woman, her right to marry: “There is another chance, dear mother, and that is,
of my marrying. I have no thoughts of it. I see a thousand reasons against it. But I could not
positively answer for always continuing in the same mind. . . . I mean no more than I say, I assure
you; but, strong as my convictions are against marrying, I will not positively promise.” The third
piece is a marvelous letter written, no doubt, to Maria Weston Chapman and read at an American
women’s rights convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1851. In the letter, Martineau repeats
her themes of the necessity of equal treatment of all humans, of the importance of education to
enable women to flourish, of the need for the object of education to be occupation, and of the
silliness of the old controversy of influence versus office. However, it is significant here that she
couched her persuasive arguments in terms of the need to do a scientific experiment. Although her
writing had always been analytical, this letter was written in the year she was first reading
Comte’s Positive Philosophy, and it is clear that she has a new faith that social experiment will
yield proof of women’s ability. This letter from 1851 is an early example of her work after she had
found clarity in science and provides a good exhibit of her utter confidence in the outcome of an
experiment not yet conducted. Only to those of us with post-Darwinian, post-Freudian, post-
Einsteinian mentalities is such assurance unwarranted. It was entirely earnest and even
revolutionary in Martineau.
If the personal is the political is the intellectual, we may have the key to Martineau’s vast outpouring

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