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Notes of work about women. One element in the shaping of her young life was the insanity and apparent
suicide of the one man to whom she ever seemed to have had a romantic attachment, her fiance
John Worthington, a college friend of her brother James. I do not think it is the whole story. I do
not think it is even a great part of the story. Yet, I take at her word the account she gives in the
fourth selection of her singleness being the great benefit to her work, in effect her work being her
love. In so doing, I differ with her recent biographers who have speculated about her lesbianism
or absence of it, her sexuality, latent or active. R. K. Webb concludes that she was a “latent
lesbian.” Pichanick disagrees with him, arguing that although Martineau had important
“affectionate female friendships,” there is no evidence for her being alesbian. I believe she was
probably behaviorally a sexual and emotionally sexually naive, and I think she means what she
says in her Autobiography: that Worthington’s death liberated her to be alone and like it. The fifth
selection, on Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and the woman question, occurs in the context
of a description of William Godwin as one of her morning visitors in London in the early days of
her fame in 1833. She delighted in Godwin and greatly enjoyed his company, and, seeing no
conflict of ideology loyalties, Martineau expressly denied that her interest in him arose because of
his connection with Mary Wollstonecraft. Instead, she said, the opposite was true. She had no use
for Wollstonecraft, while honoring Godwin. She claimed Wollstonecraft did the cause of woman
a disservice, proclaiming Wollstonecraft “a poorvictim of passion, with no control over her own
peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.”
All that, while extolling the pleasure of visiting with the man who loved Wollstonecraft—
presumably with a passion of his own—and who had done everything he could to keep her
memory alive! The passion she means, of course, is not merely sexual extravagance but the
exaggerated romantic flamboyance of a personality like Wollstonecraft’s. Following that judgment
of Wollstonecraft, however, her comments on the woman question sound uncharacteristically
self-righteous. Her tone is hostile toward some women, but her message is still consistently that of
the rational moralist. She writes calmly of her expectation that women will achieve the right to
vote.
24.5 Analysis

If I could be providence to the world for a time, for the express purpose of raising the condition of
women, I should come to you to know the means—the purpose would be to remove all interference
with affection, or with any thing which is, or which even might be supposed to be, demonstrative
of affection—In the present state of women minds, perfectly uneducated, and with whatever of
timidity and dependance is natural to them increased a thousand fold by their habits of utter
dependance, it would probably be mischievous to remove at once all restraints, they would buy
themselves protectors at a dearer cost than even at present—but without raising their natures at
all, it seems to me, that once give women the desire to raise their social condition, and they have
a power which in the present state of civilization and of mens characters, might be made of
tremendous effect. Whether nature made a difference in the nature of men and women or not, it
seems now that all men, with the exception of a few lofty minded, are sensualists more or less—
Women on the contrary are quite exempt from this trait, however it may appear otherwise in the
cases of some—It seems strange that it should be so, unless it was meant to be a source of power
in demi-civilized states such as the present—or it may not be so—it may be only that the habits of
freedom and low indulgence in which boys grow up and the contrary notion of what is called
purity in girls may have produced the appearance of different natures in the two sexes—As
certain it is that there is equality in nothing, now—all the pleasures such as there are being mens,
and all the disagreables and pains being womens, as that every pleasure would be infinitely
heightened both in kind and degree by the perfect equality of the sexes. Women are educated for
one single object, to gain their living by marrying—(some poor souls get it without the churchgoing

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