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Notes of women and their children will never be guarded as it ought to be till it is put under the charge
of physicians of their own sex. The moral and emotional considerations involved in this matter
need no discussion. Given that millions of English women were already supporting themselves by
their work, it would be useless to try to stop the trend. Instead, female industry must be nurtured
with education and opportunities. She concludes: With this new condition of affairs, new duties
and new views must be accepted. Old obstructions must be removed; and the aim must be sent
before us, as a nation as well as in private life, to provide for the free development and full use of
the powers of every member of the community. In other words, we must improve and extend
education to the utmost; and then open a fair field to the powers and energies we have educed.
This will secure our welfare, nationally and in our homes, to which few elements can contribute
more vitally and more richly than the independent industry of our country women.
Harriet Martineau was a woman of strong opinions, not only about political and economic issues
but about religious ones. From the beginnings of her Unitarian background, her religious beliefs
gradually fell away, until an outright atheism was revealed in Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature
and Development (1851), co-authored with Henry G. Atkinson, a book that one wit summed up as
“The doctrine seems to be this: There is no God, and Harriet is his prophet.” She was very ready
for Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published later in 1859. In one letter she wrote, What a book
it is! — overthrowing (if true) revealed Religion on the one hand, & Natural (as far as Final Causes
& Design are concerned) on the other. The range & mass of knowledge take away one’s breath.
(quoted in Adrian Desmond & James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, p. 486) To
Darwin’s cousin Fanny Wedgwood, Harriet Martineau wrote,
One might say “thank you” all one’s life without giving any idea of one’s sense of obligation.... we
must all be glad that he has set the world on this great new track. (quoted in Janet Browne, Charles
Darwin: The Power of Place, p. 92) The only problem that Martineau found with the book was the
religious terminology that Darwin seemed to use too much! As she continued in her letter to
Fanny, I rather regret that C.D. went out of his way two or three times ... to speak of “the Creator”
in the popular sense of the First Cause ... It is curious to see how those who would otherwise agree
with him turn away because his view is “derived from” or “based on” “Theology” ... It seems to
me that having carried us up to the earliest group of forms, or to the single primitive one, he & his
have nothing to do with how those few forms, or that one, come here. His subject is the “Origin of
Species,” and not the origin of Organisation; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the
latter speculation at all. — There now! I have delivered my mind. (Desmond & Moore, p. 486-7)

24.6 Harriet Martineau’s Feminism
It is tempting to follow Martineau’s own method and measure her feminism against specific
principles. For historical fairness, they should be principles that she herself endorsed. Yet that
would not yield a full enough picture, for it is my intent to show her contribution to later feminism,
including that of our time, as well as to the efforts of her time. Thus, the criteria must be both her
own and ones that we still consider important today, though we must be aware of the difference
between those ideas that were deliberately feminist on her part and the ones to which we in a later
age have assigned feminist significance. Martineau, herself a model of women’s accomplishment
for later feminists, was often a genuine promoter of other women. She was sensitive and conscious
of efforts made by women on women’s behalf, even though her tongue could sometimes be acid
in gossip about some women. Contemporary feminist scholars can note with appreciation that in
her Illustrations of Political Economy she repeatedly gave Mrs. Jane Marcet credit for the idea of her
own work. Though she raised her eyebrows at Mary Wollstonecraft’s personal sexual behavior
and what she regarded as her romantic excesses, she fully acknowledged Wollstonecraft as the
first English public advocate of women’s rights. Present at the dinner at which John Stuart Mill
and Harriet Taylor met, she is reputed to have been one of the worst gossips about the long,
devoted relationship Taylor and Mill maintained while Taylor was married to someone else. Yet

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