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Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

she was supportive of their feminism. Although she was not very tolerant of or informed about Notes
sexuality and unorthodox relationships, she was very supportive of work, education, political
rights, and personal dignity for women; and she went a long way in supporting all manner of
their manifestations. She came to be able to do this by objectifying the actual women involved as
she led their causes.
In a leader in the London Daily News published June 28,1854, Harriet Martineau wrote that “the
wife-beating which has excited so much attention for the last two or three years, and which we
have endeavored to meet by express legislation, has revealed to alarmed thousands of us that the
mistresses of tyrannical men have a great advantage over the wives in being able to free themselves
from their tyrant when they please. They can tell the truth in court about the treatment they have
undergone; for they have nothing to fear from the vindictiveness of the brute when he comes out
of gaol again.” This observation came in response to a report of a parliamentary Commission on
Divorce. A Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was to pass in 1857, and Martineau’s support of
it in the newspaper and her expression of that support in terms of the easing of brutality against
poor women are indications of her surprisingly foresighted feminist outlook. The new law only
established a single court where there had previously been three different jurisdictions to handle
divorce cases and did not actually give women much relief, but Martineau’s argument is immensely
important as an early feminist framework for later criticism and campaigns. Long before the
coining of the word “feminist” and thirty years before the beginning of an organized women’s
rights campaign in England, Harriet Martineau was a wide-ranging, progressive, and thorough-
going feminist in nearly every sense in which that word is used today. Embracing practically
every cause clearly in favor of women’s advancement in her lifetime and taking up certain issues
that were not sodefinitely identified as parts of the feminist fabric until the 1960s and 1970s,
Martineau was a giant among early feminists. An overview of Martineau’s writings and the issues
and campaigns she fought for with her pen gives a contemporary reader both a profile of the
emergence of feminism in nineteenth-century England and America and a theoretical foundation
for the feminist social philosophy still dominant today. She was the first Englishwoman to make
the analogy between the American woman’s lot and the slave’s. Publishing that claim in Society
in America in the context of a full analysis of the situation of American women, she and her book
received far more attention, both positive and negative, for her abolitionist views than for her
feminism. Yet the book included a very astute chapter entitled “The Political Non-Existence of
Women,” in which she claimed that the democratic principle was violated by the denial of political
participation to women. It was from women that she had learned much that she knew about the
United States, and she gave credit to these women for their achievements and talents. At the same
time she criticized the lack of authority and choice for American women and the resulting servitude
for many of them. Martineau’s position as a model for today’s feminists or as aninspiration for
female achievers is important. Alice S. Rossi’s inclusion of Martineau’s chapter on women from
Society in America in her selection of classic feminist statements, The Feminist Papers ( 1973), indicates
the current value of Martineau’s thought. In presenting her chapter from Martineau, Rossi especially
represents Martineau as a forerunner of the discipline of sociology.
Others could make such a claim for her relation to economics, though Martineau was a popularizer
in that field, not an original thinker. Although it would be much too extravagant to claim a
significant place for her as a fiction writer—her didactic tales, children’s stories, and novel Deer
brook having small current readership—it is, nevertheless, important to note that she wrote a
considerable amount of fiction. The most comprehensive “first” that Martineau accomplished as a
woman was as a journalist, for besides earning her living from her early thirties by writing
numerous popular books and many articles for major journals, she contributed, as mentioned,
over 1,600 editorials to the London Daily News on an enormous range of political and social topics
during the 1850s and 1860S.

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