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Notes The historian Janet Courtney, writing in the 1930s about the British women’s movement in the
1830s, believed Harriet Martineau to be the leading feminist of the period. Courtney wrote, “And
when I found Harriet Martineau, the ablest of them all, announcing that the best advocates of
women’s rights would be the successful professional women and the ‘substantially successful
authoresses,’ I recognized that she had put in a nutshell the whole truth about the women’s
movement.”
Courtney believed that in the 1830s women and women’s rights made great advances only to fall
back under the influence of Queen Victoria and the Victorians. Though Martineau did not write
the passage Courtney selected until she wrote her Autobiography in 1855, faith in individual women’s
accomplishments was a central point of Martineau’s feminism from the beginning. The female
role model idea is significant in Martineau’s first published piece, “Female Writers of Practical
Divinity,” published in the Unitarian journal Monthly Repository in 1822. The article opens,
I do not know whether it has been remarked by others as well as myself, that some of the finest
and most useful English work son the subject of Practical Divinity are by female authors. I suppose
it is owing to the peculiar susceptibility of the female mind, and its consequent warmth of feeling,
that its productions, when they are really valuable, find a more ready way to the heart than those
of the other sex; and it gives me great pleasure to see women gifted with superior talents, applying
those talents to promote the cause of religion and virtue. In contradiction to her theme, however,
she signed the article,” Discipulus,” implying a male author, a practice she followed in pseudonym
or textual voice off and on throughout her career in spite of the fame she gained in the 1830s
writing in her own name.
She was to echo her first printed sentiment about women achievers as models in a piece written as
an obituary for Florence Nightingale when Nightingale was believed to be dying after the Crime
an War, but not published until 1910 when Nightingale actually died. Florence Nightingale was
the woman of her time whom Martineau perhaps most greatly admired, and she wrote, Florence
Nightingale encountered opposition—from her own sex as much as the other; and she achieved,
as the most natural thing in the world, and without the smallest sacrifice of her womanly quality,
what would beforehand have been declared a deed for a future age.
She was no declaimer, but a housewifely woman; she talked little, and did great things. When
other women see that there are things for them to do, and train themselves to the work, they will
get it done easily enough. There can never be a more unthought-of and marvellous career before
any working woman than Florence Nightingale has achieved; and her success has opened a way
to all others easier than anyone had prepared for her.
Education for women was another theme Martineau pursued all her life. Her second published
piece was on that topic. She was well aware early that intellectual occupation was not considered
fitting for a girl, writing that “when I was young, it was not thought proper for young ladies to
study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand. . . . and thus my first studies in
philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve.” Martineau’s youthful writings suggested
that women should be educated in order to enhance their companionship with men and improve
their teaching of their own children, although she alway sadvocated a rigorous course of study for
girls, physical exercise for girls as well as boys, and domestic arts for women in addition to the
program followed by males. Her feminist consciousness grew, and in later life, she encouraged the
idea of education of women for its own sake and recommended a full program of advanced
subjects. As a public figure and in the press, she supported the establishment of the colleges for
women in London, Queens College in Harley Street and the Ladies College in Bed ford Square, of
the first professional school of nursing at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, and of women’s medical
education.
Work for women was also a frequent theme. Martineau made a strong argument—amazing for the
time—in favor of equal pay for equal work. Hers was not the literal argument still heard today

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