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Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

that women should be paid the same amount of money for exactly the same jobs as men but was Notes
much stronger, insisting that equivalent labor deserves equal pay. She made it most forcefully, in
fact, on behalf of the dairy-maids whose job of milking the cows twice daily, straining the milk,
preparing cheese, and churning but terhad formerly been exclusively a female occupation. She
wrote that “such work as this ought at least to be paid as well as the equivalent work of men;
indeed, in the dairy farms of the west of England the same labour of milking the kine is now very
generally performed by men, and the Dorset milkmaid, tripping along with her pail, is, we fear,
becoming a myth.”
In her writings on women’s work Martineau repeatedly expressed a concern for health as well as
pay. She wrote in several pieces of the degeneration of stamina and mental well-being experienced
by governesses and servant women because of the crushing demands of their employers: “The
physician says that, on the female side of the lunatic asylums, the largest class, but one, of the in
sane are maids of all work (the other being governesses). The causes are obvious enough: want of
sufficient sleep from late and early hours, unremitting fatigue and hurry, and, even more than
these, anxiety about the future from the smallness of the wages.” If not the insane asylum, then
the workhouse followed for many of these women, for they did not earn enough to save for their
old age. But it was better wages and the obligation of good advice from their employers on
savings pensions for themselves that Martineau advocated. Ever the laissez-faire economist, she
did not envision a social scheme for retirement benefits.
For middle-class married women, Martineau advocated improved household man agement skills
exemplified in learning expert cookery. The teaching of such skills as cookery could also become
an occupation. These women need not be house bound, though, for many of them were already
engaged alongside their husbands, brothers, and father sin shop keeping, crafts, small
manufacturing, and the desk work, especially accounting, that went with such employment.
Martineau believed that such women should be encouraged to be more active in these pursuits,
but that they would be much more useful if they were taught sufficient arithmetic to manage sales
and accounting effectively. Though she did not propose wide-scale female ownership of businesses
in preference to men and typically discussed female shopkeeping as though husbands were in
charge, she did encourage single women to learn business skills and widows to learn to manage
their inherited shops to avoid having to remarry so quickly. She spoke of nursing and medicine as
newly opened occupations that should be attractive to middle-class women and predicted that
scientists, artists, and writers would emerge from among educated women.
When Harriet Martineau was fifty-two, she wrote to all her correspondents asking them to address
her henceforth as “Mrs.,” buther request had nothing to do with marriage. It was an
acknowledgment that greater respect was carried by the title “Mrs.” than “Miss” and an assertion
that she was entitled to such respect. This was resonant with the original meaning of the word
“mistress,” of which “Mrs.” was firstan abbreviation, a word that meant female authority in the
household and had nothing to do with marital status. That meaning was largely gone by the end
of the eighteenth century, but a few distinguished nineteenth-century single women like Martineau
attempted to renewit, showing a sensitivity to the dignity conveyed by a title. Their attempts came
from the same impulse that pressed feminists of the 1970s to introduce “Ms.” as a general title by
which a woman might be addressed whatever her marital status. Martineau was outspoken about
the degradation and limits imposed on women by marriage, but she was understandably ambivalent
in some of her statements and contradictory in some of her behavior having to do with marriage.
In her time and place where marriage was so definitively normative for women, the wonder is
that she was at times so piercingly critical of marriage in general, not that most of the time she
fostered and approved of specific marriages between people she knew. This too is more consistent
with contemporary feminists’ views of the disabilities of marriage than with those of Martineau’s
own time.

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