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Notes This contradiction is vividly seen in two illustrations. In the” Memorials,” Maria Weston Chapman
reports the memory one of Harriet Martineau’s oldest friends had of Martineau’s deep regret at
the marriage of a young lady friend. She related that Martineau said that marriage “would deprive
her of larger opportunities of usefulness to the world.” Yet in 1854 she was apparently very
happy to sponsor the wedding for her maid from her house at Amble side. She wrote, refusing an
invitation received from a Mrs. Barkworth: “Many thanks for your invitation; but the intended
bridegroom will be here on Sunday, and I am engaged every day till after the wedding. My house,
hands, heart and time will be very full till it is over.”
More enigmatic is her approval of Margaret Fuller’s marriage to Count Ossoli during the last
years of Fuller’s life. Given her opinion that marriage would “deprive [one young woman] of
larger opportunities of usefulness,” it is striking to find Martineau writing of “that remarkable
regeneration which transformed her [Fuller] from the dreaming and haughty pedant in to the true
woman. In a few months more she had loved and married; and how interesting and beautiful was
the closing period of her life, when husband and child concentrated the power and affections
which had so long run to waste in intellectual and moral eccentricity.” This is a rather severe
judgment of Fuller, for although Martineau claims to have been her friend, twice in the Autobiography
she sharply criticizes the American woman. She is resentful that Fuller negatively criticized Society
in America forits emphasis on the abolition of American slavery. She was also stung by a report
from London that Fuller had called her” commonplace” after a visit as her house guest at The
Knoll. Though near in age and occupation, and even in high-strung temperament, Martineau and
Fuller were opposites philosophically, Martineau the rationalist, Fuller the romantic, Martineau
the positivist, Fuller the transcendentalist. It is no wonder that they finally did not get along with
each other. This evidence makes me wonder if Martineau was not being spiteful rather than
truthful about the value of marriage for Margaret Fuller.
On marriage in theory, Martineau wrote in How to Observe Morals and Manners: “ The traveller
everywhere finds women treated as the inferior party in a compact in which both parties have an
equal interest. Any agreement thus formed is imperfect, and is liable to disturbance; and the
danger is great in proportion to the degradation of the supposed weaker party. The degree of the
degradation of woman is as good a test as the moralist can adopt for ascertaining the state of
domestic morals in any country.” And “It is a matter of course that women who are furnished
with but one object,—marriage—must be as unfit for anything when their aim is accomplished as
if they had never any object at all. They are no more equal to the task of education than to that of
governing the state; and, if any unexpected turn of adversity befals them, they have no resource
but a convent, or some other charitable provision.” Her observations of marriage were confirmed
by letters she received from English women describing the “intolerable oppression” of women
under law and custom in England.
Martineau published theoretical considerations of political equality for women several times
between 1837 and 1851. All were about women in American society; and all were very positive.
But only once, in a passage in her Autobiography, did she address at its most abstract level what
was typically called in her day the woman question, and on that occasion she is atypically negative.
The tone of that piece suggests that women will come to have political rights if women will be
worthy of them. Most other times she was far more willing to indict the political system for
excluding women.
The woman’s suffrage campaign did not really get under way until the late 1860s when Martineau’s
health was failing. However, she had written in 1855, “I have no vote at elections, though I am a
tax-paying housekeeper and responsible citizen; and I regard the disability as an absurdity, seeing
that I have for a long course of years influenced public affairs to an extent not professed or
attempted by many men.”
She went on in that passage, however, to disclaim any intention of agitating over suffrage, believing
that women would have a vote in time. The vote was clearly simply one among many women’s

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