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Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

issues for her, not the central, singular driving focus for women’s rights that it came to be in both Notes
England and America after her death. Nevertheless, she readily signed the petition for women’s
suffrage that John Stuart Mill presented to Parliament in 1866. She admired Mill and believed him
to be an effective supporter of women’s rights, but adding her name to those of the 1,498 other
women on the petition was not a strong gesture. Her conviction of the rightness of the principle of
the vote for women, incidentally, was not shared by the ruling Queen Victoria, still mourning
deeply for her husband, then dead for five years, nor by the most admired woman in England at
the time and Martineau’s friend, Florence Nightingale.
Martineau’s final act of political activism in her old age was on behalf of women and again in the
service of a campaign led by another, the campaign of the Ladies’ National Association for the
Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts led by Josephine Butler. This time a thoroughly feminist
organization was launched. It was liberal and even patronizing in the sense that it consisted of
“respectable” women working for “fallen” women. Nevertheless, this movement was radical in
the sense that the women involved realized that all women were potentially incriminated by laws
that identified prostitutes too vaguely and punished women but not men for acts of prostitution.
Martineau was invigorated by writing publicly for this campaign, which provided an appropriate
finale for a distinguished career as journalist, thinker, and feminist.
Self Assessment

1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Martineau’s first writings appeared in unitarian periodical published in
(a) 1822 (b) 1825 (c) 1830 (d) 1828
(ii) The first writing written by Harriet was
(a) Illustration of Political Economy (b) Monthly Depository
(c) Retrospect of Western Travel (d) None of these
(iii) Martineau's Antobiography was written in
(a) 1854 – 85 (b) 1865 – 66
(c) 1850 -51 (d) 1853- 54
(iv) The Feminist Papers indicates the ...... of Martineau’s thought
(a) Current value (b) Past Value
(c) Future value (d) None of these

24.7 Summary

• The selections in this book were chosen to give a full view of the ways in which Harriet
Martineau wrote about women and about those feminist issues, both historical and
contemporary, that she addressed. Often she wrote several pieces on the same topic, and I
usually picked the shortest one if it gave the complete scope of her argument. To choose from
her many biographical works on women, I used two criteria: that a particularly feminist
point was made and that the biographee as herself notable. To my knowledge, the pieces on
American women, Irish women, and the women in the harems in Cairo and Damascus are
the only ones she wrote in a deliberately social mode about women in groups. I wanted to
show how she attended to feminist material and developed feminist theory throughout her
lifetime, so I chose material from different periods of her writing. Since my purpose was
solely to develop the idea that over forty years Martineau fostered feminist causes and
structured feminist theory in a great many works, Excluded from the selections printed here
passages that were not directly about women. I have left nearly all of Martineau’s spelling,
punctuation, and phrasing as they were in the original source, even though occasionally one
looks like a printer’s error or a grammatical oversight. I have assumed that the reader’s
interest will be primarily on the topic of women, so I have kept to a minimum, interesting

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