Meet the woman who sold more novels than Charles Dickens. Harriet Martineau (1802 – 1876) was a British novelist, feminist, abolitionist, philosopher, travel writer, journalist, and more. She is considered the first female sociologist.
Martineau struggled with ill health all her life. She had no sense of taste or smell and became partially deaf starting at age twelve. In her forties, she developed a uterine tumor that affected her for many years of her life. Nevertheless, she traveled widely and wrote extensively for over seventy-years, with major journeys to the United States and to Egypt and the Middle East.
As girl, her mother tried to force her into the accepted role for girl against which she rebelled. Her first published work in 1821 was On Female Education, in which she detailed how she should have been raised and educated. When her fiancé died, she knew married life was not for her. So when in 1829, her father lost his mercantile business, she happily took on the support of her family. She considered it the best thing to ever happen to her.
She was hired to write a series of novels that illustrated the political and philosophies of the great thinkers of her time: Malthus, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Adam Smit and more. Her nine volume series Illustrations of Political Economy was so successful that by 1834, it had sold 10,000 copies. At the time, sales of 2000-3000 copies of a novel were considered a major success.
She moved to London and befriended other major thinkers and writers of the period, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dickens, Coleridge, and Thomas Caryle. She was particularly friendly with the Darwin family. In 1852, she began writing for Charles Darwin’s journal Daily News, going on to write 1600 articles for it over her lifetime. Erasmus Alvey Darwin, older brother to Charles Darwin, was fascinated by her.
Charles Darwin upon meeting her, said “She was very agreeable and managed to talk on a most wonderful number of subjects…I was astonished to find how little ugly she is, but as it appears to me, she is overwhelmed with her own projects, her own thoughts and own abilities. Erasmus palliated all this, by maintaining one ought not to look at her as a woman.” (quoted in the New World Encyclopedia)
In 1837, she traveled around the United State and was appalled by slavery and the poor situation of American women. She was struck by the wide difference between the ideal of democracy and how women and slaves were treated. Her critical 1837 work Society in America is considered a ground-breaking work of sociology though it was denigrated for years by many male sociologists.
The following excerpt is from this work:
POLITICAL NON-EXISTENCE OF WOMEN by Harriet Martineau
One of the fundamental principles announced in the Declaration of Independence is, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. How can the political condition of women be reconciled with this?
Governments in the United States have power to tax women who hold property; to divorce them from their husbands; to fine, imprison, and execute them for certain offences. Whence do these governments derive their powers? They are not “just,” as they are not derived from the consent of the women thus governed.
Governments in the United States have power to enslave certain women; and also to punish other women for inhuman treatment of such slaves. Neither of these powers are “just;” not being derived from the consent of the governed.
Governments decree to women in some States half their husbands’ property; in others one-third. In some, a woman, on her marriage, is made to yield all her property to her husband; in others, to retain a portion, or the whole, in her own hands. Whence do governments derive the unjust power of thus disposing of property without the consent of the governed?
The democratic principle condemns all this as wrong; and requires the equal political representation of all rational beings. Children, idiots, and criminals, during the season of sequestration, are the only fair exceptions.
The case is so plain that I might close it here; but it is interesting to inquire how so obvious a decision has been so evaded as to leave to women no political rights whatever. The question has been asked, from time to lime, in more countries than one, how obedience to the laws can be required of women, when no woman has, either actually or virtually, given any assent to any law. No plausible answer has. as far as I can discover, been offered; for the good reason, that no plausible answer can be devised. The most principled democratic writers on government have on this subject sunk into fallacies, as disgraceful as any advocate of despotism has adduced. In fact, they have thus sunk from being, for the moment, advocates of despotism. Jefferson in America, and James Mill at home, subside, for the occasion, to the level of the author of the Emperor of Russia’s Catechism for the young Poles.
Jefferson says, (1) “ Were our State a pure democracy, in which all the inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberations,
1. Infants,- until arrived at years of discretion;
2. Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals, and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men;
3. Slaves, from whom the unfortunate state of things with us takes away the rights of will and of properly.”
If the slave disqualification, here assigned, were shifted up under the head of Women, their case would be nearer the truth than as it now stands. Woman’s lack of will and of property, is more like the true cause of her exclusion from the representation, than that which is actually set down against her. As if there could be no means of conducting public affairs but by promiscuous meetings I As if there would be more danger in promiscuous meetings for political business than in such meetings for worship, for oratory, for music, for dramatic entertainments, — for any of the thousand transactions of civilized life! The plea is not worth another word. (Society in America, vol. 1, p.103.
Harriet Martineau’s Writings
Martineau was an amazingly prolific writer. Here is a list of as many works as I could find. I did not include the short works she listed in her autobiography. Many of these writings are in the public domain and can be found on the Internet Archive by searching on Harriet Martineau.
- 1823 Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons
- 1826 Addresses for the Use of Families
- 1827 Principle and Practice, a novel
- 1829 Five Years of Youth: or, Sense and Sentiment, a novel
- 1832-34 Illustrations of Taxation, 5 volumes, published by Charles Fox
- 1833 Poor Laws and Paupers
- 1834 The Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to Produce Low Wages and of Union between Masters and Men to Ensure Good Wages
- 1832-4 Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 volumes
- 1837 Society in America, 3 volumes
- 1837 Miscellanies. (2 vols.)
- 1838 Retrospect of Western Travel
- 1838 How to Observe Morals and Manners
- 1839 Deerbrook, (3 vol.s) her most popular novel
- 1839The Martyr Age of the United States
- 1841 The Peasant and the Prince a novel
- 1841 The Hour and the Man a novel about the Haitian slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, who contributed to the island nation’s gaining independence in 1804.
- 1844 Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid, an autobiographical reflection on invalidism
- 1847 The Billow and the Rock
- 1848 Eastern Life, Present and Past, 3 volumes the first travelogue not about a pilgrimage by a woman
- 1849-1850 History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace (4 vols)
- 1850 “How to Make Home Unhealthy” Harper’s Magazine
- 1851 “Sketches from Life” Harper’s Magazine
- 1851 The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance (3 vol)
- 1851 Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development
- 1852 Merdhin: the Manor and the Eyrie; and Old Landmarks and Old Laws Volume 1
- 1853 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte
- 1855 A Complete Guide to the English Lakes,
- 1859 Household Education
- 1861 England and Her Soldiers.
- 1861 The Century
- 1862 Sister Ana’s Probation
- 1869 Biographical Sketches
- 1872 “International Copyright Question“, with P.A. Towne The Century
- 1877, 1832-1834 Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, 2 volumes, posthumous publication
- 1877 Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft.
Learn More about Harriet Martineau
To learn more about her very active and productive life see:
Books
Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgewood, edited by Elisabeth S. Arbuckle. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1985.
Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist by Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan, (New York: Berg, 1992)
Harriet Martineau: the Woman and Her Work, 1802-76 by Pichanick, Valerie Kossew, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980)
Articles
Harriett Martineau Digital Commons
Harriet Martineau and her Deafness by Valerie Doulton
Martineau Society, Britain
“Rendering Sociology. On the Utopian Positivism of Harriet Martineau and the ‘Mumbo Jumbo Club’” by Matthew Wilson