SOURCE: Pichanick, Valerie Kossew. “An Abominable Submission: Harriet Martineau's Views on the Role and Place of Woman.” Women's Studies 5, no. 1 (1977): 13-32.

[In the following essay, Pichanick examines Martineau's views on women's place in society and the home as well as her advice on how women should achieve equality in every area of life.]

I fully expect that both you and I shall feel as if I did not discharge a daughter's duty, but we shall both remind ourselves that I am now as much a citizen of the world as any professional son of yours could be.

With this admonition Harriet Martineau (1802-76) informed her mother that her career as a professional writer had begun. The year was 1833, and Martineau was reminding her mother, perhaps, of an earlier attempt to establish herself as an author in London. Then she had been peremptorily ordered home, and she had acquiesced despite a gnawing sense of the injustice of being remanded “to a position of helpless dependence, when a career of action and independence was opening before me.” But now with the publication of Illustrations of Political Economy she could leave behind amateur scribblings in journalism and provincial anonymity. The success of the series was immediate, and Harriet Martineau, to use her own words, “became the fashion.” She wrote indefatigably for the next forty years. And although she lived by her writing, she wrote not for money, nor amusement, nor fame, she said, but because of a compulsion “to do something with the pen, since no other means of action in politics are in a woman's power.” Martineau wrote on the political, social and economic condition of England. She advocated free trade, public education, democracy and religious toleration. She was a tireless opponent of slavery in the United States, an exponent of Comtean positivism, something of a religious heretic, and an unceasing champion of the rights of woman. Besides the Illustrations her most important works were Society in America (1837), History of the Thirty Years' Peace (1849-50), Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development with Henry Atkinson (1851), a translation and condensation of Comte's Positive Philosophy (1853) and a posthumously published Autobiography (1877). But she also was a chief leader writer for the London Daily News, a contributor to some of the major contemporary journals, and the author of two novels, several short stories and numerous minor works.¹

Harriet Martineau came from a comfortable Norwich manufacturing family. She was the sixth child in a family of eight. Her childhood was unhappy and lonely, and progressive deafness in adolescence had deepened her sense of isolation. However, both the deafness and the loneliness also had the effect of increasing her resolve to remain self-reliant and independent. When she was twenty she published her first article, “Female Writers on Practical Divinity,” in a Unitarian journal, the Monthly Repository. But her articles and stories over the next few years brought her little fame and less remuneration, and when the family's fortunes declined in 1829, it was suggested that she sew in order to supplement her small income. Martineau, however, was determined to be a writer, and she overcame maternal opposition and the prejudices of the publishing houses in order to achieve her aim.²

Harriet Martineau was never quite in the mainstream of contemporary opinion, and sometimes she ran perversely counter to it. Her family had been Unitarian, republican and laissez-fairist and these traditions shaped her outlook. She believed implicitly in the rights of the individual and in natural law, and with her often obstinate independence of mind, she could accept nothing less than personal and universal equality. She thought the unequal position of women was untenable and recognized a need for equality before the law, equality in education, equal status in marriage, and equal opportunities in employment. When she came to London these ideas were reinforced by her association with the Philosophic Radicals and the Unitarians of William Fox's circle. But they were a small minority. Before the fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s there was no recognizable women's movement in Great Britain, and Harriet Martineau's voice was one of the very few raised in lonely and mainly futile protest against the accumulated prejudices of generations.

Martineau had never doubted the mental equality of the sexes. In “On Female Education” in the Monthly Repository of 1823, Martineau first expressed the view that sexual inequalities began in the classroom:

In our own country, we find that as long as the studies of children of both sexes continue the same, the progress they make is equal. After the rudiments of knowledge have been obtained, in the cultivated ranks of society, … the boy goes on continually increasing his stock of information, it being his only employment to store and exercise his mind for future years; while the girl is probably confined to low pursuits, her aspirings after knowledge are subdued, she is taught to believe that solid information is unbecoming her sex, almost her whole time is expended on light accomplishments, and thus before she is sensible of her powers, they are checked in their growth, chained down to mean objects, to rise no more; and when the natural consequences of this mode of treatment arise, all mankind agree that the abilities of women are far inferior to those of men.

She was then barely twenty, her education had been considerably broader than that of most girls of her time and class, but it was surely no coincidence that she expressed her views on educational discrimination in the Monthly Repository at precisely the time that her younger brother and closest sibling, James, went off to school and college while she was forced to remain at home. Even the enlightened Martineaus had provided their sons with better schooling than their daughters. The educated classes in the nineteenth century hearkened to Hannah More and sought to make their girls little more than obedient wives and tolerable mothers. And the avant-garde who read Rousseau were also told that, “… the education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be helpful to us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.”³

Martineau never denied woman's domestic duties, and like other contemporary feminists saw no conflict between traditional feminine homely functions and intellectual or professional achievement. She consistently refuted the argument that learning would undermine a woman's domesticity. If the study of Greek or Latin, she argued, did not distract men from the counting-house, then similar studies would not unfit women for the work-basket or the kitchen:

If it be true that women are made for these domestic occupations [she wrote in Household Education in 1849] then … no book study will draw them off from their homely duties. … Every woman ought to have that justice done to her faculties that she may possess herself in all the strength and clearness of an exercised mind, and may have at command for her subsistence, as much intellectual power and as many resources as education can furnish her with. Let us hear nothing of her being shut out, because she is a woman, from any study that she is capable of pursuing.

A girl ought not to be reared with marriage her only object in life. Without an education she would not have any sustaining personal resources. If she married she could not be a companion to her husband and she would be unqualified to teach her children. If she did not marry she would be incapable of maintaining an independent existence. Mental atrophy would result in the former instance, and destitution in the latter.⁴

Martineau perceived that nineteenth-century social, economic and demographic changes were upsetting “hereditary notions of the dependence and amiable helplessness of women.” Where women had been customarily supported by their fathers or husbands, now, in the urban-industrial age, many were being forced to maintain themselves. She estimated that fewer than half the women of the middle class married before middle age, and that one-third of all women over twenty supported themselves. Yet, though destined to rely upon their own resources for their subsistence, women were not vouchsafed either the preparation or the scope to do so with dignity. An independent single woman herself, and one of the few exceptional members of her sex who succeeded in the literary world, Martineau was deeply concerned for those unmarried daughters of the middle class who were forced to eke a living out of fancy needlework, or to become teachers or governesses.⁵

Martineau was concerned about the inadequacy of nineteenth century education; too concerned to consign it to those who taught because of poverty rather than vocation:

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought therefore, to be more honourable than that of teaching? … Yet are governesses furnished … from among those who teach because they want bread; and who certainly would not teach for any other reason.

She saw the urgency of assisting the profession as well as its practitioners: “… they must have professional requisites to obtain professional dues.” Yet, in the late 1840s, when Queen's College and Bedford College began producing educators of a superior order, thousands of young women who should have joined this new type of female professional, and who could in turn have helped elevate the general level of female education, were kept at home by parents who willingly sent their sons to Oxford or Cambridge but who continued to deny their daughters the opportunity for betterment and independence. Martineau did not confine her interest in female adult education to that of the educator or to those of the middle class. She also advocated the founding of a working women's college “to enlighten and elevate the whole mind, and thus raise the students to a higher rank not only of occupation, but of intelligence and character.”⁶

Martineau was interested in public education at all levels and for both sexes. She was in correspondence with most of the important educators of her time. She took Matthew Arnold to task for the neglect of the subject of girls' education in his report as Inspector of Schools. And doubtless she was deeply chagrined to receive in reply the offhanded statement that “… the matter is … as yet too obscure to me, for me to try and grapple with it.” In 1862 when the Home Secretary was drafting a new charter for the University of London, Francis Newman solicited Martineau's support in his campaign to have women admitted to the examinations. Martineau used her position as leader writer on the Daily News in the 1850s and 1860s to attack the public and private conscience on the question of female education. And in the 1870s when she was too old and too ill to be an active publicist, Anne Jemima Clough and Lady Henrietta Maria Stanley of Alderley, respectively, kept her abreast of the University Extension movement and of the progress being made by the early students at Girton College, Cambridge.⁷

Martineau was concerned not only with the struggle to improve purely female institutions of learning but also with the embryonic effort to admit women to such traditionally male bastions as the country's schools of medicine. She was pleading women's right to enter the field of medicine as early as 1854, and in a Daily News leader of March 25, 1859 she proposed the establishment of a female medical school. In 1870 she petitioned Parliament to admit women to the medical profession on terms of equality. And she followed with interest Sophia Jex Blake's battle with the University of Edinburgh two years later. Among Harriet Martineau's papers in the University of Birmingham library there is a copy of the summons issued by Sophia Jex Blake et al., against the Senate and Chancellor of the University of Birmingham for not permitting the matriculation of women from the University's School of Medicine.⁸

When she editorialized on behalf of women's employment, Harriet Martineau often cited the example of her friend and correspondent, Florence Nightingale. Martineau acknowledged that by making nursing a more respectable occupation for younger women, Nightingale and her nurses had added a new respectability to women's employment generally. In the nineteenth century working women who were not working class were instantly considered déclassé, but Martineau regarded the poverty which had necessitated her own independence and which was forcing thousands of other women to seek their own sustenance as a blessing which in the long run would lead to equal employment and equal status. Through employment women would prove their capabilities, improve their social condition, cease to be dependents, and so would become equals. She, therefore, encouraged women to work and pleaded that their employment be recognized and approved. But women were excluded from most professions and crafts, and when they were employed at the same tasks as men it was seldom for the same wages. Martineau extended the philosophy of laissez-faire to the labor market. She insisted that the principles of free trade be applied to employment; that there be no monopoly of jobs; that work be apportioned according to ability and regardless of sex; and that there be equal pay for equal work. She warned that:

… if the natural laws of society are not permitted free play among us, we may look for more beating of wives and selling of orphans to perdition; and more sacrifice of women to brutal and degrading employments, precisely in proportion to their exclusion from such as befit their social position and natural abilities.⁹

Martineau seldom deviated from the doctrine of laissez-faire especially in the early years when she categorically opposed any government regulation of labor contracts. By mid-century, however, she was prepared to make exceptions in the cases of women and children in mines, factories and the sweated trades. When she became aware of the poor pay and wretched living conditions that yearly drove thousands to prostitution, she conceded that the law should be implemented to alter the situation:

There is much evil in all such interference with private arrangements; but, till we have outgrown the necessity, we ought to permit the interference most willingly where it is most wanted.

With the political economist's optimistic view that labor and management would come naturally and agreeably to terms, Martineau acquiesced to the present conditions under which men labored because she considered them to be temporary, but in the case of women, she was not prepared to await events. Neither her belief in laissez-faire nor her protestations of equality of the sexes prevented her from protesting when the workers being exploited were women. Similarly, her Malthusian opposition to charity and her adherence to the philosophy of self-help were insufficient to deter the admission of rare exceptions when the destitute were women: she supported the Governesses' Benevolent Association in its efforts to aid unemployed and aging governesses, and when hundreds of needle-women were thrown out of work in the 1850s with the invention of the sewing-machine, she hesitantly agreed to the temporary provision of relief. Ideally she would have preferred that the unemployed and the destitute be given not bread but the opportunity of alternate job-training:

The only effective rescue for this multitude of women is in putting their case in their own hands by fitting them for secure and honourable work, and in preparing the way for as many as become qualified.¹⁰

After she completed the Illustrations of Political Economy in 1834 Martineau had spent two years touring the United States. There she became acquainted with female abolitionism and the seedling feminist movement. But although she was impressed by the women of these organizations, she was disappointed in the new democratic republic:

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 [she asked] can the political position of women be reconciled with this?

Martineau was a proponent of women's political rights, but she believed that if domestic and economic self-reliance were achieved, political advancement would follow as a matter of course. She was also a pragmatist. She knew how strong the opposition in England was to any kind of political change, and she therefore advanced the democratic cause only as far as she felt it expedient to do so. Her radicalism was cautious: she was always sufficiently in the van to ruffle feathers but never so far forward as to cause a violent conservative retroaction. When she wrote in 1857 to advocate an extension of male suffrage, she did not even hint at the probable inclusion of women in such an extension. She knew that any such suggestion would kill the possibility of franchise reform completely. Yet she believed in women's rights to representation, and strongly opposed James Mill's argument that women had identical interests with their fathers and husbands, and so should be content to be represented by them. Martineau never willingly submitted to her own unenfranchised position. She said that she did not feel obligated to respect laws to which she had never assented:

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 wrote in 1854]. But I do not see that I could do much good by personal complaints, which always have some suspicion or reality of passion in them. I think the better way is for us all to learn and to try to the utmost what we can do, and thus win for ourselves the consideration which alone can secure us rational treatment. The Wollstonecraft order set to work at the other end, and, as I think, do infinite mischief; and, for my part, I do not wish to have anything to do with them. Every allowance must be made for Mary Wollstonecraft herself, from the constitution and singular environment which determined her course: but I never regarded her as a safe example, nor as a successful champion of Woman and her rights.¹¹

Martineau's defence of woman was almost identical with that which Mary Wollstonecraft had expressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Both believed that equal education and equal employment would restore lost dignities. Both believed in the compatibility of intellectual exercise and domestic duty. But Mary Wollstonecraft, Martineau said, had a chip on her shoulder, and although her principles were praiseworthy, her morals could not be condoned. Martineau believed inflexibly that the advocates of woman's rights should plead out of a sense of justice and not because of their own private passionate wrongs. She was convinced that the best spokeswomen for the cause should be happy wives or contented single women without private injuries to avenge or mortifications to relieve. If the protagonists of woman's rights were respected, if once women were accepted by the business and professional communities, and had secured for themselves an active place in the life of the society, Martineau felt certain that equality would be assured.¹²

Although she believed that the time was not perhaps ripe to demand representation in the legislative councils of the nation, yet she felt that there were inequalities and inequities in the law, and particularly in the marriage law, which had to be fought. But women were dumb before the law, they could neither represent themselves in Parliament nor elect those who would represent them. Woman's only weapon was the pen, and as ever Harriet Martineau's was ready to do battle. Her chief contributions to the marriage and divorce law questions were made after 1852 when she began writing leaders for the liberal Daily News. She kept before her readers a constant recital of the injustices of the system under which they lived. How, she asked, could they tolerate a marriage compact in which the wife was regarded as an inferior party? How could they continue to ignore the gross injustice of a law which gave a wife no protection, by which her property and earnings could be appropriated by her husband, by which she could be divorced but could not petition for divorce herself, by which her children could be taken from her, and under which she had no appeal and no redress? The law, it was clear, had to be changed. It had to give women a right to their children and control over their property and earnings. It had to make divorce more easily and equally obtainable. And by the same token it had to stop treating women like infants and make them responsible for their own debts and obligations.¹³

Martineau deeply resented the assumed subordination of the wife in marriage. She admitted reading of Katherine and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew with:

… intolerable pain at the treatment of Katherine. Such monstrous infringement of all rights, leading to such an abominable submission, makes one's blood boil as much as if it were not a light comedy, but a piece of history.

Where the average Victorian would have applauded Katherine's conversion to docility, Martineau was saddened by it. She thought that marriage should be a partnership, but as it existed in English society it appeared to her to be based less upon mutual regard than upon mercenary considerations. She did not denounce monogamy as Engels did, but like him she perceived the marriage contract and the marriage market to have financial rather than emotional underpinnings, and she described the institution of marriage as little more than a “legal prostitution.” Although the philosophies of Martineau and Engels were fundamentally different, both were appalled by the double standard which condoned the infidelities of husbands but made criminal the infidelities of wives. Both concluded independently that actual prostitution was made inevitable by the lovelessness of the customary marriage of convenience:

If men and women marry those whom they do not love [she wrote], they must love those whom they do not marry.¹⁴

Because she regarded the Victorian marriage as an economic arrangement, Martineau thought it absurd to consider it an indissoluble holy sacrament. She had witnessed unhappiness and incompatibility in the marriages of others, and she was an advocate of divorce. But while divorce could be obtained for as little as twenty pounds in Scotland, in England, she noted, it cost approximately a thousand pounds to petition Parliament for a divorce. English divorce proceedings were cumbersome and expensive, and they discriminated not only against women but also against the poor. Divorce, she said, should be granted because the party or parties needed it, and not according to their financial status or sex. As it then existed, it was invariably the poor working-class wife who was most victimized by the system. She grimly noted that the term “wife-beating” was then being used with ominous frequency, and she believed that the situation could only be amended by changing the divorce laws and not by increasing the penalties for brutality. The former, she was emphatically convinced, would result in a positive improvement in the poor woman's condition, the latter would only make her more than ever the victim of her husband's vengeance.¹⁵

Women were at last given limited protection in marriage by a new law passed in 1857, and Martineau did not allow the occasion to go unremarked. In the Daily News she recorded, somewhat ironically, that if they had “suffered a certain amount of cruelty!” women could now request a judicial separation. However, much more important than this limited concession was, she said, the fact that the new law at last recognized women as bread-winners: women could finally claim legal title to their earnings. The fact and the acknowledgement were significant signs of progress and she attributed this progress entirely to the advances being made in female employment. “It is certainly not the declaimers,” she wrote, “but working women, who have won the new protection which is blessing the whole country.”¹⁶

Harriet Martineau criticized marriage and advocated divorce in spite of the censure of polite society. She never denied the duties of conscience, and did not hesitate even before the reprehensible questions of birth-control, illegitimacy and prostitution. As a proponent of birth-control she had brought upon herself the wrath of the Quarterly Review in 1833 even though her discussion of the subject in Weal and Woe in Garveloch, one of the Illustrations of Political Economy, was naïve and unspecific. It was considered unbecoming for a maiden lady to suggest such a subject even in the vaguest terms. But Martineau was a follower of Malthus and she was bound to speak her mind. She favored birth-control in marriage and she deplored illegitimacy—on economic not moral grounds. She opposed the construction of foundling hospitals because she believed that they would encourage an irresponsible attitude toward conception. And, a supporter of and propagandist for the New Poor Law of 1834, she agreed with that clause in the law which made mothers solely responsible for their illegitimate offspring. As a Malthusian she hoped that placing the responsibility on the mother alone would reduce the incidence of conception out of wedlock; and as a feminist she welcomed the opportunity it gave women to be mistresses of their own bodies.¹⁷

Martineau opposed irresponsible procreation but she did not condemn normal sexuality. She had more sympathy for the prostitute than for the unwed mother. In How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) she described prostitutes as the victims of a society which proclaimed a false chastity, imposed artificial restraints upon the passions, encouraged loveless, mercenary marriages, and by all these created a climate which fostered the growth of prostitution. Moderation and conjugal fidelity could not, she felt, be expected in a society where asceticism was professed in sexual relations, where double standards were practised, and where women were not considered equal partners in marriage. Furthermore, where women were not vouchsafed decently paid and respectable employment, they could not be blamed for preferring “luxury with infamy to hardship with unrecognized honour … if women were not helpless, men would find it far less easy to be vicious.”¹⁸

It was with the prostitute and not with her clientele that Martineau sympathized. She thought that the licensing of prostitutes in order to protect the men who frequented their establishments would simply condone and perpetuate an evil which had its origins in sexual discrimination and exploitation. It was therefore with horror that she witnessed in 1864 the passage of the first Contagious Diseases Bill. Under the terms of this bill, women in garrison towns could be stopped on the streets and summarily arrested as prostitutes. If a woman refused a physical examination, or refused to sign an admission of prostitution, she could be imprisoned, forcefully examined, and if found diseased, confined to a certificated hospital. It was not necessary for the arresting officer to produce any evidence against her; no man was ever called upon to testify to her guilt; and she had no right of appeal. The blatant injustice of this proposed legislation was a call to action. Harriet Martineau's leader in the Daily News of July 2, 1864 was the first cannonade in the fight which became known as “The Cause.” Josephine Butler, commonly recognized as the leader of the battle against the Contagious Diseases Acts did not actually enter the lists until almost six years later, and she acknowledged the influence of Harriet Martineau's leader article in her Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. In the leader Martineau apologized for the awkwardness of the subject but pronounced it her duty as a journalist to warn against legislation which endangered the rights of innocent women. But her warning did not prevent passage of the Act, and when it was proposed that the law be extended to include the rest of the country in 1869, she again took up the cudgels. Illness had by this time forced her to resign her position as an editorialist for the Daily News, however, she published in its pages a series of letters protesting against the extension of a law designed to safeguard men “from the worst consequences of their own licence [while women were forced to] undergo the outrage and heart-break … of personal violation under sanction of law and the agency of the police.”

Up to the date of the passage of these Bills every woman in the country had the same rights as men over their own person. … Now it is no longer. Any woman of whom a policeman swears that he has reason to believe that she is a prostitute is helpless in the hands of the administrators of the new law. She is subject to the extremity of outrage … for the protection of the sex which is the cause of the sin.¹⁹

Despite her forceful words Harriet Martineau's actions cost her a great deal. She described her feelings as being sickened and her sense of modesty as being outraged. But when no voices were raised to protest the legislation, and the thought occurred to her that she was the person to break the “conspiracy of silence” she admitted to feeling as “cowardly as almost to wish that it had not … but who should do so,” she asked, “if not an old woman, dying and in seclusion. …” She was sixty-seven and in great pain when she wrote her letters to the Daily News. But she had never denied her conscience before, and she did not now consider herself either too old or too ill to act as a standard bearer in what must be regarded her last campaign. Her three letters to the Daily News were published on three consecutive days, and on the fourth day a letter from the Ladies' National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was published in the same columns. Twenty-eight prominent women, including Josephine Butler and Florence Nightingale, signed the letter, and Harriet Martineau's name headed the list.²⁰

Despite the feebleness of her health she continued to help the Cause and to support Josephine Butler's Social Purity Association which aimed to elevate masculine morality and so eliminate the hypocrisy of the double standard. She wrote posters and contributed “fancy-work” to raise money for the campaign. And along with John Stuart Mill and other luminaries of the women's movement, she provided propaganda against Sir Henry Storks, a supporter of the Acts, when he ran against a repealer in the Colchester by-election of 1870. The publicity was effective and Storks, the official Liberal Party candidate, was not elected. The loss of the seat made Prime Minister Gladstone reconsider the Acts. A Parliamentary Commission was constituted for this purpose and when it voted 13 to 6 for repeal and proposed new legislation, the repealers were jubilant. Sir John Richard Robinson, the editor of the sympathetic Daily News, wrote to congratulate Harriet Martineau: “You have done more than anyone, I really believe, to defeat the plans of the military.” But with characteristic honesty she pencilled the margin of his letter with the private comment, “No, Mrs. Butler.” Congratulations, as it happened were premature. The new Bill was not introduced until the end of the Parliamentary session. By that time it was too late to complete its passage and it was dropped. It was not until 1886, a decade after Martineau's death, that the final Contagious Diseases Act was repealed.²¹

For a nineteenth-century woman Harriet Martineau was exceptionally frank in her discussion of sexual matters. She wrote about birth-control and prostitution. She was an early advocate of sex education for the young—preferring the simple truth to the “abominable lies” usually told. She shuddered at any kind of bowdlerization. She condemned false sexual asceticism, and she understood the reasons for infidelity. However, her own relationship with the opposite sex had been very limited. She had many male friends and correspondents, but to our almost certain knowledge, she had but one romantic attachment in her life. At twenty-four she became engaged to a young clergyman named John Worthington. The evidence indicates that this had not been a very deep experience. She had entered into the commitment somewhat hesitantly, and even allowing for maidenly reticence, her letters to her brother James at the time betrayed little passion. Worthington was in delicate health. He had suffered a serious mental breakdown before the betrothal, and part of Harriet Martineau's hesitation was attributable to this reason. When he therefore underwent a second attack and became hopelessly deranged it must have come as a not unexpected shock. But the shock was of temporary duration. Martineau was able to convince herself that the John Worthington she had loved was not the poor suffering creature he had become, and when he died a short time later she did not mourn his death:

I am, in truth, very thankful for not having married at all. I have never since been tempted, nor have suffered anything at all in relation to that matter which is held to be all-important to woman—love and marriage. Nothing, I mean, beyond occasional annoyance, presently disposed of. Every literary woman, no doubt, has plenty of importunity of that sort to deal with; but freedom of mind and coolness of manner dispose of it very easily: and since the time [of her betrothal], … my mind has been wholly free from all idea of love-affairs.

One of the “occasional annoyances” she referred to in this extract from her Autobiography had been handled with something less than “coolness of manner.” When on her American tour, her host, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, had made an unexpected and fervent advance, and Miss Martineau had fled in panic and locked herself into her room. But besides being her host and a respected clergyman, Gannett was a married man, and her reaction was not altogether unnatural.²²

Martineau had no regrets about her spinsterhood, but she admitted:

When I see what conjugal love is, in the extremely rare cases in which it is seen in its perfection, I feel that there is a power of attachment in me that has never been touched.

There is a plaintive quality to this admission which belies her claim to being “the happiest single woman in England.” Certainly her partly acknowledged yearnings after marriage make one query, R. K. Webb's allegation of “latent homosexuality” in Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. There is no evidence that Martineau herself was aware of lesbian inclinations, or that any of her friends ever remarked on such tendencies. The matter therefore seems to be irrelevant, but as the issue has been raised, it ought to be examined. Professor Webb's evidence is largely circumstantial and unsubstantiated. Webb cites Martineau's apparent lack of interest in men: her rational acceptance of Worthington's loss and her recoil from Gannett's advances. But Martineau's reactions in the first instance were prompted by self-defence—it was easier to rationalize Worthington's loss than to mourn it—and in the second reflected little more than a sense of propriety and a sexual immaturity and timidity—not altogether unexpected qualities in a Victorian spinster. Martineau, furthermore, was a realist with few illusions about herself. She was plain, deaf, and her family was impoverished. She was aware, as we have noted, of the mercenary nature of most marital arrangements, and she was doubtless aware too that her shortcomings made her in this respect a less than desirable “commodity.” In any case, her immersion in her professional career was a commitment to a life of the mind rather than a life of the heart.²³

Webb's other evidence is no more persuasive. Because Martineau disapproved of the illicit liaisons between Eliza Flower and William Johnson Fox, George Eliot and George Lewes, and Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Webb assumes an “hysterical self-righteousness” which he somehow associates with sexual deviation. But surely he has misinterpreted what was little more than Victorian prudery and intolerance: these couples were abandoned by their closest friends. Martineau had never experienced passion herself, and she not surprisingly thought it “guidable by duty.” Her disapproval of these couples was not of their love but of their illicit love: in looking only at Martineau's disapproval of these extra-marital alliances Webb has ignored her hearty endorsement of happy legitimate unions.²⁴

The chief basis for Webb's allegation of lesbianism, however, rests on her susceptibility to her female mesmerizers, and on “the peculiar intensity of her friendships with women”—particularly her American friend, Maria Weston Chapman. But the former takes no account of Martineau's susceptibility to male mesmerizers; and the latter ignores “the peculiar intensity” of nineteenth-century female friendships in general. Female friends were especially important in a society which considered women inferior to men. But the deep affectionate friendships of women in the nineteenth century were normally innocent of sexual implication. And there is no reason to suspect anything otherwise in Martineau's relationship with members of her own sex. Martineau's enthusiastic regard for Mrs. Chapman was easily explainable. Her effusions were doubtless little more than the admiration of a plain woman for a lovely one. Her praise for Mrs. Chapman's abilities found ready echo among the other abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, spoke of Chapman's “genius, intuition, farsightedness, moral heroism, and uncompromising philanthropy as well as … rare literary taste and culture.” And Martineau's regard for Chapman was no less than Garrison's, and no more than a tribute from a distant foot-soldier in the abolitionist ranks to one of its leaders. Martineau's female friends were women of intelligence, moral courage and sensibility. It is not surprising that she should have been drawn to them nor they to her, and there is no evidence of anything other than a platonic relationship between them. In short, Professor Webb's allegations are without foundation; the existence or non-existence of lesbian tendencies in Harriet Martineau can simply not be proved; and his attempt to do so was perhaps motivated by the desire to try and explain Martineau's literary prolificity, and her unfeminine prominence in the highly masculine society of Victorian England.²⁵

It is rather surprising that Martineau failed to create a new image of woman in literature. In spite of an outspoken belief in equality, Martineau's fictional women—with the possible exception of Ella in Ella of Garveloch—were rather conventional heroines. It was the men and boys in her stories who acted, and the women and girls who suffered. None of her heroines in the least resembled their strong-minded, independent creator. And Ella, who resembled her the most, was a simple islander who faced none of the challenges of a sophisticated, male-dominated, urban-industrial society. If we want to find Martineau's image of woman we must look, not to her fiction but to her non-fiction, and to her own life. Throughout her long literary life, from the earliest Monthly Respository articles to the last Daily News letters, Martineau pleaded the cause of woman. But Martineau spoke to a society immured by centuries of prejudice and indifference; to a society ruled over by a Queen who never for a moment forgot that she was a woman first, who continually humbled herself as a wife where she was unable to humble herself as a sovereign, and who loudly proclaimed her opposition to the women's rights movement in all its forms.

In Harriet Martineau's own time and to her own contemporaries her feminism was a perplexing anomaly. As the actor Macready put it in his journal:

The only subject on which I did not agree with this fine woman, and on which I do not clearly understand her, is her advocacy of the restoration of the rights of women. I do not see what she would have in point of political power, nor for what.

Apart from those few who agreed with her principles and acknowledged her influence like Josephine Butler, who lead the Contagious Diseases campaign, and Jessie Boucherette, who co-founded the Society for the Promotion of Employment of Women and the Englishwoman's Review, her words fell on deaf ears. Apart from a few feminist leaders of the 1860s and 1870s, it is impossible to estimate whether Harriet Martineau had any influence at all. Certainly her advice—to obtain economic, social and marital equality before achieving equality at the ballot-box—went unheeded by later women's rightists. Because the suffragist movement of the twentieth century defined its goals too narrowly, it produced only limited results: women obtained the vote, but discrimination and economic exploitation kept them in a subordinate position. If she could have looked more than a century hence, Martineau would have been disappointed to find that although laws have been changed and conditions improved, de facto emancipation has not yet been achieved, and that some women are only now beginning to ask the questions which she so long ago posed about the role and place of woman.²⁶

Notes

1. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography was written in 1854 and 1855 but it was not published until a year after her death. Autobiography with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1877), iii, 91; H. M. to Mrs. Martineau (July 8, 1833), i, 149, 185, 188; Illustrations of Political Economy, 25 vols. (London: Charles Fox, 1832-34); H. M. to William Tait (December 28, 1832, University College Library): “I would fain treat of Woman … for there is much to be said upon it.” H. M. to Francis Place (May 12, 1832, British Museum), Add MS. 35149/147.

2. Monthly Repository, xvii (1822), 593-596, 746-750.

3. Eastern Life Past and Present, 2 vols. (London: Moxon, 1848), ii, 155 ff; Monthly Repository, xviii (1823), 77-81; Rousseau is quoted in John Langdon Davies, A Short History of Women (New York, 1927), 337 ff.

4. Household Education (Philadelphia: Lea Blanchard, 1849; published simultaneously in London) 155; Society in America (1837), second edition (London: Saunders and Otley, 1839), iii, 110, 117; Edinburgh Review (American edition), 109 (April, 1859) 151-173; How to Observe Morals and Manners (New York: Harper, 1838; published simultaneously in London) 152, 155; Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), ii, 192; For Each and For All, Illustrations of Political Economy, op cit., 28; Daily News (October 21, 1856); Autobiography, ii, 419.

5. Daily News (March 25, 1859, December 9, 1859, December 1, 1852, and November 25, 1859) in which she proposed training schools for female clerks, book-keepers and secretaries; History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1849-50), i, 568.

6. Society in America, iii, 149; History, ii, 714; Household Education, 202; DN [Daily News] (July 9, 1863, February 18, 1864).

7. Matthew Arnold to H. M. (July 7, 1864), Martineau Papers 20 (University of Birmingham Library); DN (November 23, 1859, March 30, 1865), in which she reported the inclusion of the subject of girls' education in the agenda of the Schools Inquiry (Taunton) Commission. The Report is quoted in S. J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain (1948, Westport, Ct., 1971), 546 ff; Francis Newman to H. M. (March 20, 1862), Martineau Papers 698 (Birmingham); Anne Jemima Clough to H. M. (1852 to 1862, Fawcett Library, London); Lady Stanley to H. M. several letters (1872), Martineau Papers 855-866 (Birmingham).

8. DN (March 25, 1859); George Robinson, Marquess of Ripon to H. M. (May 10, 1870), Martineau Papers 276 (Birmingham); Copy of the summons Martineau Papers 1378 (Birmingham).

9. DN (July 5, 1854, February 16, 1856, April 2, 1856, January 13, 1857, March 25, 1859); Autobiography, i, 142; Society in America, iii, 118, 147, 148.

10. Edinburgh Review (Am. ed.), 109 (April, 1859); DN (February 18, 1864).

11. Society in America, iii, 151, 199-200; i, 202-204; Autobiography, i, 402. In Society in America, i, 199-207 Martineau discussed the question of women's “political non-existence”; in iii, 105-151 she studied the social, economic, occupational and marital position of the American woman; despite her many articles on women in the English press, especially in DN and ER [Edinburgh Review] she nowhere did as systematic a study of Englishwomen, as she did of their American counterparts in Society in America.

12. Autobiography, i, 399-402.

13. Autobiography, ii, 104; DN (February 29, 1856, March 26, 1856).

14. Autobiography, iii, 207, from her Diary of 1837 (references to the Diary in the Autobiography are the only evidences of its existence); Society in America, iii, 128-129; How to Observe Morals and Manners, 147, 151; History, i, 249 ff. See Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), chapter II.

15. DN (March 25, 1853, June 28, 1854, September 8, 1853); Autobiography, iii, 448-449.

16. DN (May 28, 1858).

17. History, ii, 86.

18. How to Observe Morals and Manners, 148-151, 154.

19. A. S. G. Butler, Portrait of Josephine Butler (1954), 59-60; DN (July 2, 1864); Glen Petrie, A Singular Iniquity (1971), 88; DN (December 28, December 29, December 30, 1869). Letters signed “An Englishwoman”.

20. H. M. to Maria Weston Chapman quoted in Autobiography, iii, 438; DN (December 31, 1869).

21. George Warr to H. M. (March 27, April 1, 1873), Martineau Papers 933, 934 (Birmingham); Sir John Richard Robinson to H. M. (May 22, 1871), Martineau Papers 758 (Birmingham). A. S. G. Butler comments on the Martineau-Butler correspondence op cit. 71; there are three letters from Butler to Martineau in the Birmingham University Library; the Butler Papers at the Fawcett Library were being edited when this research was done and were thus not available.

22. Household Education, 36; H. M. to James Martineau (August 18, 1826, August 22, 1826, December 2, 1826, May 14, 1827 [transcriptions—James originally transcribed his sister's letters in short-hand when she ordered them destroyed. R. K. Webb has done Martineau scholars a service in having James's short-hand transcription translated into long-hand. Both the short-hand and long-hand versions are in the Manchester College Library.]), James Martineau Papers 70, 71, 78, 82 (Manchester College, Oxford); Autobiography, i, 131-133; Weston Papers (Notes) MS. A.9.2, vol. 6, p. 4 (Boston Public Library); H. M. to Rev. William Ware (July 8, 1838), MS. Eng. 244 (1-16), (Boston Public Library).

23. Autobiography, i, 132; R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (1960), 51.

24. H. M. to Richard Monckton Milnes (April 21, [?1844]); and see Deerbrook, passim, 3 vols. (London: Moxon, 1839), in which passion is subordinated by duty.

25. W. L. Garrison to H. M. (December 4, 1853), Martineau Papers 349 (Birmingham).

26. Macready's Journal is quoted in Autobiography, iii, 196; Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred (1965), 181. R. S. Neale, Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), 143-168.