Harriet Martineau

Who was Harriet Martineau?

Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist.

Martineau wrote only one book but multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and, perhaps most controversial, sexual identity, a feminine perspective; she also translated various works from Auguste Comte. She earned enough to be supported entirely by her writing, a challenging feat for a woman in the Victorian era. Martineau has said of her approach: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand woman's status under men.

The novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician she [Martineau] was less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation." While she was commonly described as having a masculine intellect and body, Martineau introduced feminist sociological perspectives in her writing on otherwise overlooked issues such as marriage, children, domestic and religious life, and race relations.

Famous Quotes:

• Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
• For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
• Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
• What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?
• Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.
• If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
• But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
• The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.
• Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.
• Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.