Harriet Martineau

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

Michael R. Hill, Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Michael R. Hill, Susan Hoecker-Drysdale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780815334514
• eBook ISBN: 9781317954118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Essays in this volume explore the work of Harriet Martineau from a sociological perspective, highlighting her theoretical contributions in the areas of the sociology of labor, gender and political economy. The contributors each offer a contextual, theoretical and methodological assessment of her work beginning with the opportunities and challenges of utilizing Martineau pedagogically in the sociology classroom.

CHAPTER ONE
Taking Harriet Martineau Seriously in the Classroom and Beyond

Michael R. Hill
Susan Hoecker-Drysdale

THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS BOOK, SOCIOLOGISTS ALL, TAKE HARRIET Martineau seriously as a major and consequential intellect within their chosen discipline and their classrooms. It has not always been so, at least in recent times, but Martineau has now been rediscovered by sociologists who are writing about Martineau in a growing series of books, essays, and scholarly editions. We do not all see Martineau through the same "author spectacles," as the following contributions make evident, but we do see her—she is no longer "invisible" to those of our students and colleagues who possess a modicum of bibliographic savvy. At several points in this book, readers are presented with contextual background and biographical details about Martineau, information that is useful and necessary for readers who are still new to Martineau's work, but it warrants notice that the time for penning generic introductory synopses of Martineau and her accomplishments is drawing to a close—several sociological introductions are readily available and are cited among the references at the end of this book. Along this line, although uncited in the present bibliography, a growing number of introductory sociology textbooks now make at least passing reference to Martineau (Hill 1998). Harriet Martineau has arrived on the doorstep of the twenty-first century sociological scene, and it is high time that the discipline's scholars, thinkers, and theoreticians take her seriously.

Giving Martineau her due is no minor matter and no small challenge. The eventual consequences for a discipline long socialized to honor only white western males as its revered founders are, of course, unpredictable. Chagrin? Embarrassment? Disbelief? Willful ignorance? These certainly are possibilities, but we hope here for understanding, enlightenment, and reflexivity—our sociological colleagues are, after all, scholars and intellectuals who profess tolerance and openness to new perspectives. The shape of sociological thought changes and grows in novel and unexpected ways when women's previously unheralded contributions to the discipline are acknowledged in literature reviews, incorporated in texts, included in lectures, and added to graduate reading lists (see for example the perspective adopted in Joe R. Feagin's (forthcoming) 2000 presidential address to the American Sociological Association). This is especially vital in Martineau's case. Two hundred years after her birth, Martineau's work remains intellectually vibrant, astutely critical, and deeply concerned with myriad substantive issues that still engage many of today's sociologists around the world.

Taking Martineau seriously demands more than honorific mention in introductory textbooks—no matter how salutatory it is to add such a remarkable "heroine" to the discipline's traditionally male-dominated founding pantheon. Martineau's work demands far more than a genteel tip of the hat. The contributors to this volume wrestle with the implications of Martineau's ideas for sociology today in the same way that disciplinary arbiters have for decades supported and argued for the continuing relevance of Emile Durkhem, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and other male theorists. Given the sheer magnitude of Martineau's published corpus, this is a daunting task and is only just now underway. Despite years of reading, writing, and thinking about Martineau's ideas, none of the contributors to this book claim a comprehensive grasp of Martineau's work as a whole, but each finds sociological gold—and the prospect of further rich discoveries—among the literally thousands of Martineau's writings. The conceptual potential is astonishing: new vocabularies, new precedents, new systems of relevance, new models of engaged sociological practice—all flow in torrents from Martineau's pen. This book offers a preview, a first effort toward what, of necessity, must be the long-term project of taking Martineau seriously. We invite your participation, your critiques, and encourage your own explorations and extensions of Martineau's work and ideas—and we are confident that Martineau herself would likewise welcome you to this exciting and progressive enterprise, not because she sought the limelight, but because she believed so deeply in the positive social results of cooperative rational industry.

Because we contend pointedly—as have others—that it is high time to take Harriet Martineau seriously within the discipline of sociology, the present volume provides several worked examples illustrating how to begin the project of giving Martineau her due: pedagogically, contextually, theoretically, and methodologically. In this chapter, we examine the opportunities and challenges of utilizing Martineau pedagogically in the sociology classroom, in introductory courses and across the broad spectrum of substantive interests that comprises sociology today. In the chapters that follow, Pat Duffy Hutcheon shows how to locate Martineau historically and intellectually within the social and religious movement called Unitarianism, providing a model for future explications of Martineau's location within other influential nineteenth-century movements of thought. Lynn McDonald approaches Martineau through the eyes of another major nineteenth-century figure, Florence Nightingale, and reminds us that our assessments of Martineau's centrality depend, in part, on the disciplinary spectacles one wears and values. Hoecker-Drysdale discusses Martineau's links with Auguste Comte, long acknowledged as one of the discipline's early male founders. Lengermann and Niebrugge favorably compare Martineau to Emile Durkheim, and Hill draws sharp methodological contrasts between Alexis de Tocqueville and Martineau. Beyond these contextual, theoretical, and methodological assessments, Martineau's continuing substantive relevance for special sociological work is also extraordinarily wide. In relation to the sociology of work and occupations, for example, Hoecker-Drysdale's two-part essay, "Words on Work," explores the complexity and sophistication of Martineau's analyses of human labor. Mary Jo Deegan, taking a very different tack, demonstrates Martineau's critical relevance for the sociology of physical disability. In sum, and in varied ways, all of the contributors to this volume provide sociological exemplars of how to take Martineau seriously.

In the remainder of this chapter, we draft the pedagogical dimensions of Martineau's biography, accomplishments, and ideas in sociology classrooms. Readers unfamiliar with Martineau's work will find the following material useful as a resource for introducing Martineau to students and also as an orientation for the substantive chapters below. From this perspective, the substantive chapters easily perform a double duty. Not only do they stand as independent scholarly explorations in their own right, but, when utilized selectively, they make excellent reading assignments in college courses, for example, in the sociology of religion, the sociology of work and occupations, sociological theory, health and disability studies, sociological methodology, social movements, and the sociology of women, to emphasize the most obvious pedagogical applications. We fully expect that—when more scholars in additional specialties begin taking Martineau seriously—the list from which to choose relevant course readings will become ever more expansive.

Biography and Critique

Biographical Sketch

To the extent that any complex institutional phenomenon such as sociology can have identifiable founders, Alice Rossi (1973: 118-24) justly celebrated Harriet Martineau as "the first woman sociologist." Martineau's life is a remarkable example of sociological invention, growth and insight. Harriet, born in 1802, was the sixth of eight children in a middle-class English family. Her younger brother, James, became a well-known cleric (Jackson 1901). Her father's occupation as a manufacturer placed Harriet in comfortable surroundings, but her childhood was marred by strong feelings of fearfulness and self-doubt. She was, nonetheless, intellectually industrious and applied herself to both secular and religious studies. With the exception of two years in private, coeducational classes and a year in a boarding school for girls, she was educated largely at home by siblings and by hired tutors. Through self-study, Martineau rigorously augmented her early exposure to subjects routinely taught only to males. Education was important in the Martineau family and Harriet was both immersed and self-immersed in the classics, languages (Greek, Latin, Italian, French—she later taught herself German), literature, history, composition, mathematics, religious studies, and later as an adolescent expanded her studies in music, modern literature, philosophy, poetry and languages. Women were barred from university study, but Martineau maintained a regimen of intense, self-directed investigation throughout her life. Troubled by increasing deafness as a youth, Martineau required an ear trumpet during adulthood.

The Martineau family suffered severe economic losses in the 1820s, as well as the death of Harriet's father—and Harriet was left to her own resources. While Harriet faced the exigencies of earning her living in a patriarchal society, she wrote, "I began to feel the blessing of a wholly new freedom" (Martineau 1877b, I: 108). Martineau escaped the confines of middle-class Victorian marriage when her fiance unexpectedly died. She was happily single and independent for the remainder of her life. She successfully supported herself as an author in a variety of genres, including: essays, tracts, reviews, novels, travelogues, biographies, how-to manuals, journal articles, newspaper columns, histories, children's stories, and sociologically-informed nonfiction.

Martineau's intellectual life is a chronicle of scholarly maturation and deepening sociological insight. Raised as a devout Unitarian, Martineau's first literary efforts were fervently religious (see Pat Duffy Hutcheon's chapter, this volume). Adoption of "Necessarianism" provided her with an intellectual bridge to a social scientific perspective, and the theoretical framework in her twenty-five volume Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4) signaled her eventual departure from ecclesiastical dogma (see especially volume twenty-five, The Moral of Many Fables). In the Illustrations, she employed fiction to explicate the principles of the new science of political economy, and the results met with popular success. The Illustrations marked her entry into English literary society and set her on the road to financial independence.

In 1834, Martineau began a two-year study tour of the United States (see Hill's chapter on Martineau and Tocqueville, this volume; Bullock 1992). She reported her observations in Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838a). These empirical studies emerged hand-in-hand with her foundational treatise on sociological data collection. How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838b) insightfully articulated the principles and methods of empirical social research (see Patricia Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge's chapter, this volume; Hill 1989). This period marked Martineau's achievement of a mature and incisive sociological imagination.

In subsequent years, Martineau refined her metatheoretical orientation, and moved even farther from her Unitarian upbringing. Following a trip to the Middle East, reported in Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), she openly embraced atheism in Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development (Atkinson and Martineau 1851). In 1851, she began an English translation/condensation of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophic positive. The introduction of positivist sociological ideas into the United States was greatly facilitated by Martineau's momentous rendition of Comte's (1853) most influential sociological work (see Hoecker-Drysdale's chapter on Comte, this volume).

By choice, Martineau's later years unfolded not in London, but in the Lake District where she built a house at Ambleside. She redeemed her mortgage with royalties from the controversial book with Atkinson. The beauty and peacefulness of the Lake District stand in strong contrast to the years of personal trial, illness, exhaustion, deafness, and social and literary controversy that confronted Martineau throughout much of her life. At various points, her intellectual circle included: Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale (see Lynn McDonald's chapter, this volume), Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, among many others.

For Martineau (1877, I: 143), her profession was a Weberian calling:

Authorship has never been for me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it. Things were pressing to be said; and there was more or less evidence that I was the person to say them.

Martineau, like all significant sociological theorists, gave life and direction to vital intellectual questions with insight, originality, and a deep sense of personal and social mission. Harriet Martineau died at seventy-four years of age, in 1876.

Sociological Critique

It is no easy task to provide a sociological critique of Martineau's published writings. Most readers new to her work are stunned to learn of the sheer mass and scope of her writings. Joseph Rivlin's (1947) comprehensive bibliography lists dozens of separately published books. The 3,479 pages of the Illustrations of Political Economy alone were originally published in twenty-five separate installments, of which the last, The Moral of Many Fables, was a systematically arranged compendium of theoretical principles. Martineau was equally prolific as a contributor to periodical journals and newspapers. There is yet no thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of Martineau's reviews and journal articles. Several early articles were reprinted in her Miscellanies (1836c) and a selection of later articles appeared in her Health, Husbandry and Handicraft (1861). Additional articles are discovered whenever scholars scour Victorian-era periodicals. As a sociologically-astute journalist, Martineau wrote more than 1,500 newspaper columns, of which only a few have been reprinted (Webb 1959; Arbuckle 1994; Martineau 1994). In sum, Martineau's written corpus is a massive reservoir of astute sociological insight awaiting modern sociological critique and extension.

Martineau undertook pioneering studies—-substantive, theoretical, and methodological investigations—in what is now called sociology. She was an ardent Unitarian, abolitionist, critic, feminist, social scientist, and avowed atheist. Her writing included such topics as: social theory, biography, disability, education, history, husbandry, legislation, manufacturing, mesmerism, work and occupations, occupational health, philosophy, political economy, religion, research techniques, slavery, sociology, travel, and women's rights.

Of Martineau's numerous works, her three-volume Society in America (1837) is the most widely known to sociologists in the United States. Her methodological strategy confronted the problem of ethnocentrism. Rather than compare the United States to England, she identified the moral principles to which Americans claimed allegiance, and compared them to observable social patterns—a methodologically insightful distinction between rhetoric and reality. Martineau documented a wide chasm between extant institutional patterns and the values of democracy, justice, equality, and freedom that Americans claimed to cherish. Beyond Society in America (typically read only in the abridged version), however, Martineau's other economic, political, and historical studies remain largely uncited by sociologists. Her substantive, systematic observations of society are directly relevant to historical and comparative sociologists who explicate the complexities of Victorian England and nineteenth-century life. Her theoretical and methodological insights remain as bright, lively, and cogent as any penned by her more widely acknowledged male co-founders of sociology.

In How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838b), Martineau provided the first-known systematic methodological treatise in sociology. It is a theoretically sophisticated, yet practical, guide to sociological observation. Metatheoretically, she offered the classic positivist solution to the correspondence problem between intersubjectively verifiable observables and unobservable theoretical entities. Confronting the problem of studying a society as a whole, she creatively attacked problems of bias, generalization, samples, reactivity, interviews, corroboration, and data recording techniques. She outlined studies of the major social institutions, including: religion, education, family, fine arts and popular culture, markets and economy, prisons, government, and philanthropy. How To Observe is also a precedent-setting work of theory. Before Karl Marx, and decades before Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Martineau sociologically examined social class, forms of religion, types of suicide, national character, domestic relations and the status of women, delinquency and criminology, and the intricate interrelationships between repressive social institutions and the individual (Hill 1989).

Thematic study of Martineau's extensive corpus provides a wealth of untapped opportunities for moder...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Taking Harriet Martineau Seriously in the Classroom and Beyond
• CHAPTER TWO Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian Connection
• CHAPTER THREE Making Lemonade: Harriet Martineau on Being Deaf
• CHAPTER FOUR A Methodological Comparison of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1837) and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-1840)
• CHAPTER FIVE The Meaning of “Things”: Theory and Method in Harriet Martineau’s How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) and Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
• CHAPTER SIX "Words on Work": Harriet Martineau's Sociology of Work and Occupations—Part I: Her Theory of Work
• CHAPTER SEVEN "Words on Work": Harriet Martineau's Sociology of Work and Occupations—Part II: Her Empirical Investigations
• CHAPTER EIGHT The Florence Nightingale-Harriet Martineau Collaboration
• CHAPTER NINE Harriet Martineau and the Positivism of Auguste Comte
• EPILOGUE Martineauian Sociology and our Disciplinary Future
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index