Harriet Martineau was born in in Norwich, England. She was the sixth of eight children born to Elizabeth Rankin and Thomas Martineau. Thomas owned a textile mill, and Elizabeth was the daughter of a sugar refiner and grocer, making the family economically stable and wealthier than most British families at the time.
They were practicing Unitarians and instilled the importance of education and critical thinking in all of their children. However, Elizabeth was also a strict believer in traditional gender roles , so while the Martineau boys went to college, the girls did not and were expected to learn domestic work instead. This would prove to be a formative life experience for Harriet, who bucked all traditional gender expectations and wrote extensively about gender inequality.
Martineau was a voracious reader from a young age, was well read in Thomas Malthus by the time she was 15, and had already become a political economist at that age, by her own recollection. This piece was a critique of her own educational experience and how it was formally stopped when she reached adulthood.
She wrote for the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian publication, and published her first commissioned volume, Illustrations of Political Economy, funded by publisher Charles Fox, in These illustrations were a monthly series that ran for two years, in which Martineau critiqued the politics and economic practices of the day by presenting illustrated tellings of the ideas of Malthus, John Stuart Mill , David Ricardo , and Adam Smith.
The series was designed as a tutorial for the general reading audience. Martineau won prizes for some of her essays, and the series sold more copies than did the work of Dickens at the time. Martineau argued that tariffs in early American society only benefited the rich and hurt the working classes both in the U. She also advocated for the Whig Poor Law reforms, which shifted assistance to the British poor from cash donations to the workhouse model. In her early years as a writer, she advocated for free market economic principles in keeping with the philosophy of Adam Smith.
Later in her career, however, she advocated for government action to stem inequality and injustice, and is remembered by some as a social reformer due to her belief in the progressive evolution of society.
Martineau broke with Unitarianism in and adopted the philosophical position of freethinking, whose adherents seek truth based on reason, logic, and empiricism, rather the dictates of authority figures, tradition, or religious dogma. This shift resonates with her reverence for August Comte's positivistic sociology and her belief in progress. From there she continued to write her political economy series until When the series was completed, Martineau traveled to the U.
While there, she became acquainted with Transcendentalists and abolitionists , and with those involved in education for girls and woman.
Intern With Us. References Chadda, G. Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai. Hamlin, J. Harriet Martineau: Morals and Manners.
Hill, M. Harriet Martineau — I enjoy looking on, and seeing our world under the operation of a law of progress. I cannot conceive the absence of a First Cause. For Harriet, a loving God was a substitute to overpowering parents and elder brothers and yet, her yearning for love and justice was left unsatisfied by the sermons she heard at the Octagon Unitarian Chapel in Norwich, which nourished a sense of frustration leading her to question the Unitarian message:.
My passion for justice was baulked there, as much as anywhere. The duties preached were those of inferiors to superiors, while the per contra was not insisted on with any equality of treatment at all.
I, The circumscriptions of the English Unitarianism of that period were thus met by so strong a counter-acting force as to make them an unmingled benefit. She was not, indeed, one that could be imprisoned in the ordinary Sunday-school routine of its Scripture commentaries, Gospel harmonies, sacred geographies, or Biblical lessons; but all these were fused by her active mind to a sort of basis on which her devotional feelings and her poetical conceptions, alternately wrought; and where by means of scientific investigation and philosophical study she was continually adding, rejecting, and rectifying as years went on.
III, Even though free will was denied in the necessarian doctrine, it admitted that each individual was fully responsible for his decisions. This doctrine allowed Martineau to combine her Unitarian faith with a rational foundation from which to judge human acts. Both Hartley and Priestley had forged the discipline of Mental Philosophy based on the premise that body and mind were interrelated, external impressions determining motives through associations.
For Priestley, whose scientific achievements bolstered his role as a leader of Unitarianism, physiological psychology and the Scriptures were mutually enlightening, and he advised that the two be studied concurrently by rational Christians. There she fell under the influence of the sermons preached by the Reverend Lant Carpenter whom she then regarded with passionate devotion.
This admiration she was later to deny when, in —55, she was writing her Autobiography , looking back on the years she had lived with her Unitarian faith to guide her. She had by then renounced her faith, which makes it difficult to consider her reminiscences of her religious mentor as being objective. The frustration she was under for having adhered to a faith whose doctrine she renounced as untenable certainly explains the highly critical terms with which she describes Carpenter:.
There was a great furor among the Bristol Unitarians at that time about Dr Carpenter who had recently become their pastor. He was a very devoted Minister and a very earnest pietist: superficial in his knowledge, scanty in ability, narrow in his conceptions, and thoroughly priestly in his temper.
He was exactly the dissenter minister to be worshipped by his people, and especially by the young and to be spoiled by that worship. He was worshipped by the young, and by none more than by me; and his power was unbounded while his pupils continued young: but, as his instructions and his scholars were not bound together by any bond of essential Christian doctrine, every thing fell to pieces as soon as the merely personal influence was withdrawn.
As for me, his devout and devoted Catechumen, he made me desperately superstitious,—living wholly in and for religion and fiercely fanatical about it. A denomination of practical philosophers at once idealistic and scientific in the gradual perfectibility of man through rational reform with a rigorously intellectual approach to the examination of factual evidence. They were given to investigation of everything, from biblical miracles to the inequities in contemporary society.
Dedicated to freedom, intellectual and political, they were vigorously individualistic, yet forever concerned with the good of the whole. They were temperamentally radical and devoted to education as the vehicle of social change. My life has been whatever else a very busy one; and this conviction, of the invariable action of fixed laws, has certainly been the main spring of my activity. When it is considered that, according the Necessarian doctrine, no action fails to produce effects, and no effort can be lost, there seems every reason for the conclusion which I have no doubt is the fact, that true Necessarians must be the most diligent and confident of all workers.
I, — The period of her early womanhood, from to , was devoted to the writing of essays, book reviews, tales, and poetry occasionally, all published in the Unitarian periodical The Monthly Repository and later published in Boston for her American readers under the title of Miscellanies She had by that time become internationally known as the author of Illustrations of Political Economy — It was her brother James who encouraged her to submit her first text to the Unitarian magazine.
Martineau introduced feminist sociological perspectives in her writing and addressed overlooked issues such as marriage, children, domestic life, religious life, and race relations. Her translation so dramatically improved the work that Comte himself suggested his students read her translations rather than his original work. Her goal was to popularize and illustrate the principles of laissez faire capitalism, though she made no claim to original theorizing.
Her ideas in this field were set out in her book, How to Observe Morals and Manners.
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