Harriet Martineau (1802-1874), the "founding mother of sociology", was the daughter of an English textile manufacturer who lost his business during a depression in 1825 and died in 1826. Martineau supported herself, her mother, a crippled sister, and alcoholic brother by writing. Her publications include thousands of articles and many books.
Martineau was painfully aware of the discrepancies in opportunities for males and females. For example, she was not given the education afforded her brothers. In 1823 she published her first article On Female Education for the Unitarian Journal which began her career as an outspoken critic of injustices against women, slaves, children, mentally ill, the poor, and prostitutes. She studied stratification in Europe and the United States and advocated protective legislation, equal rights, and education including medical education for women. Her other credits included a popular thirty-four book series published 1832-1834 Illustrations of Political Economy, a scholarly History of England, and a study of major world religions called Eastern Life.
Included in Martineau's many contributions to sociology is her translation of Auguste Comte's Les Cours de Philosophie Positive from French to English. This four-volume set outlined the theoretical foundation for sociology. Her condensation was so clear that the normally reticent Comte had her version translated back to French, substituting it for his own in the Positivist Library. Comte's admonition that society should be studied objectively led Martineau to write the first book of social research methodology How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838). In this text she advocated development of theoretical framework, research questions, objectivity, and representative sampling.
Martineau was vilified in her time and subsequently ignored by many historians because of her blunt exposure of inequality. In contrast to de Tocqueville's 1835 Democracy in America, Martineau's book Society in America published in 1837, was incisively critical of America's failure to realize the full potential of citizen empowerment in democracy. In the chapter "The Political Non-existence of Women," she argues that women were indulged instead of treated equally, bolstering her claim that they were treated like slaves. She felt that the system of slavery in the South led to inherent social decay because the power of white males as property owners often led to potential harems composed of all slave women over the age of fifteen. The owner could father slave children then sell them for profit while his unsuspecting wife served merely as "an ornament in her husband's house." Planters' wives were kept from intellectual pursuits by lack of exposure to appopriate conversation, men choosing instead to patronize women and ignore that intellectual capabilities. In the meantime, horrible atrocities occurred on the plantations (such as the burning alive of four male slaves) during Martineau's thirteen-month tour of America. She also wrote that American women were trained "to consider marriage the sole object in life," but in marriage they were expected to be subservient and dependent. In religion they were "expected to be pious but not educated in philosophy, politics, or morals so as to prevent anything more than passive participation."
Martineau is identified with the American Transcendentalist movement despite her English roots. In the United States, she was associated with Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and in England with utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Study of her contributions continues through Martineau societies in England and in the United States.
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