Approaches to the Study of Harriet Martineau 1802-76
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Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Controversies and contradictions: approaches to the study of Harriet Martineau 1802-76 Thesis How to cite: Weiner, Gaby (1992). Controversies and contradictions: approaches to the study of Harriet Martineau 1802- 76. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 1992 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000e03a Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk 31 0107898 1 llllI I IIllII IIIll II Ill I I I llll U t.J -r,e. I C7L CONTROVERSIES AND CONTRADICTIONS: APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF HARRIET MARTINEAU 1802-76 GABY WEINER B.ED. M.A. THESIS SUBMITTED FOR EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY / SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, OPEN UNIVERSITY. SEPTEMBER 1991 sbM.ofl: I0,/*priL )°\Q Lz i.- r1112 EX 12 EIGRER DEGREES OFFICE LIBRARY AUTHORISATION FORM STUDENT: h lPJttlPhtf SERIAL NO:k 10 11 DEGREE: PD. TITLE OF ThESIS: i'a l f u4b.A, *Qt.t%7 I confirm that I am willing that my thesis be made available to readers and maybe photocopied, subject to the discretion of the Librarian. SIGNED: C9(, LJb-t. DATE: ,5qi NTPVERSIES NTRDICTIS: APPBOAC}S '10 THE STUDY ' HARRIET MARTINEALJ ABSTRACT This thesis is a reassessment of Harriet Martineau's place in feminist and mainstream scholarship. It focuses on Harriet Martineau, first, as a subject of research and, second, as an object of text. The importance of Harriet Martineau as a subject of research is explored through consideration of her social position as a nineteenth-century, female, unmarried, middle-class, writer, reformer and intellectual. Further, it is claimed that she provides one of the links between Enlightenment feminism and the nineteenth- century women's xtcvement in Britain, and that her prioritisation of economic and legal advances for women marks her out as an important feminist theorist. In particular her leaders on the condition of women in the Daily News merit wider attention. As an object of text, Harriet Martineau is investigated through the work of her biographers, ranging from her contemporaries to coimientaries written in the 1970s and 1980s. In examining Harriet Nartineau's writing and that of her biographers, opportunities are provided for the exploration of a range of issues within feminist theory and scholarship. These include questioning conventional notions of significance, the relationship between theory and methodology in feminist research, and the subjective reading of texts. IVERSIES P TRPDICTICtS: APPROACHES 'ID THE S'IJDY OF HARRIET MARTINEAU 1802-76 PAGE J. Acknowledgements Preface 1 Chapter 1: Why Revisit Harriet Martineau? 7 Chapter 2: Harriet Martineau: a Survey of her Work: 41 Political Economy 42 Education 51 Journalism 63 Sociology 75 Hi story 82 Autobiography 90 Literature 97 The 'Woman Question' 105 Chapter 3: A Survey of Coimientaries on Harriet Martineau' s 136 Life and Work. Chapter 4: Yet Another Biography!: Re-Presenting 202 Harriet Martineau Chapter 5: Feminist Scholarship in Biography and History: 241 Placing Harriet Nartineau Chapter 6: Conclusions 271 Bibliography: 1: Harriet Martineau's Quoted Works 281 2: General Quoted Works 284 rs This study has been part of my life for nearly a decade, and many people have sustained and supported me through it. I would like to give special thanks to the following people: Richard Aldrich, Madeleine Arnot, Miriam David, David Doughan, Felicity Edholrn, Judith Fewell, Morwenna Griffiths, David Hamilton, Lesley Holly, Donald MacKinnon, David Orsborne, Jenny Ozga, Margherita Rendel, Rosalind Russell, Dale Spender, Julia Swindefls, Lucy Townsend, Ruth Watts, Daniel Weiner, Saira Weiner, Philip Weiner, Margaret Williamson; to Open University students on U221: The Changing Experience of Women (1983-6) and E813: Gender and Education (1986- 91); to my colleagues at the Open University and South Bank Polytechnic; and to my history teacher at Dame Alice Owen's, Miss English. Gaby Weiner, London, September, 1991. -1- PREFP My interest in Harriet Martineau was initially stinulated by a request to rescue Harriet Martineau from obscurity. In 1981 the noted Australian feminist, Dale Spender, asked me to write a chapter on Harriet Martineau for her book Feminist Theorists. At the time, I had great problems in placing Harriet Martineau historically. Though clearly a woman of some note in the nineteenth century, I found little mention of her in medern texts on the nineteenth century, except in footnotes or anong lists of Victorian celebrities. Further, I found difficulty in placing her in relation to nineteenth-century politics, though she wrote widely on politics and economics; and difficulty in locating her within feminist history since she began writing three or four decades before the nineteenth. century women' s ivement began. When I finally began to comprehend the range of her talents and achievements, my fascination grew. Her autobiography, in particular, drew attention to her struggles to achieve economic independence and intellectual freedom. I therefore decided to continue my study of Harriet Martineau. Daring the 1980s, however, she has ceased to be invisible. Five volumes and fifteen or more journal articles or substantial pieces of writing about some or other aspect of her work appeared during that period. nd the Autobiography and novel Deerbrook were reprinted in paperback by Virago in 1983. Yet, as my study progressed, I began to appreciate the complexity of Harriet Martineau's life and work. Not -2- only was her writing occasionally contradictory, bit I also found it difficult to locate Harriet Martineau within some feminist discourses with which I identified. For these reasons, there seemed little point in producing another celebration of her life. Thus, I began to establish a different critical framework for my analysis of Harriet Nartineau, from which three analytic themes emerged. First, I developed an interest in how we construct significance. It became clear to me, for example, that R. K. Webb, one of Harriet Martineau's nost noted biographers, had a profoundly misogynist view of his subject's abilities, notivation and achievements. (3) This provided a marked contrast to nineteenth and twentieth century feminist evaluations of her work. (4) Yet both derived their accounts from virtually the same evidence and sources. Thus, the academic treatment of women appeared to illuminate the ideological perspectives of biographers, comnentators and historians, as well as those of their subjects. Second, my focus on women, such as Harriet Nartineau, as subjects of biography and history, was based on anger at the unjust treatment of women in Britain today. I wanted to explore the processes whereby women are subordinated to men, across classes, religions and cultures. What are the processes whereby women are excluded from positions of power and assigned to lower paid and lower status jobs? How is domestic ideology asseithled in such a way as to hold women -3- responsible for servicing men at home, at work and at leisure? Why does the public sphere still largely exclude women? How are these processes reflected in society and culture? How have these processes been reflected historically? Third, I was also interested in the influence of feminism and women's nvements on knowledge. How and why, for example, has women's or feminist history re-emerged as a discourse from the 1970s onwards? What is its relationship to mainstream history? Pursuing these issues led me into the extremely thorny and contentious debates about the objectives and meaning of biography and history, and their relationship to each other. I distinguish, in this thesis, between wanen's and feminist biography and history. The former constitute studies about women, which may not necessarily be concerned with redressing gender inequalities or incorporating a feminist understanding of the sources of women's oppression. Many of the works on Harriet Martineau which are quoted in this thesis come into this category. They take a woman, Harriet Martineau, as one of their primary foci - hence they constitute women's biography or history - yet, as I shall show, they are often profoundly sexist and anti-feminist. Feminist scholarship, on the other hand, has iicre self-conscious purposes: it is, arrong other things, a critique and the constrnction of a new intellectual position. In Levine's words, feminist scholarship aims: -4- To offer a critique of the inadequacies of the traditional categories of scholarship with its false claims to offer an invariably positivist neutrality and objectivity, and to begin the process of constructing an intellectual position which fully embraces the experiences of women. (Levine P., (1988), 'The History of Women', The Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 June) I decided to expand my investigation to include consideration of Harriet Martineau as a case-study of how women are treated by biographers and historians and. the role of textuality in this process. I compared my own evaluation of Harriet Martineau's work (largely based on her unpublished Daily NeWS leaders) with those of other biographers, ranging from her contemporaries to comnentaries written from the 1970s onwards. This, I anticipated, would enhance my understanding of recent developtients in feminist theory and hi. storiography. I also made a year-long detour to establish whether any parallels could be drawn between Harriet Martineau and her female contemporaries. In a survey of women born in Britain within ten years of Harriet Martineau' s birth, I identified 157 women with some degree of historic visibility. However, whilst this investigation cast some light on the life experiences of women living and.