Martineau, Harriet

(1802-76)

Harriet Martineau was effectively the first woman sociologist. Martineau, who was English, wrote the first systematic treatise in sociology, carried out numerous cross-national comparative studies of social institutions, and was the first to translate Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive into English. A professional and prolific writer, she popularized much social-scientific information by presenting it in the form of novels. Feminist, Unitarian, critic, social scientist, and atheist, she matched her activism about the issues of slavery and the ‘Woman Question’ to her arguments for equal political, economic, and social rights for women. She undertook many pioneering methodological, theoretical, and substantive studies in the field that would now be called sociology: the analysis of women's rights, biography, disability, education, slavery, history, manufacturing, occupational health, and religion all came within her gamut.

One of her best-known works. Society in America (1837), compared American moral principles with observable social patterns, and outlined a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. Martineau's How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) is arguably the first systematic methodological treatise in sociology, in which she outlined a positivist solution to the dilemma of reconciling intersubjectively verifiable and observable data with unobservable theoretical entities. She tackled the classic methodological problems of bias, sampling, generalization, corroboration, and interviews, as well as outlining studies of major social institutions such as family, education, religion, markets, and culture. Long before Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, Martineau also studied and wrote about social class, suicide, forms of religions, domestic relations, delinquency, and the status of women. Her neglect by sociologists in subsequent years is therefore often cited as an illustration of the ways in which academic sociology has until more recently excluded women sociologists from its agenda.