Harriet Martineau
There are several women who might compete with Harriet Martineau for the title of the first woman sociologist in the 19th century, including Catherine Macauley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Flora Tristan, and Beatrice Webb, but Martineau's specific sociological credentials are strong. She was for a long time known primarily for her English translation of Comte's Course in Positive Philosophy.
However, she also produced a corpus of her own work in the vein of the great social reform movements of the 19th century and added a woman's perspective to the discussion of society that was severely lacking at the time.
The fact that she was able to support herself as the first female writer in Britain to publish under her own name after becoming destitute at the age of 24 due to the deaths of her father, brother, and fiancé was a credit to her ability. She had serious hearing loss starting at age 12 and needed to wear a big ear trumpet to talk. In 1832, she wowed a large audience with a collection of writings on political economy.
She left England in 1834 to spend two years researching the newly formed institutions of the United States, including its jails, asylums for the crazy, factories, farms, Southern plantations, universities, hospitals, and churches. She collaborated with abolitionists on the social reform of slavery and published Society in America based on her considerable research, interviews, and observations. (Zeitlin 1997). She also fought for social change for women's rights, including their equal access to school, employment opportunities, and the law. She collaborated with Florence Nightingale on the establishment of public health care, which resulted in the first iterations of the British welfare system. (McDonald 1998).
Her early work on sociological technique, How to Observe Manners and Morals, was very inventive. (1838). She laid the foundation for a methodical social-scientific approach to examining human conduct in this volume. She understood that a social science, as opposed to a natural science, would require a different approach to dealing with challenges relating to the researcher/subject interaction. For the research to be considered valid, the observer, or "traveler," had to adhere to three standards: objectivity, criticism, and sympathy.
The unbiased observer could not let herself be "perplexed or disgusted" by foreign customs she could not personally reconcile with. She yet believed that sociology should aim to provide a fair but critical appraisal of a culture's moral standing. In particular, sociology sought to defend every person's right to be a "self-directing moral being" by opposing various forms of racial, sexual, or class dominance. The researcher had to have unequivocal compassion for the subjects being researched, which separated the science of social observation from the natural sciences. (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007).
She spent a significant amount of time in the United States analyzing the instances where moral practices and public pronouncements conflict. She was particularly interested in how the legal democratic right to free speech allowed abolitionists to hold public gatherings, but when the gatherings were physically attacked by crowds, it was the abolitionists who were blamed for encouraging the violence rather than the mobs. (Zeitlin 1997). The contrast she made between manners—the real patterns of social conduct and association in society—and morals—society's collective conceptions of authorized and banned behavior—led to her emphasis on examining paradoxes.
As she realized the difficulty in getting an accurate representation of an entire society based on a limited number of interviews, she developed the idea that one could identify key “Things” experienced by all people—age, gender, illness, death, etc.—and examine how they were experienced differently by a sample of people from different walks of life (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007). Martineau’s sociology, therefore, focused on surveying different attitudes toward “Things” and studying the anomalies that emerged when manners toward them contradicted a society’s formal morals.
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