Transcript SOC4044 Sociological Theory Harriet Martineau Dr. Ronald
SOC4044 Sociological Theory:
Harriet Martineau
Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 1
Harriet Martineau
References
Hill, M. R. (n. d.). Women in Sociology … Woolf, L. M. (n. d.). Women’s intellectual contributions to the study of mind and society: Harriet Martineau. Retrieved on August 11, 2002 from
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/martineau.html
Yates, G. G. (1985). Hjarriet Martineau on women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Retrieved on August 11, 2002 from
http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/INDEX.HTML#martineau
Zeitlin, I. M. (1997). therory (6 th Ideology and the development of sociological ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 2
Harriet Martineau
Pronounced “Martin’o’” 1802-1876 Born in Norwich, England Upper middle class family Textiles and Imported Wine Education Self study at home Exposure to male-only subjects Religion Unitarian Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 3
Harriet Martineau
Dealt with the problem of deafness throughout her life She took the risk of being a “single” female in a very male-dominated economic world. Her father died during the 1820’s and her fiancé had a mental and physical collapse…she decided to escape the confines of a Victorian marriage.
She remained single and independent the rest of her life.
By 1829, she had decided to commit herself to the writing profession. Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 4
Harriet Martineau
In 1834, Martineau began a two year study and visit of the United States. She reported her findings in Society in America Retrospect of Western Travel (1837) and (1838).
These empirical studies emerged at the same time as her foundational treatise on sociological data collection, Manners principles and methods of empirical social research. How to Observe Morals and (1938). This book articulated the Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 5
Harriet Martineau
Society in America
(1837) is her most widely known work to sociologists in the United States, addressing the issues of methodological strategy confronted with
ethnocentrism
. In this work she compared valued moral principles and observable social patterns, illustrating insightfully the distinctions between rhetoric and reality.
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Harriet Martineau
Her writings in
and Manners How to Observe Morals
(1838) offered a positivist solution to the correspondence problem between intersubjectivity, verifiable observables, and unobservable theoretical issues (Hill, n. d., p. 292). Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 7
Harriet Martineau
Although it was in vogue for Europeans to travel in the new republic and write about it, Martineau did more than simply describe her journey. She formulated a comparative method for studying societies and analyzed the new American culture by measuring it against carefully stated principles.
(Yates, 1985) Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 8
Harriet Martineau
Quite possibly, she wrote the first “methodological essay” ever published, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). Her greatest originality was in her method. Significantly, she translated and abbreviated Comte’s Positive Philosophy textbooks today.
Tuesday, April 28, , the wellspring of social scientific thought, so effectively that it spread the Comtean word far and wide and gave Martineau herself a new systematic framework in positivism.
Comte himself believed it was so good that he had it retranslated into French for his French disciples, and her translation and abridgement are still the standard edition of Comte’s work used in English sociology (Yates, 1985) 2020 Bolender 9
Harriet Martineau
IMPORTANT NOTE!!!
Before
Durkheim, Engels, Marx, Sumner or Weber… Martineau examined social class, religion, suicide, national character, domestic relations, women’s status, criminology, and interrelations between institutions and individuals.
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Harriet Martineau
In 1848, after her trip to the Mid-East and the publication of her work:
Eastern Life Past and Present
, Martineau openly embraced atheism. In 1851, Martineau translated Comte’s
Cours de philosphie positive
facilitating the introduction of positivism into American thought. into English, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 11
Harriet Martineau
There is no thorough bibliography of Martineau’s reviews and journal articles. During her life, she wrote over 1500 columns, undertook pioneering methodological studies in what is now called sociology. She was forgotten, in sociology, literature, history, and journalism due to the
MALE
academic system (Hill, n. d., pp. 294-295). Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 12
Harriet Martineau
Martineau’s politics included a thoroughgoing attention to women.
In 1869, she supported the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. It was to call for the repeal of a group of laws that gave sweeping authority to police allowing them to detain and examine women on
MERE
suspicion of prostitution as means to control the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea.
Englishwomen made the repeal of these laws a rallying focus for their first fully organized feminist operation.
(Yates, 1985) Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 13
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Example of Comparative Method and Analysis
Newspapers reporting of acts of violence against slaves VERSUS the rhetoric of morals and principles (Zeitlin, 1997, pp. 114-115) Even newspapers in free states made brief such acts.
neutral
references to terrible acts of violence for fear of reprisals against those reporting and commentary of Northern merchants’ and professionals’ fondness of the commercial relationships with Charleston, SC led to moral compromise regarding the slavery issue. Tuesday, April 28, © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith 2020 Bolender 14
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
By the time of Martineau’s visit to the United States, the indentured servitude of white immigrants had been abolished, and the introduction of any form of servitude had been prohibited in the Northern and Western regions of the country.
The institution of slavery was therefore confined to 13 Southern states that grew tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar.
The slave population numbered 2.5 million (Zeitlin, 1997) Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 15
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Martineau found that the sociology consequence of slavery had a
MAJOR significance of work
.
impact on the
moral
In the North, children learned to work early and were taught the dignity of labor. Youths worked hard not only for their daily bread, but also for their future. Whether they aspired to the liberal professions, to business, manufacturing, or farming, they had to provide for themselves. Typically, there was much manual labor in the country colleges, and many a successful man had spent his boyhood and youth doing the numerous, daily manual chores, without which their families could not have sustained themselves.
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Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
In the slave states, there were two classes, the servile and the imperious.
The fundamental, white moral value of the slave system was that children were indoctrinated with this view, so much so that they considered it a loss of honor to do the basic chores for themselves. •
labor is demeaning and disgraceful
Martineau heard utterances of the following kind: – – – “Do you think
I
“O, you must not touch the poker here.” “You must not do those things for yourself…it won’t do for a lady to do so.” shall work?
. Very young – “Poor thing! She has to teach: If she had come here, she might have married a rich man, perhaps.” – “Mamma has so much a year now, so we have not to do our work at home, or any trouble. ‘Tis such a comfort!’” Tuesday, April 28, © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith 2020 Bolender 17
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Tuesday, April 28, 2020 • • Children grow up pitying all the white folk who have to work and dreading the degraded status that a life of manual labor would bring upon them.
One result of this value system was to produce a degraded class among whites themselves, those who had come to be called “
mean whites
their hands. ,” signifying whites who worked with – – – Martineau aptly remarked in this regard that where there is a black servile class, whose color has become a stigma due to their servitude, two consequences are unavoidable: (a) those who have the color without the servitude are despised by the whites (such as free slaves in the North) (b) those who have the servitude without the color are despised by blacks (usually working whites in the South) © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 18
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
For Martineau, the primary characteristic of a slave system is injustice.
It is an illusion to suppose that there can be justice where a society is divided into two classes: • Those who command • Those who serve Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 19
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Where there is no justice, what other social virtues are possible?
• Martineau found that “
mercy
” was the social virtue that was available when there is no justice.
– The
affection
that slaveholders often showed for their slaves was a form of mercy, which the slaveholders mistakenly regarded as an
adequate substitute for justice
.
– Martineau’s informants often found it difficult to the gross fallacy of their outlook. She became weary of explaining that indulgence can never atone for injury: “that the extremest pampering, for a life-time, is no equivalent for rights withheld, no reparation for irreparable injustice.” Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 20
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Slavery had a corrupting and destructive influence on the slaveholder’s (planter’s) family. Every white master had his own harem; and since the law stipulated that the children of slaves were to follow the fortunes of the mother, there was the widespread practice of planters selling and bequeathing their own children.
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Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
The Quadroon girls of New Orleans, for instance, were brought up by their mothers to be what the white male masters had made of them: the mistresses of white gentlemen.
• The girls were educated to be refined, attractive, and accomplished; and every white young planter or wealthy merchant selected one and established her in one of those pretty and peculiar houses, whole rows of which could be seen in the city and its environs.
– The liaison would last for life or for several years. When the time came for the man to take a white wife, he apprised his Quadroon partner of the news she had dreaded, either by means of a letter transferring to her ownership of the house and furniture, or by a newspaper announcement of his marriage. Abandoned Quadroon ladies rarely formed a second relationship. Many committed suicide and many more died broken hearted.
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Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
– – Every Quadroon woman lived in hope that her partner would prove an exception, and remain loyal to her; and every white lady believed that her husband was an exception, who would take no mistress.
Fairly typical, then, was the state of affairs in which every white man had two sexual relationships, one of which had to be concealed, and two families, the existence of which had to be hidden from one another.
When the offspring of the planters’ black mistresses were boys, they were sent to France for illicit sexual purposes or sold on the slave market.
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Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Conjugal relations between white masters and black slave women were not uncommon on the plantations themselves. Female slaves were reared on certain estates where the object was to produce them for the slave market. This lead to a situation which prompted the wife of a planter to acknowledge bitterly that a planter’s wife was only “
the chief slave of the harem
.” • James Madison informed Martineau that the sexual practices in many Virginian plantations “stopped just short of destruction; and that it was understood that female slaves were to become mothers at fifteen.” Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 24
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Laws enacted to make the emancipation of slaves more difficult were a direct response to the widespread relations between white masters and their female slaves. The prevalence of such relations introduced a category of mulattos so numerous that if their white parents had been permitted, out of affection, to set them free, that would have made a dangerous breach in the slave system. The law therefore prohibited their emancipation while permitting their sale.
•
Martineau remarks that it was the very same planters who engaged in sexual relations with their female slaves and who sold their offspring to fill their purses, who falsely accused the Northern abolitionists of wanting to mix the races.
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Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
The slave system inevitable bred a mutual hatred between the planter and his slaves, a hatred that led to the perpetration of savage violence against them. During her stay in the United States, Matineau knew of the burning alive of four black men and other heinous crimes.
• For Martineau, the cause of such unspeakable crimes lay not only in the general oppressiveness of the system, but also in the sexual conduct of the masters. The black man’s resentment rose to a very high pitch at being deprived of his wife—at being sent out of the way so his master could take possession of her. Often, therefore, black men sought revenge in violent acts and thus became objects of vengeance in return and destined for a cruel fate.
– Martineau had no doubt that much of the blacks’ intense resentment flowed naturally from their subjection to toil and the lash, but she also recognized that the sexual exploitation of black women by white masters was the proximate cause of the mutual hatred between the planters and their slaves. Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 26
Harriet Martineau: Sociology of Slavery
Another example of an unconscious, self justification of the planters’ ways: A Southern lady owned a pretty mulatto girl whom she claimed she was very fond of. A young man came to visit and soon fell in love with the girl but was not allowed to court her. He went away disappointed, but returned weeks later saying he was so in love with the girl that he could not live without her. “I pitied the young man,” concluded the lady, “so I sold the girl to him for 1500 dollars.” Tuesday, April 28, 2020 © 2002-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender 27
Harriet Martineau: Political Condition of Women
It is a fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence that the government of the American republic derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. How then, Martineau asks, can the political condition of American women be reconciled with that principle? Government had the power to tax women who owned property, to divorce women from their husbands, and to fine, imprison, and even execute them for certain crimes. Why should women obey laws to which they have never given their consent?
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Harriet Martineau: Political Condition of Women
Martineau asks why women should be denied the authority to represent their own interests. It is a sure sign, she avers, that a soceity is lacking in justice when one-half rules the other on the cynical principle, “might is right.” Indeed, Martineau discerned certain parallels between the status of women and the status of slaves.
Women are given indulgence instead of justice.
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Harriet Martineau: Political Condition of Women
The emancipation of any class, Martineau averred, takes place primarily through the efforts of the individuals of that class; and so it would have to be with women too. Martineau confidently anticipated that as women gained consciousness of the many ways in which their sex is subordinated, they would come to exert a moral and political power strong enough to burst the bonds of their subjection.
Prophetic words!
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