Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was born in Norwich England in 1802 into a well-respected bourgeois family, the sixth of eight children. The family was active in the Unitarian Church and her first writings were anonymous entries into the Unitarian periodical Monthly Repository, focusing on religious activity which she later expanded into a book in 1820. Martineau reported being miserable as a child and painted an unflattering portrait of her mother, describing her as a domestic “tyrant” with little interest in her children’s care and education. She attended a Unitarian girl’s school but was largely self-taught at home through reading and study (as women were barred from university attendance). She struggled with health issues through much of her life, losing her senses of smell and taste early and being nearly deaf much of her life. She never married, though she had a long relationship with Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s older brother). She was ill and largely housebound in the period from 1839 to 1844, where she wrote or started many of her most famous works. After recovering, she designed her house at Ambleside called “The Knoll” where she would spend the rest of her life. She died in 1876 of bronchitis.
Martineau was a prolific author and credited the failure of her family’s business with motivating her to support herself with her writing – no small achievement for a woman of her era. Her first works were short periodical pieces on religion and devotion, which built her reputation for clear and concise writing. Because of family connections to liberal circles, she was then commissioned to write an expository work on Adam Smith called Illustrations of Political Economy (1832). The work was wildly successful at popularizing Smith’s theory and the book sold well, which led to a set of books on similar topics covering liberal social and economic thinkers like J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In 1834 she took a two-year trip to the United States which formed the basis of Society in America (1837) and How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838), the former making substantive and theoretical points while the latter was focused on methodology. Society is largely a critique of America’s failure to live up to its own democratic principles. Where Tocqueville had paid little attention to women, Martineau emphasized the failure of the US to provide them with all rights of citizenship - including voting. Even more strikingly, Martineau called attention to the contradictions tolerating slavery posed to the allegedly free society of the US - and which would soon shape the Civil War. Particularly with regard to the rights of women and for slavery but also espouses a general theoretical vision that linked social understanding to naturalistic principles and a scientific approach to understanding society. Homebound with illness between 1839 and 1844, she wrote four novels, started her autobiography and wrote Life in the Sickroom, which has since been recognized as one of the first works to reverse the power dynamics of patient and caregiver in medical situations with a clear focus on self-reliance and determination. After recovering in 1844 she took a trip to the Middle East which informed her book Eastern Life, Present and Past which reflects on religious topics, taking a much more naturalist and secular turn than her earlier devotional works. In 1848 she wrote Household Education which advocated for improving women’s education, a topic she’ll return to again numerous times in over 1600 articles for the Daily News.
Martineau in her own day was clearly associated with a long and deep liberal strand in British politics (the so-called “Whiggish” tradition) that favored a limited monarchy, gradual democratization, free-market capitalism, and global markets. That tradition was suspicious of government involvement in economy and society and sought to unleash the entrepreneurial and democratic potential of the British people. She was a public proponent of these ideas about economics and social progress. Today, sociologists regard her as a forgotten founder in sociology (Giddens and Griffiths 2006), notable for her endorsement of comparative methods, her keen empirical insights, and her insistence on broadening the argument for social equality from white men to women and people of color. Although she was no social leveler, she consistently advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Very much in the Enlightenment tradition, she pushed for a scientific understanding of the social world in keeping with the progress being made in the natural sciences. Martineau was optimistic that liberal principles of social order would enable societies to make economic progress and advance equality.
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was born in 1860 to a middle-class family in Cedarville Illinois. Her father was a successful mill owner and local politician. Her mother died when she was two and Addams was close to her father, who wanted a good higher education for all his children. He sent Addams to Rockford Seminary where she graduated valedictorian of the class. Like many newly-educated women of the time, professional use of her education was limited and Addams felt this constraint deeply. She started medical school but health issues pushed that off, and had a nearly ten-year period of aimlessness searching for an outlet for her energy and intellect. During this time, she visited a London settlement house (social welfare agency) which sparked the idea of founding a similar institution back home. Along with Hellen Gates Starr, Addams co-founded Hull House in the new industrial metropolis of Chicago.
In many ways, Hull House became the practical muse behind much of Addams work and worldview. The settlement house movement aimed to provide a place for immigrants and the poor to work and live. The philosophy was one of embedded self-help: not providing services for others but working directly with them to build a vibrant community. Hull House was this and more – becoming a laboratory for many innovative social programs and projects, ranging from playgrounds for kids to a dedicated juvenile court. Hull House was co-educational and included projects and opportunities for men and women, but it was clearly women centered with a focus on “foregrounding women’s experiences, analysis and concerns.” (see Hamington 2019). Living and working in Hull House made clear to Addams the stark misfortunes and difficulties of poverty, racism, and sexism in America. Addams’ understanding of social institutions, programs and activism built directly from the experiences of the people living and working in Hull House.
The success of Hull House propelled Addams into the role of a popular public activist. She wrote numerous essays, visited politicians, and otherwise directly advocated for the needs of the poor and oppressed. She was active in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She was active in the Progressive Party and co-nominated Theodore Roosevelt. She was also a committed pacifist, which brought her considerable criticism once America entered World War I, though her steadfast support for nonviolence was ultimately recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Her grounded approach to finding solutions to everyday problems based on the lived experiences of those in need was complemented theoretically by her foundation in pragmatism and interactionist theory. She was a contemporary and collaborator with both John Dewey and George Herbert Mead and much of her work builds from these points of view. Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy founded in American that takes an embedded point of view on philosophical questions: what matters is not building rational or theoretical systems, but rather testing ideas against real situations in the world. John Dewey is a foundational thinker in this tradition. Dewey visited Hull House and had long-standing correspondence and interactions with Addams and their work built on each other’s projects and ideas. Addams had a close relationship with Mead and his wife, both parties frequently visiting each other and lecturing together. In 1916, Mead supported the University of Chicago giving Addams an honorary doctorate, though it was only conferred after her 1931 Nobel Prize. The notion of building insights from close observation of situations shows a clear linkage in their intellectual styles.
Addams realized that the great modern transformations linked to democracy and the market had left many behind. Liberalism with its focus on commerce, industry and civic life overlooked the world