Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was one of the first women sociologists in the 19th
century. There are a number of other women who might compete with her for the
title of the first woman sociologist, such as Catherine Macauley, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Flora Tristan, and Beatrice Webb, but Martineau’s specifically
sociological credentials are strong. She was for a long time known principally for
her English translation of Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy. Through this
popular translation she introduced the concept of sociology as a methodologically
rigorous discipline to an English-speaking audience. But she also created a body of
her own work in the tradition of the great social reform movements of the 19th
century and introduced a sorely missing woman’s perspective into the discourse on
society.
It was a testament to her abilities that after she became impoverished at the age of
24 with the death of her father, brother, and fiancé, she was able to earn her own
income as the first woman journalist in Britain to write under her own name. From
the age of 12, she suffered from severe hearing loss and was obliged to use a large
ear trumpet to converse. She impressed a wide audience with a series of articles on
political economy in 1832. In 1834 she left England to engage in two years of study
of the new republic of the United States and its emerging institutions: prisons, insane
asylums, factories, farms, Southern plantations, universities, hospitals, and
churches. On the basis of extensive research, interviews and observations, she
published Society in America and worked with abolitionists on the social reform of
slavery (Zeitlin 1997). She also worked for social reform in the situation of women:
the right to vote, have an education, pursue an occupation, and enjoy the same legal
rights as men. Together with Florence Nightingale, she worked on the development
of public health care, which led to early formulations of the welfare system in Britain
(McDonald 1998).
Particularly innovative was her early work on sociological methodology, How to
Observe Manners and Morals (1838). In this volume she developed the ground work
for a systematic social-scientific approach to studying human behavior. She
recognized that the issues of the researcher/subject relationship would have to be
addressed differently in a social, as opposed to a natural, science. The observer, or
“traveler,” as she put it, needed to respect three criteria to obtain valid research:
impartiality, critique, and sympathy. The impartial observer could not allow herself
to be “perplexed or disgusted” by foreign practices that she could not personally
reconcile herself with. Yet at the same time she saw the goal of sociology to be the
fair but critical assessment of the moral status of a culture. In particular, the goal of
sociology was to challenge forms of racial, sexual, or class domination in the name
of autonomy: the right of every person to be a “self-directing moral being.” Finally,
what distinguished the science of social observation from the natural sciences was
that the researcher had to have unqualified sympathy for the subjects being studied
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