Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355 – 366

www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Assembling Harriet Martineau's gender and health jigsaw

Ellen Annandale
Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

Synopsis

Harriet Martineau maintained that health and the position of women were unfailing indicators of the underlying morals of
nineteenth-century English society. However the connections between health and gender are underdeveloped in her work. Although
we need to be wary of creating a neat feminist ‘gender and health jigsaw’ out of apparently unrelated pieces, I argue that a picture
of this relationship is there to be developed. It suggests an alternative to the conventionally identified disembodied origins of
sociology that were embodied from the start, but rendered invisible by male dominance of the intellectual agenda. The first piece of
the jigsaw is Martineau's argument that women's health is socially, rather than biologically (or naturally) caused. The second is an
awareness that illness throws the mind/body relationship into sharp relief. Joined together, these two pieces trouble the
conventional association of health with ‘men, the mind, the social’ and illness with ‘women, the body, the natural’. This enables
Martineau effectively to turn the subject of illness – arguably the quintessence of female oppression – into a medium of challenge
to patriarchy a century or so before it became accepted practice within medical sociology and feminism.
© 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction mind/body, reason/emotion, and by extension health/

It is widely maintained that the legacy of philosophical
dualism in western philosophy actively inhibited the
development of an embodied health sociology. The belief
of sociology's nineteenth-century ‘founding fathers’ that
social interaction – the principle object of enquiry – could
never be reduced to biology or to physiology is understood
to have produced a heavy emphasis on the social
consequences of health and illness and to have fostered a
disembodied sociology during the twentieth century.
Accordingly, Turner (1996:61) maintains that, ‘the
legitimate rejection of biological determinism in favour
of sociological determinism entailed…the exclusion of the
body from the sociological imagination’.
Throughout history, patriarchy's successive assaults on
the minds and bodies of women have depended on
reducing them to a powerful, potentially dangerous, but
typically base, nature. Dualisms such as, social/natural,
0277-5395/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2007.05.006
illness, have sanctioned patriarchy by permitting men to
equate themselves with the positive and socially valued (the
social–mind–reason–health) and women with the negative
and devalued (the natural–body–emotion–illness). Male
theorists such as Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917) cultivated mind/body dualism
through male/female distinction. Comte, for example,
maintained that, with their emotional and affective natures
women are less human than men. In his own words, woman
is unfit ‘for the continuousness and intensity of mental
labour, either from the intrinsic weakness of her reason or
from her more lively moral and physical sensibility, which
are hostile to scientific abstraction and concentration’
(Comte in Lenzer, 1975: 269). Durkheim (1893, 1897)
continued this theme with the claim that women are asocial
beings who have been left behind men in a state of nature.
Given the historical equation of men and the social, it is
hardly surprising that sociology took flight from the
356 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
biological body. Although this point is appreciated by
many (e.g Frank, 1991; Scott & Morgan, 1993; Williams
& Bendelow, 1998a,b), there is still a widespread lack of
awareness that alternatives were available from the start. It
is doubtful, for example, that Uta Gerhardt would have
remarked (with specific reference to Spencer) upon ‘how
remote in nineteenth-century sociology was the idea that a
person's normal organic functioning was not to be taken
for granted’, nor so easily have concluded that, ‘health was
a sociological non-issue’ at this time, had she included
Harriet Martineau in her history of the intellectual origins
of medical sociology alongside Herbert Spencer, Karl
Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Norbert Elias
(Gerhardt, 1989: xii, xiii, emphasis original). The general
lack of awareness means that the opposition of the bio-
logical and the social, as described by Turner and others, is
framed as an inevitability rather than as something that
could have been avoided had the intellectual agenda been
formulated differently.
Harriet Martineau's nineteenth-century writing pro-
vides a glimpse of what could have been, had the intel-
lectual roots of the sociology of health and illness been
different. It suggests an alternative to the conventionally
identified origins that were embodied from the start but
rendered invisible, and thereby devoid of influence, by
male dominance of the intellectual agenda. Martineau's
work is being rediscovered by feminists and sociologists
alike. As Deidre David (2004:87) remarks, ‘she has herself
become an industry’ of late. The combination of her
unusual status as a female intellectual and populariser and
the notoriety of her illness and sickroom sequestration
means that those who comment on her work usually
include a discussion of gender and, to a lesser extent, a
discussion of health and illness, though it is unusual to find
these linked and placed in a feminist context. The
connections made in the wider literature are usually rather
demarcated and concern Martineau's account of long-term
illness and the care of the invalid/care of self, the challenge
that this might pose to orthodox male medicine, and
women's conditions of work. Less attention has been
given to the amalgam of these concerns in relation to the
wider association of gender and health and its significance
for feminist politics.
Generally speaking there has been a tendency to argue
in one of two ways. First, as discussed by Susan Bohrer
(2003:22), there is the contention that, even though she
tried, Martineau could not escape from ‘the binary
attributions of male/masculine, female/feminine and the
configuration of separate spheres’ that accompany them
and fell into illness herself as a consequence (e.g
Postlethwaite, 1989). Although she makes no reference
to health – or perhaps because she makes no reference to
health – Margaret Waters (1976:336) goes as far as to
argue that Martineau herself set up ‘an impassable division
between the personal and the impersonal, between – on the
one hand – discipline, principle, duty, the rational mind;
and on the other passion’, associating men with the former
and women with the latter. From this first perspective, ill-
health was a result of Martineau's failure effectively to
challenge the malestream. Second, authors have drawn
attention to Martineau's unprecedented and thereby
distinctive ability to speak on matters of health and matters
of gender both as a woman and for women. Thus Mary Jo
Deegan's (2003) insightful study of Martineau's deafness
demonstrates that she was one of the earliest sociologists to
study disability in relation to the experience of self. But,
despite remarking that Martineau's gendered analyses,
‘clearly place her in the forefront of the study of women
and disability’ (Deegan, 2003: 56), Deegan's concern is
predominantly with female experience rather than the
sociological potential of her feminist health politics.
Gender is one of the lens through which Maria Frawley
(1997, 2004) looks at the sickroom experience. She argues
that Martineau's account of Life in the Sickroom (1844a)
‘undercuts the association of invalidism, particularly
female invalidism, with weakness of will or powerless-
ness’ and thereby ‘exercises and develops the sufferer's
agency’ (Frawley, 2004: 229). Frawley (2004: 235) comes
to the conclusion that, for Martineau, invalidism subsumed
gender. In other words, the female identity was absorbed
within the sick role identity of women; ultimately they
were one and the same. While not without value, this
reading – which is in any case focused on Life in the
Sickroom rather than Martineau's wider writing – has the
effect of limiting the feminist transformative potential of
her work. From this second perspective then Martineau's
concern with health and illness (including her own ill-
health) was a spur to feminist politics, but the full force of
this remains unexplored in the current literature. The
reason for this is undoubtedly that the connections between
gender and health are underdeveloped in Martineau's own
work.
Although we need to be wary of creating a neat feminist
‘gender and health jigsaw’ out of apparently unrelated
pieces, a picture of this relationship is there to be
developed. It not only makes apparent that gender and
health have always been connected rather than, as often is
assumed, brought together with the advent of ‘second
wave’ health activism in the mid-twentieth century, but
also that health was a vital element of ‘first wave’ feminist
politics. When the pieces of the jigsaw are assembled, the
resulting picture reveals the various ways in which
Martineau was able to take illness – the sine qua non of
patriarchal oppression – and turn it into a medium of
 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
challenge to patriarchy. This was facilitated by the
heightened social sensitivity to health matters in general
during the mid- to late nineteenth-century (Frawley, 2004)
and advanced specifically by the use of health and illness
both to gauge and to trouble gender identities, which were
themselves in flux and open to contestation at this time
(Jordanova, 1980, 1999; Poovey, 1988; Winter, 1995).
The article begins by establishing the importance of
health and women's social standing to Martineau's general
analysis of society. Her premise that women's inferiority is
socially rather than biologically (or ‘naturally’) caused is
amply demonstrated in her journalism and fictional writing
where she used the theme of health and illness to challenge
the social/biological dualism that sustained patriarchy. By
grounding the experience of health and the body in the
social circumstances of people's lives, she prefigures what
has come to be known as the ‘lived body’ or ‘social
embodiment’ (Connell, 2002; Leder, 1990; Turner, 1996;
Williams & Bendelow, 1998a,b). This embodied approach
enabled Martineau to rupture the dualisms which sustained
women's oppression through a focus on the body in health
and illness. This is evident in her detailed writing on the
individual – and in her case, personal – experience of long-
term illness, which is the next focus of the article. In this
writing, the emotional sensitivity of illness accentuates that
mind and body work together, rather than in opposition.
This is not to suggest that they are in harmony; more often
they jostle with each other. But illness reveals, what
Derrida (1982) was later to claim more generally; namely,
that dualisms need to be re-conceptualised as a cohabita-
tion of terms rather than as an oppositional either/or.
Martineau's work was an early indication that, by trou-
bling conventional mind/body dualism, health/illness no
longer maps in an easy or direct way onto the male/female
dualism and therefore resists any necessary association
with man or woman (male or female).
Martineau's embodied sociology
Martineau (1802–1876) is principally known within
sociology for her English translation of Auguste Comte's
six volume work, Cours de Philosophie Positive (Comte,
1830–1842; Martineau, 1853).1 Reflecting on the rapture
of this task, she remarked that she ‘should never enjoy any
thing so much again’ (Martineau, 1877: 390). Comte was
so pleased, he had the work back-translated into French.
Important though this and other accolades were, it is
testimony to the erasure of women from the history of
sociology that Martineau is far more known today for this
translation than for her own sociological works (Madoo
Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, 2003). Her
acclaimed Society in America (1836/1837) and her meth-
357
odological treatise, How to Observe Morals and Manners
(1838) appeared well before Comte's Cours (orig. 1830–
1842 and trans. by Martineau in 1853) and Durkheim's
Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1895/1982).
Martineau (1838) defined sociology as the direct
observation of the surface ‘manners’, or patterns of social
relationships between people in order to reveal a society's
deeper ‘morals’, or social convictions of right and wrong.
She maintained that social relationships should be
observed by reference to ‘things’, by which she meant
institutions and social practices. The health of a commu-
nity, which she saw as ‘an almost unfailing index of its
morals’ (Martineau, 1838: 161), was a prime example of
this. Health status was an indicator which could be used to
interpret the wider character of a society. For example
one character of morals and manners prevails where the
greater number die young, and another where they die
old; one where they are cut off by hardship; another
where they waste away under a lingering disease; and
yet another where they abide their full time, and then
come to their graves like a shock of corn in its season.
(Martineau, 1838: 166)
Martineau ‘viewed fiction as an experimental mode in
which the theoretical principles of the social sciences can be
worked out’ (Hill & Hoecker-Drysdale, 2001: 19). In the
novel Deerbrook (1839) the sickness of society, manifest in
the petty rivalries and jealousies of English village life, is
disclosed in contests over medical knowledge and the trails
and tribulations of the village doctor Edward Hope and his
family. The hospitality shown to Hope when he settles in
the village turns to hostility when he votes against the
interests of his patron, a powerful local landowner, in the
county election. He not only loses his business, plunging
his household into poverty, but becomes a victim of mob
violence when he is accused as a resurrectionist.2 The
Hopes fall on hard times, only to be rescued when Hope
acquits himself with great honour and humility when a
fever epidemic hits the village (England had experienced a
real life cholera epidemic in the early 1830s).
In a manner similar to health, Martineau (1838:174)
also believed that ‘the degree of degradation of woman is
as good a test as the moralist can adopt for ascertaining the
state of domestic morals in any country’. Her feminism is
revealed in the anomalies between a society's declared and
its actual morals. How, she asks, with reference to the
United States, ‘is the restricted and dependent state of
women to be reconciled with the proclamation that “all are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness”?’ (Martineau, 1836/7: 308). She found that
American society was operating under the fallacy of
358 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
distinct masculine and feminine virtues of hardy men and
gentle women. The conditions of both women and slaves –
Martineau was an outspoken abolitionist – were docu-
mented in Society in America, the result of two years
extensive travel, conversation with and observation of
women and men from a range of social backgrounds across
the United States.3 She asserted that, until the time when
jobs are open to women and to men, ‘the condition of the
female working classes is such that if its suffering were but
made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble
through the whole society’ (Martineau, 1836/7: 307). In
the subsequent Eastern Life, Past and Present (Martineau,
1848), she described women of the harem as ‘the most
studiously depressed and corrupted women whose condi-
tion I have witnessed’ (quoted in Thomas, 1985: 58).
Opinion is divided on how far Deerbrook (1839) con-
veys a feminist message. Some maintain that it is success-
ful (e.g Roberts, 2002), some less so (e.g Sanders, 1986),
while others consider that it fails altogether (e.g David,
1987). The heart of the novel is the harnessing of women's
life to marriage prospects. Health is integral to this plot. For
example, Dr. Hope fails to appreciate the domestic disease
to which his new wife Hester falls prey. Hester explains to
her sister: ‘life is a blank to me. I have no hope left. I am
neither wiser, nor better, nor happier, for God having given
me all that should make a woman what I meant to be’
(Martineau, 1839: 242). She is only rescued from this
malaise when called to action in the care of this sick – and
in the process becomes a true companion to her husband –
when the fever comes to the village. The character of
Hester therefore shows how women's ill-health is a prod-
uct of their social circumstances, rather than being natural
to them. Causality works in reverse in the character of
governess Maria Young who loses the prospect of mar-
riage altogether after being disabled and subject to a life of
pain following an accident. This almost certainly reflects
an episode from Martineau's childhood, when a friend of
her own age of 7 lost a leg in an accident. Martineau reports
that, this event ‘influenced my mind and character more
than almost all other influences together’ (letter in Sanders,
1990:6). In Deerbrook, Philip Enderby, who had a close
affection for Maria before her accident, admits that he
remembers rejoicing after hearing of her accident that his
‘esteem for her had not passed into a warmer feeling’
(Martineau, 1839: 332). Unbeknownst to Enderby, Maria
is still in love with him. In this instance then illness has
been ruinous to a woman's life circumstances. Even
though Maria is able to make her way in life as a governess,
she fears for her old age as the threat of worsening health
endangers her livelihood.
Through a blending of narrative fiction and realism
Martineau made her ideas far more accessible than would
ever have been possible in a narrowly academic style
(Logan, 2002; Sanders, 1986). Her highly successful Il-
lustrations of Political Economy of the 1830s, for example,
were a series of twenty-four tales intended to express the
principles of political economy. One of the most interesting
of these in the current context, Weal and Woe in Garveloch
(1832) – a fictitious Scottish island – depicts the literal and
figurative sickness of society as Garveloch's new
prosperity turns into poverty. Proposing Malthusian
principles, Martineau advances that the ever-growing
population risks starvation due to inherent fluctuations of
supply and demand in industry. Hardship hits in the shape
of an average crop and the drying up of the herring catch
and then a fever, which is made worse in its impact because
its victims are weak for want of food. A bad winter follows
as ‘rheumatism among the aged, consumption among the
youthful, all the disorders of infancy among the children,
laid waste the habitations of many who thought that they
have never known sorrow till now’ (Martineau, 1832: 121).
Two of Martineau's characters, or ‘embodied princi-
ples’, Ella and Katie reflect on what to do, coming to the
conclusion that, ‘there must be some check to the increase
of the people’ (Martineau, 1832: 104). Most importantly,
the dialogue between Ella and Katie advances a woman's
right to choose if and when she will bear children. By
advocating the ‘preventative check’, or birth control,
Martineau offended the sensibilities of men and women
alike. Relatively little attention has been given to the
feminist implications of Martineau's position. Ella
Dzelzainis (2006) concludes that, above all, Martineau
makes a case for woman's capacity for reason — it is the
female characters Ella and Katie who are able work out
what needs to be done and take appropriate steps to
achieve this. In Weal and Woe Martineau challenges the
conception of maternal instinct and thereby advances
woman's right to choose if she will engage in sexual
relations with men (Bohrer, 2003). But is not only control
over the body that is at stake here, but also the proposition
that women are not controlled by the body. Again,
Martineau contends that women's circumstances are
intimately tied to the body, but not controlled by it.
So far I have argued that, for Martineau, health and the
position of women are two of the most important
sociologically observable patterns of social relationships
between people (or ‘manners’) that reveal a society's
‘morals’ (or what we would now terms its norms and
values). If, as she put it herself, ‘good and bad health are
both cause and effect of good and bad morals’ (Martineau,
1838: 163), then neither health status nor the status of
women are ‘natural’ givens. For example, the reason why
the health of nineteenth-century school-girls' is generally
worse than school-boys' has nothing to do with their
 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
biology and everything to do with ‘the unequal develop-
ment of the faculties’ (Martineau, 1861: 22). Thus, for girls
there is too much intellectual acquisition, though not
too much mental exercise….and there is an almost total
absence of physical education. If the muscles were
called upon as strenuously as the memory to show what
they could do, the long train of school-girls who
institute the romance of the coming generation would
flock merrily into ten thousand homes, instead of
parting off – some to gladden their homes, certainly, but
too many to the languid lot of invalidism, or to the
actual sick-room; while an interminable procession of
them is for ever on its way to the cemetery – the
foremost dropping into the grave while the number is
kept up from behind. (Martineau, 1861: 22–23)
Hence many more girls ‘will languish in invalidism;
fewer will have genuine robust health; more, in particular,
will die of consumption within ten years’ (Martineau,
1861: 22–23). Martineau was not the first to make this
overall point of course. For example, writing towards the
end of the eighteenth-century, Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792:154) had claimed that we should hear nothing of
women's fragility ‘if girls were allowed to take sufficient
exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles
are relaxed and their digestion destroyed.’ However,
Martineau paid far more attention to health than her
feminist predecessors. The health of women of working
age was a particular concern (see Logan, 2002). Focusing
on specific occupations and ‘stations in life’, she drew
attention to the causes of needless mortality and ‘the
prevalent imperfections of health, for which society is
answerable’, in a series of articles in the periodical Once a
Week (Martineau, 1861: 267). For example, she claims that
turning over all of one's time to child care is far from
natural or good for women in her commentary on the live-
in governess. Thus the indefatigable devotion of govern-
esses to the education and care of children is ‘cause enough
for a perpetual fever of mind and wear of nerves, leading to
illness, to failure of temper, to a resort to stimulants by
slow degrees’ (Martineau, 1861: 195). In other words, it is
enough to drive a governess to drink. Insult is quite
literally added to injury since ‘the salary does not afford
any prospect of a sufficient provision when health and
energy is worn out’ (Martineau, 1861: 195, 196). The
needlewoman's conditions of work, which make her
vulnerable to spinal disease and blindness, were a par-
ticular concern for Martineau. Although there was wide-
spread opposition to mechanisation among workers at
the time, Martineau was optimistic that the sewing
machine would ease women's suffering. She maintained
that women were already
359
reduced to be themselves sewing machines of an
imperfect sort, whose work was sure to be superseded
by a machine which cannot suffer, and pine, and grow
blind, and drop stitches, and spoil fastenings. [Thus] it
must be a mercy to stop the working of human ma-
chines, driven by the force of hunger, and disordered by
misery … It is the machine which must put an end to the
straining of eyes over the single candle, and the fearful
irritation which attends the exhaustion of certain
muscles, while the rest of the frame is left unexercised.
(Martineau, 1861: 223, 228)
During the 1860s, Martineau began a period of
intensive collaboration with Florence Nightingale based
on a shared interest in environmental and occupational
health and the need for skilled nurses (see McDonald,
2003). She proposed that the shortage of skilled nurses was
an ideal opportunity for women to improve their cir-
cumstances and, through this, their own health and well-
being. Nursing was seen as ideal because, unlike other
occupations, it was ‘undisturbed by any jealousy of men’;
that is, it was seen as women's work (Martineau, 1865:
411). Since it would provide women with regular meals,
sufficient sleep, time off, social standing and a decent
wage, it was infinitely preferable to the work of the humble
governess or night-working milliner and other female
occupations with dreary prospects.
So far we have seen that health and gender helped to
uncover the relationship between a society's ‘manners’
and its ‘morals’ and that the resulting knowledge held
out the potential of feminist change. Martineau therefore
was able to contest the patriarchal equation of women-
the natural-illness by demonstrating the social basis of
their physical and mental ill-health. However, it is
important to appreciate that this challenge did not
involve a flight from biology (or from matter to mind),
but rather an appreciation of the fundamentally embod-
ied nature of experience; that is, what is social is simul-
taneously corporeal. This drew the body, or more
accurately the embodied subject, to the heart of Marti-
neau's social science. This does not mean to say that her
thinking was free of tensions. Cartesian mind/body dualism
was under wider challenge at the time (Winter, 1998) and
perceptions of the nature of males and females were in flux.
This found expression in Martineau's writing on the
experience of illness.
The experience of illness
Martineau's writing on the personal experience of
illness had very personal origins. She lost most of her hea-
ring at the age of 12 and used an ear trumpet as an adult.4
360 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
Aged 37 in 1839 she became unwell with a gynaecological
complaint while travelling in Venice. The consensus is that
she was suffering from a prolapsed uterus caused by a
benign ovarian cyst, although this was not fully apparent at
the time. Between 1840 and 1844 she lived the life of an
invalid in the coastal town of Tynemouth in the north of
England where, sequestered in her sickroom, she wrote her
personal account, Life in the Sickroom (1844a).
Life in the Sickroom needs to be read in the context of
two nineteenth-century British enthusiasms: firstly, for
self-help and advice-giving; and second, for the use of the
sickroom metaphor in fiction. Martineau's writing on
health and disability had much in common with the genre
of self-help that was popular at the time (and which has
enjoyed something of a renaissance since the late
twentieth-century in the form of autobiographical illness
narratives e.g Frank, 1995, 2004). It demonstrates a
conspicuous ‘appeal to the fraternity of shared experience’
(Frawley, 2004: 247) and a desire to advise, even instruct,
others. As Martineau wrote in a letter of 1834 concerning
her published ‘letter to the deaf’: ‘people with all infirmities
are reading my sermon. As a lady said to me, “we all have
our deafness”’ (Martineau in Sanders, 1990:43–4). Life in
the Sickroom is peppered with very practical advice on
matters, such as how to make the sickroom as convivial as
possible. It also contains maxims such as, the well should
not seek to comfort the sick by disavowing their pain or
entreating them to gain solace from past achievements (for
all the sick recall is that they could have been done better).
Doctors and nurses similarly are asked to be frank: they
should avow that the medicine is nauseous; the treatment
painful; and be open about the approach of death.
Although Martineau was not in any wholesale manner
opposed to the emerging medical professionals of the time
(Cooter, 1991), she certainly looked to distance herself
from their edicts (Martineau, 1877; Ryall, 2000). Doctors
therefore were subject to her sickroom challenge to the
authority of those who thought that they, rather than the
patient, knew best (Roberts, 2002; Winter, 1995).
The theme of health and the body was often used by
Victorian novelists to explore moral life and social
relationships (Bailin, 1994; Vrettos, 1995; Wiltshire,
1997; Wood, 2001). As Miriam Bailin puts it, there is
‘scarcely a Victorian fictional narrative without its ailing
protagonist, its depiction of a sojourn in the sickroom’
(Bailin, 1994: 5). Bearing in mind that episodes of interest
in women's health frequently coincide with periods of
significant change in their social and economic roles
(Weisman, 1998), it is instructive that characters often
enter the sickroom as a result of a personal crisis which has
separated them from the social roles and norms that have
defined their lives. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1985:
208) discusses for female hysteria, this illness ‘became one
way in which conventional women could express – in
most cases unconsciously – dissatisfaction with one or
several aspects of their lives’, most notably the confines of
the mother–wife role. In the manner of sociologist Talcot
Parsons' (1950) later concept of the ‘sick role’, sickness
and the nineteenth-century sickroom were a sanctioned
form of protection from the ‘discontinuities of experience
and frustrations of communal life’ (Bailin, 1994: 18).
Given that women's domain of the home was traversed by
others with impunity, the nineteenth-century sickroom
could provide them, quite literally, with the only ‘room of
their own’. Since women were pressed both into sickness
and into ministering to the sick, the sickroom might seem
an unlikely place of self-empowerment. In relation to
hysteria, for example, while women may have purchased
their escape from ‘the emotional and – frequently – from
the sexual demands of their life’, they did so only at the
‘cost of pain, disability, and an intensification of women's
traditional passivity and dependence’ (Smith-Rosenberg,
1985: 207). It was common nonetheless for novelists to
depict sickroom sequestration as a ‘kind of forcing ground
of the self — a conventional rite of passage issuing in
personal, moral, or social recuperation’ (Bailin, 1994: 5).5
Although Life in the Sickroom shares in these wider
nineteenth-century concerns, it stands out in going beyond
the personal to a wider sociological interpretation of the
invalid condition. As Maria Frawley (2003) remarks, it
was a prelude to the emergence of medical sociology in the
twentieth-century. The book was an attempt to overturn
the idea that the sickroom was for those who had opted out
of life and to instate it instead as a platform for direct
political intervention in the world. In the literal sense of
seeing, Martineau writes with wonder of the potential to
fill a volume with the simple detail of life witnessed from
her one back-room window, often with the aid of her
telescope, such as the comings and goings of her
neighbours and the town's sailors. Being set apart from
the ‘disturbing bustles of life in the world’ provides the
invalid with the singular opportunity to contemplate many
sides of a question; the ability not only to see much farther
than one used to, but also much farther than ‘others do on
subjects of interest, which involve general principles’
(Martineau, 1844a: 117). Sociological insight is forged
through the conviction that, since invalids are denied slices
of actual life, they think through a blending of ‘history, life
and speculation’ which, in a previously healthy life, would
have seemed to us ‘to constitute departments of study as
separate as moral [social] studies can be’. In her own
words: ‘history becomes like actual life; life becomes
comprehensive as history, and abstract as speculation’
(Martineau, 1844a: 95, 91).
 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
Mind and body
The syncretic sociological insight that emerges from the
invalid experience is accentuated in Martineau's view by
the alertness to the mind/body relationship which accom-
panies illness, especially its companion, pain. She antici-
pated present day discourse on the taken-for-granted, or
absent presence, of the fit and healthy body (e.g Leder,
1990), remarking (in a discussion of the maid-of-all-work)
that,
she does not think about her bodily condition at all; for
there are no aches and pains to remind her. Some people
go through life without ever having felt their lungs; and
others are unaware, except by rational evidence, that
they have a stomach. (Martineau, 1861: 160)
Likewise, healthy youthfulness is associated with
unconscious ease; the sickness of older age with conscious
labour. Writing about the experience of the aged, she
remarks that, when they were young the contact between
external objects and the body was ‘so natural as to be
unobserved…now , when the consolidation of the frame has
gone too far, there is obstruction somewhere in the process,
or everywhere…its loss must be supplied somehow, if
thought and action are to go on; and to supply it is a heavy
and unremitting task’ (Martineau, 1861: 258).
As Williams and Bendelow (1998b: 136, emphasis
orig.) explain, ‘while at an analytical level the study of
illness, pain and suffering demand the dissolution of
former dualistic modes of thinking in drawing attention to
the relatedness of self and world, mind and body, inside
and out, we must also account for the enduring power and
qualities of these dichotomies at the experiential level of
suffering.’ Martineau was acutely aware of this. She wrote
that bodily pain can so affect the mind that it loses all its
gaiety and, by disuse, almost forgets its sense of
enjoyment. But it can also act as a relief from the gnawing
misery of the invalid's mind; thus, ‘the more restless is the
distressed body, the more at ease does the spirit appear’
(Martineau, 1844a: 113). Recognising the counterintuitive
nature of her claim, she explains that the sick person is
never so happy as when they feel their paroxysms of pain
coming on, for they know that the aftermath will bring
relative ease. In this way, the body appeases the distress of
the mind. Appeasement also works in the other direction as
the power of ideas offers respite from bodily pain. For
Martineau, by vindicating ‘the supremacy of mind over
body’, the sick signalled the power of being over doing;
the crucial recognition that despite their liabilities, the sick
can still be even though they cannot do (Frawley, 1997;
Martineau, 1844a: 129). They still have much to contribute
to society. These are prescient remarks. Her conceptualisa-
361
tion of pain is remarkably similar to today's commentators
who stress that pain is a lived, embodied experience
mediated by social context (cf. Turner, 1992; Williams &
Bendelow, 1998a,b). Above all, Martineau stresses the
inter-relational and socially embedded nature of illness.
This comes through clearly in her account of mesmer-
ism. Martineau (1844b) attributed her eventual return to
health to mesmerism which was at the height of its success
at the time. Her celebrity ensured her cure was a nation-
wide sensation (Cooter, 1991) and a very public challenge
to doctors whose new medical techniques were premised
on a quite different understanding of the body (Winter,
1995, 1998). Although mesmeric practice varied from
practitioner to practitioner, it's basic principle was the
power of one person to affect another's mind and body.
Martineau was initially mesmerised by the well-known
Spencer Hall, but when she failed to find lasting relief, he
was replaced, first by her maid Jane and then by Mrs
Montague Wynyard. In an article published in The
Athenaeum in 1844, she gives a particularly vivid account
of her experience. Making clear to the reader that she had
refrained from taking any opiates this day, Martineau
recounts that
Something seemed to diffuse itself through the atmo-
sphere, – not like steam or haze–, but most like a clear
twilight, closing in from the windows and down from
the ceiling, and in which one object after another melted
away, till scarcely anything was left visible before my
wide-open eyes… A delicious sensation of ease spread
through me, – a cool comfort, before all pain and
distress gave way, oozing out, as it were, at the soles of
my feet. (1844a: 244, 245)
Eminent physicians sought to disqualify Martineau
from commentary on her own experience and thereby to
contest her cure on gendered terms. Thomas Spencer
Wells, the pioneer of ovariotomy, for example, opined that
her ‘peculiarities of character’ were the result of her
gynaecological disease and would have been resolved had
the cyst been removed (Ryall, 2000). In Charles Darwin's
opinion, a tendency to deceive was characteristic of
‘disordered females’. He pointed out that his father, a
wealthy doctor, had often known mania to relieve
incurable complaints. Martineau's improved health could
therefore be construed as a symptom of madness (Winter,
1998). Tempting though this discourse no doubt was, other
medical commentators quite simply believed that the
pathology was resolved prior to mesmeric treatment. This
was the opinion of Dr. Thomas Greenhow, Martineau's
brother-in-law, who had treated her up to this point. Much
to Martineau's consternation, Greenhow published her
‘case’, without her permission, in a shilling pamphlet in
362 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
1845. He maintained that, as the ovarian cyst which had
caused her uterus to prolapse grew, it had forced her uterus
back up into her pelvis, and this coincided with the
mesmeric treatment. She fiercely contested this, remarking
‘I was never lower than immediately before I made trial of
mesmerism’ (Martineau, 1844b:4). Upon the onset of the
heart-disease that was to cause her death many years later,
aged 74, she declared that this was the one case where
mesmerism was dangerous and worried that her adversar-
ies would claim that her final illness was the same as that
suffered earlier (Martineau in Sanders, 1990).
The veracity of these accounts, which in any case
cannot be adjudicated, is of less interest to us than what
Martineau's involvement with mesmerism reveals about
the relationship between mind and body in her thinking.
Although, on the surface, mesmerism appears to vindicate
the power of mind over body and thereby substantiate
mind/body dualism, a closer inspection discloses a more
complex relationship. For Martineau, mesmerism was the
key to a scientific understanding of the mind/body relation-
ship. In the first place, it is instructive that mesmerism was
not simply a matter of ‘mind over body’, but of power over
‘mind and body’ (Martineau, 1844b). In this respect it is
important to note that, in later life she looked back upon
Life in the Sickroom as a show of weakness and display
of self-pity. Although she stands by ‘all of the facts in the
book, and some of the practical doctrine’, Martineau feels
ashamed of her state of mind, which she now considers
‘crude if not morbid’. She makes clear that this new
perspective was not a result of being well; that is, in an
altered state, for she declares herself to be ‘again ill, as
hopelessly as before, and more certainly fatal than I was
then’. Rather, she attributes her earlier feelings to having
been in a crude or ‘metaphysical state of mind’ and not yet
liberated from the ‘debris of the theological stage’6
(Martineau, 1877: 210, 211), or from ‘the Christian
superstition […] of the contemptible nature of the body,
and its antagonism to the soul’ (quoted in Ryall, 2000:7).
Martineau's translation of Comte's Cours de Philosophie
Positive was published in 1853, approximately a decade
after her sickroom experience. As Anka Ryall (2000:7)
discusses, Comtean positivism was crucial because it
undermined her earlier belief in ‘theological and meta-
physical soul/body dualism’ which was itself under wider
challenge within Victorian society of her time (Winter,
1998).
Mesmerism displayed the spectacle of ‘human beings
intimately connected to each other by invisible sub-
stances’, of their identities extending beyond the visible
border of the body and flowing into one another (Winter,
1998: 117). It was conceived as a force of nature that
could restore equilibrium to body and mind. As Alison
Winter puts it, ‘through the direct action of a force of
nature on her nervous system, Martineau had attained
access to the “very laws of life” and the source of all
beliefs about the world, and was able to understand how
they related to one another’ (Winter, 1998: 223). This
was in accord with her wider sociological endeavour
which involved a naturalistic approach to explanation,
‘integrating factors of the biophysical environment with
the social and economic’ (McDonald, 2003: 156). This
brings us back to Martineau's sympathy with Comtean
positivism. Although she took issue with Comte's views
on women, his racism, and his vision of a hierarchically
organised society, she shared his conception of the
interconnections of the individual, the social and the
natural world and the search for natural laws of human
existence. She felt that sociology could uncover these
connections by empirical observation and that this was
facilitated by the development of the human mind away
from theological and metaphysical forms of knowledge
towards positivistic understanding (Hoecker-Drysdale,
2003).
A gender and health jigsaw
Martineau's writing on the invalid condition therefore
encompasses the themes of her wider oeuvre. It demon-
strates her search for an empirical understanding of the
social world and the place of the individual within it. The
connection between the circumstances of women's lives,
particularly their working lives, and their health status is
very clear. Her many articles in the periodical Once a Week
(Martineau, 1861) were direct attempts to improve matters.
Her supposition that the individual experience of illness is
a platform for political intervention is apparent in her
advocacy of mesmerism, which was a challenge to the
establishing medical orthodoxy. As Caroline Roberts
points out, somnambulists like Martineau's maid Jane,
were mostly women, moreover women who were
physically and emotionally weakened. Ostensibly bound
by animal sensibilities or brute biology, mesmerism
appeared to be demonstrating that women had more self-
command than was commonly supposed (Roberts, 2002)
and therefore that they were defying their nature.
Yet Life in the Sickroom, arguably Martineau's most
important book in this regard, is not overtly feminist
insofar as it appears to be directed equally to men and to
women and does not openly confront the medical
treatment of women. It is even difficult to discern the
exact nature of Martineau's illness. Maria Frawley
(1997) attributes this vagueness to Martineau's opinion
that invalidism is constituted by what happens within
the sickroom rather than what specifically has brought
 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
one there. It can be suggested nonetheless that a more
overt feminist argument might have developed had
Martineau explored the gynaecological nature of her
condition. Conversely, it might be argued that this
apparent neutrality made it possible for her to undercut
the conventional association between invalidism, pas-
sivity, powerlessness and women by emphasising the
unique agency that the sick role cultivates for all.
Another, equally plausible, reading of Martineau's
outwardly separate discourse on illness and discourse
on gender in Life in the Sickroom is that they were in
fact bound to act in concert. As the disparagement of her
persona by medical men testifies, her very public profile
meant that neither her personal, nor her sociological,
accounts of illness could fail to resonate but in gendered
terms. Health politics were always to some extent
gender politics simply because ‘illness’ and ‘woman’
were always to some extent joined together. Obviously
this was not unassailable since the connection could
always be challenged and undone. But the threat of
repair was always there and this meant that illness could
never actually be gender-neutral. The feminist argument
which follows from this reading is that, since women
and illness were part of the multifaceted cultural jigsaw
of which her wider work was a part, they had to be
overturned together. Therefore, by turning the conven-
tional association of illness with inactivity, into mental
activity – what is more, activity with privileged insight –
Martineau simultaneously converted women – who were
always putatively linked to illness – into active beings with
privileged insight.
Martineau's ability to trouble the dualisms which
sustained women's oppression through the medium of
illness was facilitated by the wider social sensitivity to
health and illness and the indeterminateness of the invalid
body in mid- to late-Victorian society (Frawley, 2004;
Winter, 1995) and by the relative state of flux in gender
ideologies and gender roles at the time (Jordanova, 1980,
1999; Poovey, 1988).
The pieces in context
A multiplicity of models of authority with respect to
illness and the body flourished during the Victorian
period (Winter, 1995:597). Doubts went well beyond
generalised concern about scientific medicine's inability
to cure, to encompass profound anxieties about the
future, including apprehensions about gender. There has
been a tendency to assume that more fluid conceptua-
lisations of (what became known as) sex and gender
began with late twentieth-century identity politics, and
that past conceptualisations were rigid and unyielding.
363
However, the gender ideologies of any period are always
‘in the making’ and, therefore, ‘open to revision, dispute,
and the emergence of oppositional formulations’ by
feminists and patriarchs alike (Jordanova, 1980, 1999;
Poovey, 1988:3). So, although biological/social, body/
mind divides were powerful forces in mid-to-late
nineteenth-century society, they were less fixed than
often is assumed. They were fissured, contested and
responsive to social climates – in Martineau's sociolog-
ical framework, a society's ‘social morals’ – that
positioned men and women in diverse ways.
As Thomas Laqueur (1990:5) demonstrates, by 1800
‘writers of all sorts were determined to base what they
insisted were fundamental differences between man and
woman, on discoverable biological distinctions’. This ‘two
sex model’ had existed for thousands of years and was
quite firmly rooted in the European collective conscious-
ness at the time of Martineau's writing. It had replaced the
‘one sex model’ which viewed bodies not in terms of
difference, but as commensurate and sharing a common
physiology. However, then, as now, ‘at any given point of
scientific knowledge, a wide variety of contradictory
cultural claims about sexual difference were possible’
(Laqueur, 1990: 175). The body was a contested site which
was drawn into the service of many different political ends,
of which women's emancipation was just one. This made
it possible for Martineau (and others) to work within and
between dualisms; that is, to leave the pieces of the gender
and health jigsaw unsettled rather than fixed in place. This
can be exemplified through a discussion of nervous
disorders. Since nervous disorders such as hysteria, hypo-
chondria and neurasthenia were ‘neither obviously organic
nor exclusively mental’ they were, by definition, ‘disorders
of function occurring in the connections between mental
and bodily experience’ (Wood, 2001:4). As a product of
embodied experience, they resisted any one-to-one
association with man or woman, even at the same time
that they were drawn in this direction. This relative
flexibility meant that imaginative use could be made of
unstable aetiologies of mental illness to reinterpret what
doctors and wider society were trying hard to fix and
enclose as female (Wood, 2001).
The avid interest in ‘functional nervous disorders’ is
evident in the characters who populated the nineteenth-
century novels of authors such as George Eliot (Mary
Ann Evans) and Charlotte Brontë, as well as Harriet
Martineau (Chase, 1984; Wiltshire, 1997; Wood, 2001).
Would-be scientific arguments about male/female differ-
ences and the normative prescriptions that accompany
them particularly come into play at times of marked
change (Smith-Rosenberg & Rosenberg, 1973). But
notwithstanding the best efforts male writers and many
364 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
doctors, functional nervous disorders could not easily be
assigned to woman. As Janet Oppenheim (1991: 141)
explains, ‘they could not have done so, even if they had
wanted to, for the evidence exposing male nervous
vulnerability was too familiar to the Victorian public for
pretence’.
This put considerable strain on the notion that men
were stable, rational creatures. As the English Conta-
gious Diseases Acts (the first in 1864) made apparent,
one way of maintaining power over women was through
the presumption of uncontrollable male sexuality, which
sat uneasily alongside the patriarchal vision of men as
rational, self-controlled actors.7 This dual vision might
be explained in terms of the power of men; simply that
they were in the position to ‘have it both ways’. But it is
important also to appreciate that, although social and
economic discourse figured them as rational actors in
control of their own destiny, men were increasingly
becoming mere cogs in the larger machine of industrial
economy; that is, lacking in self-direction themselves
(Frawley, 2004). To be sure, this change provided a
legitimate reason for male nervous disorder, which was
that men were suffering from work-related stresses, and
also for the notion that their manly resolve would
eventually pull them through (Micale, 1991; Oppen-
heim, 1991; Wood, 2001). But there was an abiding
fragility to this account, always a chance that male
nervous disorder would be marked as female. Male and
female novelists alike often picked up on this in their
depictions of invalid men reduced to the state of women
through illness. For example, hypochondria is described
as a female visitation upon Crimsworth, ‘an astute
mercantile man’, in Brontë's novel, The Professor
(Brontë, 1857/1998).
The scope that women writers had to portray men
publicly in this way only added to men's growing unease
about their manhood. For example, writer and social
critic Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) clearly feared
women's ability to script men in marriage plots and
domesticity and to arouse what he saw as dangerous
sexual desire. Like other Victorians, Carlyle felt that men
possessed a distinctive, barely controlled, but potent
energy that had to be managed lest they collapse into
madness and chaos (Sussman, 1995). Carlyle's fears
were probably excited by a preoccupation with his own
afflictions from an early age. This account from his
correspondence, aged 30, is rather typical: he writes of
being ‘sick with sleeplessness, quite nervous, billus,
splenetic and all the rest of it’ (quoted in Haley, 1978:
12). The intensely misogynist Carlyle dealt with what he
saw as the inner chaos and fragility of masculinity with a
dual strategy of projecting it onto women (and to Non-
White men), whom he wrote of with derision as unclean,
diseased and polluting, and by emphasising the value of
self-discipline and productive (industrial) activity for
men (Sussman, 1995). Hopefully Carlyle is not typical,
but his example does illustrate how the indeterminate
invalid body elevated health and illness to a prime place
in the increasingly voluble world of Victorian gender
politics.
Conclusion
In this article I have argued that when we enrich the
partial history of sociology (and social science generally)
with Harriet Martineau's work, she becomes not simply
one of the first generation founders of the discipline –
who in contrast to her male contemporaries took a keen
interest in health and in women's oppression – but one of
the earliest and precedent-setting. Bringing her account
of health and illness to the fore extends our understand-
ing of early feminism to comprise health and body
politics and suggests that the sociology of health and
illness has alternatives that were embodied from the start.
Martineau's writing illustrates that health and illness is a
sensitive political barometer of socially troublesome
gender identities which feminists have been able to press
into the service of challenging the dualisms which have
nourished patriarchy across the centuries.
I have used the metaphor of a jigsaw to convey
Martineau's gender and health politics as a work in the
making rather than something that was polished and
complete. Although she insisted that both health and the
position of women were unfailing indicators of a
society's ‘morals’, Martineau did not always fit these
together in her writing. Nonetheless, she provides us
with many of the necessary prices and the means to bring
them together. The first piece is her argument that the
state of women's health and their fall into illness is
socially, rather than biologically (or naturally) caused.
The second is her awareness that illness throws the mind/
mind relationship into sharp relief. By troubling the
conventional association of man with mind and woman
with body, health and illness no longer map in an easy or
direct way onto the male/female dualism and therefore
resist any necessary association with man or woman
(male or female). Joined together, these two pieces
challenge the patriarchal equation of women with a fixed
and inferior biology and man with the mind and, in the
process, imbue illness – the quintessence of female oppres-
sion – with the potential to effectively challenge patriarchy.
While Martineau's work quite evidently is not a feminist
panacea, it does provide a glimpse of what could have been
had the intellectual roots of sociology been different.
 E. Annandale / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 355–366
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of
WSIF for their helpful comments on an earlier version
of this article.
Endnotes
1
This was not ‘mere translation’ of course. Martineau's method was
to study as she ‘went along, the subjects of my author’. ‘Being thus
secure of what I was about, I simply set up the volume on a little desk
before me, glanced over at a page or a paragraph, and set down its
meaning in the briefest and simplest way I could’ (Martineau,
1877:391). Her volume reduced Comte's 4700 pages to 1000.
2
The date of the action in Deerbrook is unclear, but if it was before
the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832, which made it possible for
the medical profession to access ‘unclaimed bodies’ such as those of
paupers, it would have been quite realistic to portray villagers living
in fear of grave-robbers (Roberts, 2002). The early nineteenth-century
was a time of significant advances in anatomy and there was a brisk
demand for bodies to dissect, but a shortage in legal supply. This
‘ensured good business for the “resurrectionists”, who robbed new
graves to sell their spoils to anatomists like Knox’ (Porter, 1997:317).
3
It comes as no surprise that, despite the methodological superiority of
Martineau's account (Deegan, 1991; Hill, 2003), de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America (de Tocqueville, 1967[1835, 1840]) is far more
likely to be chosen for discussion of mid-nineteenth century American
politics and institutions than Society in America (Martineau, 1962 [1836/
1837). For example, in Origins and Growth of Sociology, J. H. Abraham
(1973: 91) praises de Tocqueville for his ‘acute observation’ and eulogises
him as a ‘supreme sociologist’. By contrast, Martineau is mentioned only
as Comte's translator.
4
Martineau believed that the need for her informants' to speak close to
her ear encouraged their confidence and more frank accounts of their
lives. She also associated her use of observation as a method with her
inability to participate in casual conversation due to her lack of hearing
(although she did instruct her companion, Louisa Jeffrey to listen and
make reports to her).
5
Unfortunately this sequestration has provided fertile ground for the
claim that many prominent nineteenth-century women, such as Florence
Nightingale, feigned long-term illness in order to avoid trivial domestic
and social responsibilities and to create a space for intellectual work (e.g
Woodham-Smith, 1950).
6
Comte's law of the development of human knowledge went through
three stages: the theological; the metaphysical; and the positivistic (Comte,
1896).
7
By then in her mid 60s, Martineau came out of retirement to petition for
women's civil liberty and repeal of the Acts (which did not come until 1886,
a decade after her death).
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