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Early Women Sociologists
and Classical Sociological
Theory: 18301930
Patricia Madoo Lengermann
The George Washington University
Gillian Niebrugge
American University
Chapter Outline
Harriet Martineau (18021876)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (18601935)
Jane Addams (18601935) and the Chicago Womens School
Anna Julia Cooper (18591964) and Ida Wells-Barnett (18621931)
Marianne Schnitger Weber (18701954)
Beatrice Potter Webb (18581943)
The traditional telling of the history of sociological theory has been shaped by a politics
of gender that tends to emphasize male achievement and erase female contributions.
(For an account of how this erasure occurred, see Lengermann and Niebrugge, 1998/2007.)
As conventionally told, the creation of sociological theory is presented as the work of two
generations of men: a founding generation who, in the middle third of the nineteenth
century, acted as public educators outside any formal university baseparticularly,
Comte, Spencer, and Marxand a second classical generation, a larger cohort of
university-based mennotably, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Mead, and Parkwho
between 1890 and 1930 set out to establish a profession and a discipline. This historical
account raises the critical question of mobilized feminismAnd what about the women?
This chapter modies this conventional history in the following ways. First, we
add one woman, Harriet Martineau (18021876), to the rst mid-nineteenth century
generation of sociologys founders, afrming that Martineau is not only a key theorist of
this generation but that she is perhaps sociologys original founder. Second, we describe
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a larger, interconnected community of women on both sides of the Atlantic who, in the
period of sociologys emergence 18901930, worked with extraordinary energy to create their own models for sociological theory and practice. We review the ideas of just a
few of these womenCharlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Anna
Julia Cooper, Ida Wells-Barnett, Marianne Weber, and Beatrice Potter Webb. The
women who contributed are so numerous and the records so incomplete that we have
had to be very selective in our presentation; important women omitted here include
Helen Campbell, Caroline Bartlett Crane, Katharine Bement Davis, Jenny P. dHéricourt,
Crystal Eastman, Isabel Eaton, Lucille Eaves, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg,
Florence Nightingale, Olive Schreiner, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, Anna Garlin
Spencer, Jessie Taft, Flora Tristan, Mary van Kleeck, and Fannie Barrier Williams.
The retelling here, part of the only half-completed feminist revolution in sociology
(Alway, 1995; Chafetz, 1997; Delamont, 2003; Stacey and Thorne, 1985, 1996; Thistle,
2000), is important because a discipline is signicantly dened by the canon of its classic works. That canon changes over time, depending in part on whether the discipline is
engaged in the practice of normal or revolutionary science (Kuhn, 1970). In
moments of revolutionary science, the discipline of sociology has frequently reached
out to incorporate new or forgotten gures (for example, Parsonss reintroduction of
Weber in the 1930s and the collective effort to incorporate Marx in the 1960s). This
reclamation is currently under way in the burgeoning of feminist-inspired research of
the last two decades (Arni and Mueller, 2004; Broschart, 1991a, b; Collins, 1990;
Costin, 1983; Deegan, 1988, 1991, 2002a, 2002b; Deegan and Rynbrandt, 2002;
Elshtain, 2002; Fish, 1981, 1985; Fitzpatrick, 1990; Grant, Stalp, and Ward, 2002; Hill,
1989, 2005; Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale, 2001; Hoecker-Drysdale, 1994, 2000; Keith,
1991; Lemert, 1995, 2002; Lemert and Bhan, 1998; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley,
1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2006; McDonald, 1994, 1998; Reinharz, 1992, 1993;
Rosenberg, 1982; Rynbrandt, 1999; Seigfried, 1996, 1999; Sklar, 1995; Thomas and
Kukulan, 2004).
In making our selection, we have been guided by Dorothy E. Smiths conception
that a sociology is a systematically developed consciousness of society and of social
relations (1987:2). By systematically developed consciousness, we mean that the
person doing the thinking is doing so with a view to understanding society, and that
understanding nds expression in an ability to identify and relate the parts that constitute
society and social relations. The parts that seem essential to any social theory are some
sense of (1) the fundamental organization of society, (2) the nature of the human being,
(3) the relation between ideas and materiality, (4) the purpose and methods appropriate
to social-science study, and (5) a denition of the social role of the sociologist. The
women whose theories we describe developed such an understanding, and that understanding is essentially feminist. And this fact adds a sixth point to be looked for in their
understanding of society and social relations: their articulation of a principle from which
to judge the essential fairness of the society in place.
By describing these theories as feminist, we mean that from the vantage point of
contemporary feminist sociological theory, we recognize certain themes and concerns
central to the theories of these women. These include (1) the theorists awareness of her
gender and her stance in that gender identity as she develops her sociological theory,
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H ARRIET M ARTINEAU
A Biographical Sketch
Harriet Martineau was born on June 12, 1802, in Norwich,
England. The sixth of eight children in a business family of
comfortable means and of the liberal Unitarian faith,
Harriet, as a child, was given as good an education as her
brothers. An able student, she turned eagerly to scholarship,
not only because of its intrinsic appeal, but also as a respite from her childhood
shyness and from the deafness that overcame her in early adolescence. She had an
extraordinary facility for writing and began publishing in 1820, writing on womens
unequal treatment in education and religion for the Unitarian journal The Repository.
The failure of the family business left her penniless in 1829. Faced with the
choice of earning herand her mothersliving as a seamstress or as a writer, she
chose the latter, settling on a plan for writing in which she would educate the public,
in a pleasing and acceptable form, in the principles of the emerging discipline of
sociology. Between 1832 and 1834, she wrote didactic novels in the series,
Illustrations of Political Economy. The series was enormously successful, averaging
10,000 copies a month at its height and outselling even Dickens. The success of
this venture won her nancial independence, fame, and political inuence.
In 1834, Martineau followed this enormously successful venture into public
education with more theoretical work: she drafted the rst text on sociological
research techniques, How to Observe Morals and Manners (which was published in
1838). Between 1834 and 1836, she applied and expanded these research strategies
in an extensive eld study of American society, published in 1836 in three volumes
as Society in Americathough she had wanted it titled Theory and Practice of
Society in America to better capture the intent of her social-science project. By
(2) an awareness of the situatedness of her analysis and of the situatedness of the vantage points of others, (3) a consistent focus on the lives and work of women, (4) a critical concern with the practices of social inequality, and (5) a commitment to the practice
of sociology in pursuit of social amelioration.
Harriet Martineau (18021876)
As recent feminist research shows (Annandale, 2009; Boucher, 2006; Broschart, 2005;
Deegan, 1991, 2008; Hill, 1989; Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale, 2001; Hoecker-Drysdale,
1994, 2000, 2002, 2005; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, 2001b, 2005;
Rossi, 1973; Yates, 1985), Harriet Martineau indisputably belongs in that founding generation of sociologists usually represented by Comte, Spencer, and Marx, thinkers who
undertook the ambitious task of delineating an intellectual undertaking that would systematically and scientically study human society.
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1837, her reputation as Britains preeminent social analyst led to a request from her
publishers that she become editor of a proposed new periodical to treat of
philosophical principles, abstract and applied, of sociology (cited in HoeckerDrysdale, 1994:7071).1 Personal uncertainty and family pressure led Martineau to
refuse the offer, but she continued her projects of social research and of popularizing
sociology. In 1853 she published an extensively edited English translation of Comtes
Positive Philosophy, a version he so approved that he substituted it, translated back
into French, for his original edition. It is only in this relationship to Comte that,
until recently, Martineaus name survived in the record of sociologys history. But
the claim may indeed be made that she is the rst sociologistsociologys
founding mother.
Martineau would write for the rest of her life for her living, for social reputation, and for political inuence. She published more than seventy volumes in many
genres, including adult ction, childrens stories, poetry, history, religious tracts,
autobiography, literary criticism, and social and political analysis. She also wrote
more than 1,500 newspaper columns.
Despite this grueling writing schedule, Martineau was not a recluse. She traveled extensively in Britain, the United States, and the Middle East. She spoke and
traveled on behalf of innumerable public causes, including womens rights and the
abolition of slavery. A prominent feminist thinker, she led a busy social life and was
connected to the signicant British intellectuals of her day.
The quality that comes through most strongly as we study her life and writings is her valor in the face of deafness, poor health, nancial vulnerability, and the
disadvantages of being a woman making her way from modest beginnings on her
own in nineteenth-century England. Harriet Martineau was determined to make the
best of what life had dealt her, and she did so with enormous discipline, considerable talent, and a capacity for joy in the details of her daily experiences. She died
on June 27, 1876, at the home she had earned for herselfThe Knoll, Ambleside,
in Englands Lake District.
The Social Role of the Sociologist
Martineaus rst venture into this new science was an attempt to popularize political
economy, an intellectual forerunner both of economics and sociology (a science which
is, as both Comte and Spencer later also portray it, about material and moral existence).
Between 1832 and 1834 she published twenty-ve didactic novels in a series called
Illustrations of Political Economy, intended to teach the principles of the new science
of society to a general middle-class and working-class readership through the medium of
stories (often set in some distant or exotic place); Martineau concluded each volume
with a summary of the principles of the new science that shaped her plot. The role of
1The phrase to treat of philosophical principles, abstract and applied, of sociology (italics added) is from two letters from
Harriet to her brother James, December 12 and 21, 1837 (as cited in Hoecker-Drysdale, 1994:77). Although Comte is
conventionally seen as inventing the word sociology, Martineaus use here shows that the term had general currency in the
1830s and that her usage, together with Comtes, may reect some emerging consensus about the name for the new eld.
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sociologist as that of public educator, and dened her Martineau saw audience democratically and inclusivelythe educated intelligentsia like herself, the political class of
Britain, the ordinary working people of both the middle and working classes, women,
children (by means of a popular series of childrens stories), her public in America
(where since 1837 her popularity had been enormous), feminists and abolitionists on
both sides of the Atlantic, evenin what must be a sociological rstthe disabledin
this case, those who, like her, were deaf (1830/1836).
Despite this project of making sociology popular, Martineau held that the formulation of sociology, its subject matter and its method, should be developed in a disciplined and systematic way:
In an attempt to develop any science, whether deductive or inductive, the very rst
step . . . is to dene your subject methodically, to lay down the denition of your
terms and instruments, and to ascertain what are the principles upon which the science
essentially turns.
(Martineau, cited in Hoecker-Drysdale, 1994:112)
The Organization of Society
Sociologys subject matter, for Martineau, is social life in societyits patterns, causes,
consequences, and problems. Like Comte and Spencer, she chooses society, understood as
roughly equivalent to a nation state or politico-cultural entity, as the object for sociological investigation, and believes that the life of any society is inuenced by general social
laws, including the principle of progress, the emergence of science as the most advanced
product of human intellectual endeavor, and the signicance of population dynamics and
the natural environment. But for Martineau, the most important law of social life is that
the great ends of human association aim above all to the grand one,the only general
one, . . . human happiness (1838b:12). This is the principle by which she judges the
essential fairness of society. She argues that a system of social arrangements is conducive
to human happiness to the extent that it allows individuals to realize their basic human
nature as autonomous moral and practical agents. The opposite of autonomy is domination, the enforced submission of ones will to another (1838a:411).
Morals and Manners
Sociologys project is, thus, to assess the extent to which a people develop morals and
manners that produce or subvert this great end of all social life, human happiness. By
morals, Martineau means a societys collective ideas of prescribed and proscribed
behavior; by manners, its patterns of action and association. The principle that the aim
of human association is human happinessfor Martineau as much a law of nature as
any of the others, that is, one to which societies should conform if they are to progress
distinguishes her sociology from that of Comte and Spencer, giving her theory of society a critical tone essentially absent from their theories. She shares that critical posture
with Marx, although his theory would focus on class injustice and be militant, whereas
hers would be woman-centered and reformist.
Martineaus sociology, unlike that of Comte and Spencer, is interested much less
in building a model of an ideal-typical, ahistorical, generalized social system or
creating an abstract typology of societies in terms of their stages of development.
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Rather, she chooses to study the fundamental organization of society in the actual patterns of human relationships and activities, in historically developed societies
England, Ireland, the United States, and those of the Middle East. In the truest sense of
the term, she is a qualitative, comparative sociologist. In her analysis, the actions and
interactions of a society can be classied as relating to various institutional zones
government, economy, law, education, marriage and family, religion, communication,
popular culture, and so on. But social activities can also be constructed less formally, as
the uid relational tissue or texture of social life. Thus, Martineau studies hospitality,
travel, colloquialisms, attitudes toward money and toward nature, decorum and entertainment, childrens comportment, norms of housing, relations around sexuality, and so
on. The life of each society in its uniqueness from, as well as its similarities to, other
societies is her immediate subject of attention.
Anomaly
Together with this descriptive task, Martineau wishes to analyze each society in terms of
its general economic and moral well-being. She sets out to discover the moral principles
that the societys members have collectively set up for themselves, their cultural aspirations or Morals. The well-being of a society is in part to be assessed in terms of the
alignment between moral codes and actual behaviors or manners. Martineau calls a misalignment between a societys morals or ideals and its manners or everyday practices an
anomaly. In Society in America (183637), she identies four anomalies that she feels
will eventually disrupt U.S. societythat is, four ways the societys practices do not
meet its stated ideals of assuring all individuals the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. These anomalies are the institution of slavery, the unequal status of
women, the pursuit of wealth, and the fear of public opinion. She tries to ascertain a
societys progress or malaise in terms of the degree to which it promotes autonomy or
allows domination; she develops three measures of this progress: (1) the condition of
the less powerfulwomen, racial minorities, prisoners, servants, those in need of charity; (2) cultural attitudes toward authority and autonomy; (3) the extent to which all people are provided with the necessities for autonomous moral and practical action. In this
last measure, Martineau links ideas and materiality.
Methods
Things and Sympathy
This concern with issues of measurement is part of Martineaus deep interest in methods
for research and for sound scientic thinking. In How to Observe Morals and Manners
(1838b), she focuses more sharply on the research work of the social scientist and develops the rst methods text in the history of sociology. Again she believes everyone capable
of instruction in social scientic procedures of observation, and she takes as her audience
the person in everyday life who in the role of traveler wants to make informed observations about society. In How to Observe, Martineau gives instruction in the appropriate attitude of the sociologist toward the research experience, in problems of sampling, and in the
identication of social indicators. She also develops the rst guidelines for the practice of
interpretive sociology. She argues that the sociologist must try to develop a sympathetic
understanding as a strategy for discovering the meanings of an activity for the actorsfor
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actions and habits do not always carry their moral impress visibly to all eyes (1838b:17).
To overcome problems of sampling, the sociologist must look for things that represent
the collectivity. In a passage that anticipates Durkheims much later statement (Rules of
Sociological Method, 1895/1982), she says that one must begin the inquiry into morals
and manners with the study of THINGS . . . facts to be collected from architectural
remains, epitaphs, civic registers, national music or any other of the thousand manifestations of the common mind which may be found among every people (1838b:63). She
goes on to elaborate strategies for eld work, including a diary of ones views, a journal of
ones observations, a notebook for recording events. This concern with disciplined
research is sustained after the American investigation in all her other sociological investigations. In the detail of her directives and her application of these directives in social
research, Martineau is much more advanced methodologically than Comte or Spencer, and
she anticipates the work of the next generation of academically based or trained sociologists, both male and female. If Martineau is the founder of a feminist sociology, then that
sociology is to be both theoretical and rmly grounded in empirical research.
Feminism
Martineaus feminist approach to social analysis is evident in Society in America
(183637) in her pervasive interest in and investigation of the conditions of womens
lives. She makes the relational facts of marriage in the United States a key index of the
moral condition of that society (her conclusions are pessimistic). The enslavement of the
African-American population is her second key index, and she does not miss the significance of the interplay of gender and race. For Martineau, the domination of women
closely parallels the domination of slaves. Like the slave, the woman is describedeven
to herselfas being indulged, but indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice.
Her case differs from that of the slave, as the principle, just so far as this; that the indulgence is large and universal, instead of petty and capricious. In both cases, justice is
denied on no better plea than the right of the strongest (183637:II:227).
In her writing and research after the study of U.S. society, Martineau continued
this woman-centered sociology with investigations of womens education, family, marriage and the law, violence against women, the tyranny of fashion, the inhumanity of the
Arab harem, the inhumanity of the British treatment of prostitution, and in study after
study, the nature of womens paid work, in terms of its brutally heavy physical demands
and wretchedly low wages. Her particular focus was on the wage labor of working-class
womenin factories, in agriculture, in domestic service. In these studies, she brings
together the double oppressions of class and gender.
Martineau did not restrict the sociology she was developing to womens issues. She
expanded her analytic efforts to an enormous number of other topics. She continued her
comparative case studies with eld research in Ireland and in the Middle East; the latter
research was published in the three-volume work Eastern Life: Present and Past in 1848.
Later, Martineau wrote about the origins and functions of religion; crime and its punishment; the lives of the poor; labor conicts; colonialism and war; illness, both physical
and mental; and health care practices related to illness. Her sociological perspective,
though anchored in her gendered life experience and permeated by a woman-centered
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sensibility, did not produce only a sociology of gender. It is a general sociology with theoretical relevance for all aspects of social life.
To some extent, the most basic connection of Martineaus sociology and her feminism was her understanding of herself as a gendered being in a world in which gender
mattered and in which the fact that she was a woman would always frame others
response to her and her work. Her consciousness of this gender framing and, consequently, of a particular duty to women is visible from her very rst publications
Female Writers on Practical Divinity (1822) and On Female Education (1823)to
her great achievements, Society in America (183637) and How to Observe Morals and
Manners (1838b). She opens Society in America by answering the charge that her being
a woman has made her research difcultIn this I do not agree. I am sure, I have seen
much more of domestic life than could possibly have been exhibited to any gentleman
traveling through the country. The nursery, the boudoir, the kitchen are all excellent
schools in which to learn the morals and manners of a people (183637:I:xiii).
In the end, Harriet Martineau was defeated by the very issue she knew to be inseparable from others reactions to her workher gender. Although she worked with modesty, discipline, and prodigious productivity to prove her worth as a human being and a
woman, and although she maintained a public reputation as a social scientist, political
advocate, and intellectual in her lifetime, at her death the patriarchal currents in both
general intellectual life and in sociology would ood in to defeat her. The record of her
achievement would be washed away almost without trace in the century in which the
eld in which she had been so creative and dedicatedsociologywould emerge as a
distinct scholarly discipline.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (18601935)
In her analytic writings, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, more than any other female sociologist of the classic period, approximates in tone and intention the work of her male contemporaries in sociologyDurkheim (see Chapter 7), Weber (see Chapter 8), Simmel
(see Chapter 9), Mead (see Chapter 15), and Park (see Chapter 2). Gilmans project was
to p…
