Assembling Harriet Martineau's gender and health jigsaw

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 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

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

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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 biological 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 provides a glimpse of what could have been, had the intellectual 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, illhealth 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 powerlessness’ 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 illhealth) 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

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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 longterm 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 cohabitation of terms rather than as an oppositional either/or. Martineau's work was an early indication that, by troubling 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-

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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 community, 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

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distinct masculine and feminine virtues of hardy men and gentle women. The conditions of both women and slaves – Martineau was an outspoken abolitionist – were documented 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 condition I have witnessed’ (quoted in Thomas, 1985: 58). Opinion is divided on how far Deerbrook (1839) conveys a feminist message. Some maintain that it is successful (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 product 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 marriage 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 Illustrations 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 principles’, 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

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biology and everything to do with ‘the unequal development 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 livein governess. Thus the indefatigable devotion of governesses 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 particular concern for Martineau. Although there was widespread 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

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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 machines, 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 circumstances and, through this, their own health and wellbeing. 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 womenthe 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 embodied nature of experience; that is, what is social is simultaneously corporeal. This drew the body, or more accurately the embodied subject, to the heart of Martineau'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 hearing at the age of 12 and used an ear trumpet as an adult.4

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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).

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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 accompanies illness, especially its companion, pain. She anticipated 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-

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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 mesmerism. 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 nationwide 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 atmosphere, – 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

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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 adversaries 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 relationship. 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 metaphysical 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 substances’, 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 demonstrates 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 selfcommand 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

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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, passivity, 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 conventional 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 conceptualisations of (what became known as) sex and gender began with late twentieth-century identity politics, and that past conceptualisations were rigid and unyielding.

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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 sociological 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 consciousness 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, hypochondria 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 nineteenthcentury 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 differences 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

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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 Contagious 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; Oppenheim, 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 understanding 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 oppression – 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.

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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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