How to Observe Morals and Manners
By Harriet Martineau
How to Observe Morals and Manners is a sociological treatise on methods of observing manners and morals written by Harriet Martineau in 1837–8 after a tour of America. She stated that she wasn’t looking for fodder for a book but also privately remarked, “I am tired of being kept floundering among the details which are all a Hall, and a Trollope (writer of Domestic Manners of the Americans) can bring away.” Unlike Victorian prescriptive handbooks of how societies ought to behave, Martineau focuses on observing locals on their terms and emphasizes the need to practice cultural relativism when observing other people. Martineau combined what she called manners and morals.
She states, “Manners have not been treated separately from Morals in any preceding divisions of the objects of the traveller’s observation. The reason is that manners are inseparable from morals, or, at least, cease to have meaning when separated”. This is distinctive against Mary Wollstonecraft, who, in her preface to A Vindication of the Rights of Women, stated that “Manners and morals are so nearly allied that they have often been confounded; but, though the former should only be the natural reflection of the latter, yet, when various causes have produced factitious and corrupt manners, which are very early caught, morality becomes an empty name.”
Read or download Book
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau (12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was an English social theorist who is often regarded as the first female sociologist.
Biography
She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious, and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her job and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised “focusing on all [society’s] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions”. She applied a thorough analysis of women’s status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her “a born lecturer and politician… less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation.”
Her lifelong commitment to the abolitionist movement has seen Martineau’s celebrity and achievements remain remarkably relevant to American institutions of higher learning, such as Northwestern University with its Methodist foundations. When Wendell Phillips unveiled a statue of Martineau in December 1883 at the Old South Church in Boston, he referred to her as the “greatest American abolitionist.” Martineau’s statue was gifted to Wellesley College in 1886.
Harriet Martineau
