like there comes a point where you think something is fundamentally wrong with you. and then it turns out it’s just Friday and you haven’t washed your hair in three days and maybe you’re also just a little lonely and the combination of all three of those things is whittling a hole into your chest every time you breathe. but also the sun’s up. and you’ve survived everything so far, so you’ll survive this too, even if it hurts, even if you have to survive it many times.
“At one point in her observations of American women [Harriet] Martineau notes that “the prosperity of America is a circumstance unfavourable to its women. It will be long before they are put to the proof as to what they are capable of thinking and doing.” She contrasts this circumstance with the reality confronting Englishwomen, thousands of whom were sorely tested by economic adversity and its effect upon their families’ income following the crash of 1825. Martineau herself must be counted among such Englishwomen, for it was the collapse of her father’s business in 1825 that triggered her efforts to establish herself as a writer, and it was continued economic need that kept her pen at work each day from early morning to midafternoon for years on end. In the course of that long writing career she touched on political and literary issues of her day; was the first to translate and abridge Comte’s Positive Philosophy; penned numerous pamphlets on political economy in an effort to reach a wide audience of English workers; wrote several stories for children and a volume on “household education” that urged a more rational form of child care; and proposed the publication of a 200-volume library of good cheap books for the working classes, of which 140 were actually published. She was an ardent defender of women’s rights throughout her life, though her plan to found a journal dedicated to the cause of women did not succeed. Long before Marx and Engels were to depict women as household slaves oppressed by the bourgeois patriarchal family system analogous to the oppression of the proletariat by the ruling class, Martineau wrote of the analogy between the position of women in England and America and that of the American slave. She showed a careful eye for the impact of marriage on American women, noting the contrast between their healthy vigor before marriage and their rapid aging and the shallowness of their lives thereafter. She showed a sociological sensitivity to the consequences of the universal social pressure in America on women toward marriage and motherhood, commenting drily that “where all women have only one serious object, many of them will be unfit for the obiect.” She was astonished by the pervasive influence of religion on American women, though she drops the acid comment that
their charity is overflowing, if it were but more enlightened; and it may be supposed that they could not exist without religion. It appears to superabound; but it is not usually of a healthy character.
Martineau made countless friends and had innumerable admirers during her American tour, only to lose many of them, and to confirm the views of those who denounced her support of abolitionism during her visit, when her book on America was published. Her hopes for the new nation remained high, but she feared that the cancer of slavery might yet rip the society apart or so corrupt it that it would be deflected from fulfilling its own professed destiny as the land of the free. She put a sensitive finger on the same character tendencies in the American that de Tocqueville in her own era and Riesman more than a century later pointed out, chief among them the overwhelming concern of Americans for the opinions of others. She interpreted this “other-directedness” as the reflection of an open society, where social status must be achieved. English men and women, by contrast, in a society where social position was more apt to be ascribed at birth, could indulge in greater eccentricity and individuality.
Crusty, garrulous, a prodigious writer, a forerunner of the discipline of sociology not yet born, Harriet Martineau stands as an early ardent defender of women’s rights, the first woman sociologist, and a sympathetic observer of the social condition of women in a society that proclaimed freedom and justice for all but did not grant it to more than half its population.”
-Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir
Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.
you can put whatever you want here. more links, quotes, anything.
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