Rewriting the past and present

At first glance, Harriet Martineau would seem to be a writer concerned more with the present than the past. After all, she was an outspoken commentator on the most important issues of her day, from the Crimean War to women’s employment opportunities. Yet for Martineau, current events and cultural practices were best understood within a historical context. From the outset of her career, she looked to the past to gauge the progress of modern society – both in Britain and abroad. Like other Whig historians of the period, she was guided by the belief that all human societies were advancing toward a more enlightened democratic state. ¹ Because Martineau’s view of the past was so contingent on her conception of the present and her vision of the future, she focused primarily on contemporary history writing. Martineau was interested in illuminating recent historical events as a way of coming to terms with rapid change in political, social, and economic institutions. Part cautionary tale, part triumphant narrative, contemporary history could be used to motivate the right kind of social change. As a radical, Martineau’s vision of the ‘right’ sort of transformation was premised on the decline of aristocratic privilege and the expansion of free markets and democratic opportunity. As we shall see in the discussion of Martineau’s feminism in Chapter 9, her conception of an egalitarian state was also predicated on the expansion of women’s rights. If, as she put it in Society in America, a crucial ‘test of civilisation’ was the ‘condition of that half of society over which the other half has power,’ then the history of women’s experiences must be recounted in order to assess the progress of society toward achieving this state of advanced civility. ²