Harriet Martineau Quotes
Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.
Martineau, Harriet. Society in America. Vol. 3, Saunders and Otley, 1837, p. 116.
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote many books and essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic and feminine perspective, translated works by Auguste Comte, and earned enough to support herself by writing, a rare feat for a woman of her period. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed reading her and invited her to her coronation in 1838. Martineau said of her approach, "One must focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions." She believed thorough analysis was needed to understand women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician... less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation."
