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Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, edited by Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-- Drysdale. New York: Routledge, 2001. 233 pp. $80.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8153-3451-6.
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America has been cited innumerable times in many disciplines in every decade since its publication in 1835. By contrast, Harriet Martineau's Society in America, published in the same decade of the 1830s and based similarly on observations of American society from a European perspective (French and English), has been largely neglected in intellectual history until late in the twentieth century. This has been an egregious neglect, nowhere more so than in sociology, because Martineau's perspective is more sociological than Tocqueville's.
Seymour Lipset's 1962 abridgement of Martineau's Society in America was the first sign of belated recognition of Harriet Martineau. In his introductory essay, Lipset characterized Martineau's 1838 volume, How to Observe Manners and Morals, as the "first book on the methodology of social research." A decade later, I included a biographic essay and brief selections from Society in America in the 1973, The Feminist Papers, acknowledging Harriet Martineau as "the first woman sociologist." When I was asked to suggest several people appropriate to a named chair as a professor of sociology, Harriet Martineau headed my list, and my department and the university agreed. But it has only been in the 1990s that any significant recognition has been given to Martineau, with the formation in the late 1990s of a new section on the History of Sociology in both the American Sociological Association and...