Assembling Harriet Martineau's gender and health jigsaw

SynopsisHarriet Martineau maintained that health and the position of women were unfailing indicators of the underlying morals of nineteenth-century English society. However the connections between health and gender are underdeveloped in her work. Although we need to be wary of creating a neat feminist ‘gender and health jigsaw’ out of apparently unrelated pieces, I argue that a picture of this relationship is there to be developed. It suggests an alternative to the conventionally identified disembodied origins of sociology that were embodied from the start, but rendered invisible by male dominance of the intellectual agenda. The first piece of the jigsaw is Martineau's argument that women's health is socially, rather than biologically (or naturally) caused. The second is an awareness that illness throws the mind/body relationship into sharp relief. Joined together, these two pieces trouble the conventional association of health with ‘men, the mind, the social’ and illness with ‘women, the body, the natural’. This enables Martineau effectively to turn the subject of illness – arguably the quintessence of female oppression – into a medium of challenge to patriarchy a century or so before it became accepted practice within medical sociology and feminism.