Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Forgotten Women in the Study of Gender and Health

Abstract

This epigraph from a poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman neatly conveys the theme of this chapter; it is indeed hard to lift the weight of the many years whence the ‘habits, methods and ideas’ of male classical theorists have presided over social theory. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and the earlier Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) are the neglected contemporaries of the male theorists usually recognised as the originators of the classical sociological canon, such as Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Lester Ward and Max Weber. In this chapter, it is argued that an examination of their work provides a glimpse of how the sociology of health, illness and medicine might have been if the wider discipline of sociology had developed differently according to the precepts Martineau and Gilman endeavoured to bring to public attention. In particular, it proposes that as they grappled with the mind/body relationship in illness, especially as this concerned women, they advanced a nascent embodied sociology of health and illness and sociology of gender and health.