Emma Martin (feminist)

Emma Martin (* 1812 near Bristol , Great Britain; † October 8, 1851 in Finchley Common near London ) was an English social reformer and feminist - and thus in her time, when "the public tongue of women was in the mouths of men", as her comrade Holyoake wrote, also a pioneer.

life and work

The daughter of a cooper (barrel maker) is brought up in a strictly Baptist way and develops the corresponding sense of mission. Initially the operator of a girls' boarding school and from 1835 editor of the short-lived Bristol Litary magazine , her encounter with the Owen disciple Alexander Campbell and various legal proceedings against Holyoake and Southwell for blasphemy pulled her on a freethinking , later also socialist and feminist course. She left her husband Isaac Luther Martin (1839) and became a kind of traveling preacher. She "has to fight for her existence, lives on alms, carts her children around with her .. (..) .., is chased from town to town and harassed by pastors and magistrates." She condemns the sentences for the heretics mentioned and for this he is repeatedly imprisoned.

Martin equally condemns the fetters of religion (patriarchal God), marriage (no self-determination) and the factory. As a bold, astute, witty and quick-witted speaker, she is admired by some and hated by others. Often times she is condemned as a witch or whore of the devil in turn. In Edinburgh in 1845 she barely escaped being stoned with a daughter. Physically and financially on the ground, she settled in London that same year , where she lived (unmarried and until her death) with the kindred engineer Joshua Hopkins. In 1847 she gave birth to another daughter. Shortly thereafter, she trained as a midwife at the Royal Adelaide Hospital . She is now committed to self-determined women's medicine. At a time when female doctors were unthinkable, she also acted as a pioneer. She gave courses, founded a kind of union for nurses, sold workwear. But her own health was badly damaged. In 1840 she died of tuberculosis at the age of 39 . Her husband dies just a year later.

She enjoyed considerable esteem outside of the (socialist) workers' education associations and the circles around Owen and Holyoake. Harriet Martineau helped finance a memorial stone. Once considered the most important women's rights activist after Frances Wright , Emma Martin has been forgotten in the younger feminist movement.

Works

Baptism A pagan Rite , 1843 (Baptism as a pagan rite)
Tracts for the People , 1844
Punishment of Death ,? (about or against the death penalty)
A Miniature Treatise of some of the Most Common Female Complaints , 1848 (Brief Treatise on Some Common Female Complaints )

literature

George Jacob Holyoake: The last days of Mrs. Emma Martin: Advocate of free thought , J. Watson, London 1851, 8 pages
Barbara Taylor: Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century , Virago, London 1983, p.
Olive Banks: The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists , Volume I 1800-1930, New York 1985
Dominic Janes: Emma Martin and the manhandled womb in early Victorian England , in: A. Mangham and G. Depledge (Eds.): The Female Body in Medicine and Literature , Liverpool 2011, pages 107-118 (Liverpool University Press, ISBN 9781846314728 )

Individual evidence

^ Sixty Years of an Agitators Life , London 1892, Volume 1, Chapter XLI, also available online , accessed on July 29, 2011
^ Adrian Desmond / James Moore: Darwin , London 1991, quoted from the Rowohlt edition Hamburg 1994, page 361
↑ It has not infrequently attracted an audience of 3,000, write Desmond / Moore, 1994, p. 361
^ ^A ^b ^c Olive Banks New York 1985
↑ USA 1795-1852
↑ In it also "her inflammatory pamphlet Conversation on the Being of God , in which she claimed that evolution does not need a creator" (Desmond / Moore 1994 p. 361)
↑ Desmond / Moore (1994, p. 619) also note, referring to the year 1867: “Once it might have been Darwin's worst nightmare to appear in a criminal album like Holyoake's anti-church treatise Half-Hours with Freethinkers . Now his short biography was included as well as the life stories of Emma Martin, Robert Owen and Lucretius ... "

Web links

Emma Martin on Prayer (prayers)

personal data
SURNAME	Martin, Emma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English social reformer and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH	1812
PLACE OF BIRTH	at Bristol
DATE OF DEATH	October 8, 1851
Place of death	Finchley Common near London

[1] Sixty Years of an Agitators Life , London 1892, Volume 1, Chapter XLI, also available online , accessed on July 29, 2011

[2] Adrian Desmond / James Moore: Darwin , London 1991, quoted from the Rowohlt edition Hamburg 1994, page 361

[3] It has not infrequently attracted an audience of 3,000, write Desmond / Moore, 1994, p. 361

[Banks-4] A ^b ^c Olive Banks New York 1985

[5] USA 1795-1852

[6] In it also "her inflammatory pamphlet Conversation on the Being of God , in which she claimed that evolution does not need a creator" (Desmond / Moore 1994 p. 361)

[7] Desmond / Moore (1994, p. 619) also note, referring to the year 1867: “Once it might have been Darwin's worst nightmare to appear in a criminal album like Holyoake's anti-church treatise Half-Hours with Freethinkers . Now his short biography was included as well as the life stories of Emma Martin, Robert Owen and Lucretius ... "