Introducing a new occasional online column by Professor Ampersand: designed to discuss words, language and related matters of interest and/or concern to the Left. My aim is to discuss the usage and origins of words, their change of meaning as time goes by but also, importantly, the connections and interactions of these words with other words.
This will include not only the written but also the spoken word. Word4Word is not a dictionary. Indeed, dictionary definitions can be rather limited. It might best be regarded as an expanded, historically and materially based radical compendium.
My model, if I have one, is Keywords by Raymond Williams, first published in 1976. Language is central to our raison d’etre. It is how we communicate our ideas and actions. It is therefore important to attempt to achieve maximum clarity and understanding.
Today’s word: Emancipation
A word that is regularly used nowadays. In most cases its use is clear and has the benefit of being wide-ranging. This wasn’t always the case. Its origins are in Ancient Rome and the verb form was emancipare being an element of Roman Law specific to either putting a son beyond parental authority which often happened when the father died (mothers rarely counted) or the relatively rare occasion of freeing a slave.
Our word today derives from ex (‘out’, ‘away’) and mancipare (‘deliver’, ‘transfer’). However, it wasn’t used by the Romans in the general sense of freeing slaves en masse. As theirs was a slave society the Romans had little, if any, enthusiasm for this although a favoured individual slave might be freed, the verb form being manumiterre. The noun form, manumission, is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but I suspect is little used today.
The English word was first used in the 17th century as part of a developing discourse around issues of religious tolerance (particularly towards Catholics) and anti-slavery. In France émancipation came into circulation around 1630.
It soon became a central element in Enlightenment language and thinking: Immanuel Kant thought of humanity’s ‘coming of age’ as the emancipation from ignorance and superstition as he put it. By the late 18th century or early to mid 19th century, emancipation was being used regularly in a manner entirely recognisable to us today.
In 1828 the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote ‘What is the task of our time? It is emancipation. Not just the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the West Indians, the Blacks and the oppressed people of that kind, but rather the emancipation of the entire world and particularly of Europe.’ However, despite the apparent universality, Heine makes no mention of women.
The outlawing of slavery in the British Empire was known as The Emancipation Act of 1833; the USA followed in 1862-3 with its Emancipation Proclamation. Karl Marx uses emancipation as a key term when discussing the position of Jews in his ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843). In this text Marx stressed the political emancipation of the Jews and their equal rights. Unlike Kant, Marx argued that emancipation had to connect to the real world of human beings and their social and economic conditions.
Women finally entered the frame in 1850 when emancipation was used to refer to those exceptional women (usually – but not always – from the upper and middle class) who freed themselves, one way or another, from the conventions and bonds of patriarchy. In Britain in 1891 the Women’s Emancipation Union was established by Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy following a notorious court case when a certain Edmund Jackson abducted his estranged wife to enforce his so-called conjugal rights (only made illegal in England in 1970!).
Despite the emancipation of women becoming a 19th century buzzword, movement was glacial, certainly if the extension of the voting franchise is any criterion to go by. The Women’s Emancipation Bill in 1919 introduced by the Labour Party as a private members' bill passed in the House of Commons but fell when it reached the Lords. The rest is well-known: the full franchise was only won by women in Britain in 1928, while women in Switzerland had to continue campaigning till 1971!
In the last 50 years or so, emancipation appears to have taken something of a back seat and has been replaced by liberation. Perhaps the latter term suggests an immediacy and stress on self-activity which emancipation now lacks (although the term self-emancipation may overcome this objection).
Hence, a number of anti-colonial movements have used liberation in their titles e.g. The National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria while the upsurge in feminist activity beginning in the Sixties took the broad label of the Women’s Liberation Movement, often shortened to Women’s Lib.