Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.

One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.

This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!

– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9

The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,

[A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.

Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.

The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.

While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.

Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.

The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.

Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.

The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.

In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

E

EMANCIPATE

She bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power. ‘I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?’

-Sojourner Truth speaking in 1851, as recalled by Matilda Gage in History of Woman Suffrage

Well in hand

Alas and alack, I have no Latin language linked tea-towel (or indeed any other lexical kitchenware). So I had to do some trans-linguistic dictionary groping (oh ho) to reveal that the verb ’emancipate’ can be broken down into not one but three etymological building blocks (oh, alright pedant, two words and one suffix).

Ahem. These are: ‘e-‘ (out of), ‘manus’ (hand), ‘capere’ (to capture, to seize). So to emancipate is, etymologically speaking, something like ‘to release something captured from your hand’. Its first meaning in the OED is ‘to release or set free (a child or a wife) from the patria potestas, the power of the pater familias‘. Most of those Latin words come back to the same idea: Big Daddy and his eternal potency, and it is here that, presumably, the ‘Emancipation of Women’ has its phrasal origins. To emancipate someone is to relinquish the (legal) power that you hold over them, and it is thus that, in its association with women’s rights, the word has come to be associated with first wave feminism and its fight for property rights, women’s suffrage and basic legal equality. It is presumably for this reason that it is no longer widely considered technically applicable to gender issues, as a quick look at Wikipedia will confirm.

Clemens in horto laborat

But emancipate also has a definitional cousin in the word ‘manumit’ (‘to set forth from one’s hand’), which means ‘to release from slavery’, and indeed, slavery – and emancipate‘s second definition – is where we must next turn. Of course the Romans who bandy these manii around were, if not exactly pioneers, at least great practitioners of the flesh trade. But, perhaps unexpectedly, they did have a sort of ‘liberal’ edge to their way of doing things: slaves could be legally freed, and, as ‘freedmen’, often enjoyed considerable socio-political power (the Vettii brothers in Pompeii were famous for having a rather rockin’ house).

Thus, emancipate‘s second meaning, ‘to set free from control; to release from legal, social or political restraint’, which, as the dictionary points out, has in modern use acquired a primary application to slavery, with ‘other uses felt to be transferred from this’. In ancient Rome, female slaves (‘libertae’), of course, had less options, and generally ended up marrying their former masters (oh, the liberalism), suggesting that they might need emancipation in the third sense – ‘to set free from intellectual or moral restraint’, and in fact getting into its fourth and final meaning, ‘to enslave’, via the explanatory quotation, ‘a wiues emancipating herself to another husband’. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

America, America

Here you are, love.

In the years following the Emancipation Proclamation of the early 1860s, which of course challenged the slavery widely practised by a more modern empire, emancipate starts to gain something of its modern sense, as the dictionary puts it, ‘primarily suggesting the liberation of slaves’. Turning briefly to said Emancipation Proclamation, it was an ambiguous document, widely criticized for freeing only those slaves its authors had no authority over and shying away from declaring slavery itself to be illegal. The more-than-hundred years of struggle leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prove the limits of technical ’emancipation’, and the battle that had to be fought over every remnant of restraint in American law, not least the abolition of slavery as a concept.

But where does this history take us, as followers of a gynocentric lexical trail? Well, one of emancipate‘s most interesting side-effects as a word-journey is to take us into the realms of historical figures who stood up for freedom in women’s rights as part of a wider struggle for racial – human – equality. These include Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton, alongside Sojourner Truth, ex-slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist (reported to have an ‘Amazonian’ form, for those following the progress of this series intently).

Whilst technically ’emancipated’ herself (although in practice anything but, forced due to a contextually ironic hand injury to continue working for her master after New York had finished emancipating slaves in 1827), Truth set about challenging the sexism and misogyny rife in white society alongside the need to abolish slavery. She highlighted in her most famous speech, ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ (1851) how plantation owners would savagely beat their female slaves while simultaneously offering white women a hand into their carriages and over ditches. Ideally positioned to turn upon both injustices, Truth herself expressed the frying pan-fire of emancipate‘s fourth meaning when she said that “Man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”

It is one of the recurring criticisms of modern feminism that it leaves groups behind. Emancipate is a word fraught with definitional hooks and barbs that the escapee can catch on – from legal to moral and social restraint, to, finally, re-enslaving. I chose the verbal sense for a reason.

NEXT: F is for … Female, actually. After the curveball of C Is For Crinoline, we’re going Obvious.