Indeed!

That’s exactly what I was interested in: emancipation in the US was a formal proclamation that actually achieved pretty much nothing in real terms. We often have to look carefully at what such legal freedoms actually mean.

in which sense, of course, it gives us its end-in-beginning sense of ‘to enslave’.

Except in the quote I gave above, ‘a wife’s emancipating herself to another husband’.
Liberating indeed.

The more I think about “Emancipate” the more I am struck by the passivity of the concept. One is emancipated by another person’s act. One can liberate oneself, but not (I think) emancipate oneself.