ANNEKE, MATHILDE-FRANZISKA

ANNEKE, MATHILDE-FRANZISKA (Mathilde-Franziska Giesler; 1817–1884), German writer, publisher, educator, and women's rights activist.

Born on 3 April 1817 in Ober-Leveringhausen near Blankenstein on the Ruhr River in Germany, Mathilde-Franziska Anneke was the eldest of the twelve children of the bourgeois family of Karl Giesler, a city councillor and tax assessor, and his wife, Elisabeth. Only one year after marrying Alfred von Tabouillot in 1836, and with an infant daughter, she asked for a divorce, having been abused by her husband. Through a long fight in court, she experienced the discrimination against women in the legal system. She became a writer and soon made a reputation as an advocate for women's rights. In her book Das Weib im Konflikt mit den socialen Verhältnissen (1847; Woman in conflict with social conditions) she defended Louise Aston, a divorced woman who had been expelled from Berlin for her advocacy of gender equality and for "unwomanly" behavior.

In 1846 she joined oppositional groups in Münster. There she met the former Prussian officer Fritz Anneke, who had been discharged from the army for his "democratic leanings." They married in June 1847 and moved to Cologne. Their home became a meeting place for liberal poets and writers such as Ferdinand Freiligrath, and the Annekes helped to found the revolutionary Kölner Arbeiterverein (Cologne Workers' Association). Fritz Anneke was unhappy about the political passivity of the association, but he did not openly oppose its leader, Andreas Gottschalk. When both men were arrested in early July 1848, a group led by Karl Marx took over and tried to bring the association more in line with Cologne's Democratic Society.

Her husband's arrest did not stop Mathilde Anneke's work on a newspaper project that had been her idea. The Neue Kölnische Zeitung "for the enlightenment of the working people" was first published on 10 September 1848 but was soon suppressed. Anneke continued it as the Frauenzei-tung (Women's newspaper). It was not strictly a feminist paper, but this way Anneke hoped to circumvent censorship and at the same time introduce the question of women's rights into the democratic movement. The newspaper was published earlier than Louise Otto's Frauen-Zeitung, making it the first women's rights periodical in Germany. After only two issues the paper, which had advocated radical ideas such as the separation of school and church, was suppressed. In October 1848 the Neue Kölnische Zeitung was allowed to resume publication. Marx made it the successor to his Neue Rheinische Zeitung when the latter was prohibited in May 1849.

Fritz Anneke, who had been released in December 1848, joined the revolutionary forces in Baden and the Palatine in mid-May. The next month Mathilde Anneke left Cologne and served her husband as an unarmed orderly. In Memoiren einer Frau aus dem badisch-pfälzischen Feldzuge (A woman's memoirs of the Baden-Palatinate campaign), published in 1853, she explained why she as a woman had been on the battlefield. When the Rastatt fortress surrendered in July 1849, the Annekes fled Germany. Later that year they emigrated to the United States, where they were among the most prominent Forty-Eighters.

The Annekes settled in Milwaukee in March 1850 and soon became active in political and cultural affairs. She restarted the publication of her Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a "Central Organ of the Organizations for the Improvement of the Position of Women," in March 1852 and continued the publication after the family moved to Newark, New Jersey. It had up to two thousand subscribers. Anneke published translations of articles by the leading American suffragists and also reprinted parts of her own works. Poor health and family responsibilities forced her to stop its publication in 1855. Three years later the family moved back to Milwaukee. From 1860 to 1865 Mathilde Anneke lived in Switzerland, working for American and German newspapers, while her husband fought in the Civil War. She returned to Milwaukee with Cäcilie Kapp, the daughter of a prominent educator. Together they founded a boarding and day school especially for girls—the Töchter-Institut—which closed after Anneke's death on 25 November 1884.

Mathilde Anneke was an outspoken freethinker, opponent of slavery, and supporter of radical democratic movements. While living in New Jersey she joined the American suffrage movement, gave speeches in many cities in the Northeast and Midwest, and became friends with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffrage leaders. When the movement split in 1869, Anneke sided with Anthony, Stanton, and others who formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Never being fluent in English somewhat limited her activities, but as vice-president for the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association she was an important adviser to the national leadership and became one of the best-known speakers of the movement.

Her feminism, based on the ideas of the German Enlightenment and on idealism, was radically democratic and antireligious; she fought both temperance and nativism. For her the liberation of women was part of a much larger struggle for democracy, equality, and social justice. In 1930 the League of Women Voters honored Mathilde-Franziska Anneke along with seventy other women—among them Anthony, Stanton, and Jane Addams—as a pioneer of women's rights activism in the United States.

See alsoFeminism; Suffragism.

bibliography

Brancaforte, Charlotte Lang. Mathilde Franziska Anneke: An Essay on Her Life. Milwaukee, 1998.

Bus, Annette. "Mathilde Anneke and the Suffrage Movement." In The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, edited by Charlotte L. Brancaforte, 79–92. New York, 1989.

Wagner, Maria. Mathilde Franziska Anneke in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten. Frankfurt, 1980. Includes long excerpts of letters, articles, and other documents.

Andreas Etges