Anneke, Mathilde Franziska b.April 3, 1817; Leveringhausen, Westphalia d. November 25, 1884; Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The most important German American social activist, feminist, educator, and writer of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Moderately successful as a journalist and dramatist before her political career, Anneke was one of the prominent women among the Forty-Eighters.
She married the former artillery lieutenant Fritz Anneke in 1847 and through him came in contact with the Cologne Socialist circle. With him and all by herself while he was in prison, she wrote, edited, and printed the Neue Kolnis- che Zeitung (New Cologne Newspaper), a working-class daily. When the censors closed down the paper, she reopened it as the Frauen-Zeitung (Women’s Journal), only to see it closed down again. The An- nekes escaped from Germany in 1849 and eventually arrived in Milwaukee, where in 1852 Mathilde Anneke started editing the Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung (German Women’s Newsletter), the first feminist U.S. periodical. She also published the diary she had kept during the 1849 campaign as Mem- oiren einer Frau aus dem badisch-pfalzischen Feldzuge (A Woman’s Memoir of the Campaign in Baden and the Palatinate), wrote short stories and essays for newspapers, and saw her pre-1848 stage success, Oithono oder die Tempelweihe (O., or the Dedication) produced in Milwaukee. Of major importance were her contact and cooperation with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which led to her appearance as speaker at the 1853 Seneca Falls Conference of women’s rights activists.The outbreak of the American Civil War found Anneke and her family in Switzerland en route to Italy, where her notoriously improvident husband had hoped to join Giuseppe Garibaldi. He returned to the United States immediately for a tumultuous career during the war. Mathilde Anneke remained in Switzerland and supported her family by writing correspondence and reports for German newspapers like the liberal Augsburger Allgemeine (Augsburger Gazette), based on letters she received from the United States.
She also wrote and published magazine stories. These stories often contained interesting heroines, some of them slave women. Doubly enslaved as African Americans and as women, they actively fought for their own freedom, transgressing the borderlines set by, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s female characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.After the close of the war, Anneke returned to Milwaukee with her three surviving children, where she started her last major project, a women’s academy. She had realized that women could only hope for equality in their lives and workplaces if their level of education and their training compared favorably to that of men. She directed this academy and spoke and wrote on behalf of women’s rights and emancipation until her death.
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also Forty-Eighters; Milwaukee; Slavery in German American and German Texts
References and Further Reading
Gebhardt, Manfred. Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Berlin: Neues Leben, 1988.
Steucher, Dorothea Diver. “Double Jeopardy: Nineteenth Century German-American Woman Writers.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1981.
Wagner, Maria. “Mathilde Anneke's Stories of Slavery in the German-American Press.” MELUS 6, no. 4 (1979): 9-21.