Mathilde Franziska Anneke:

The Thunderous Voice in Two Revolutions

Mathilde Franziska Anneke was a force of nature.

A revolutionary, a journalist, a fierce abolitionist, and a pioneering feminist whose life bridged two continents and two great struggles for freedom. Her story is of frontline activism, intellectual leadership, and an unwavering commitment to linking the fight against slavery with the fight for women's emancipation.

Her early life set the stage for her radicalism. Born into a wealthy Catholic family on April 3, 1817, in Sprockhövel, Germany (today Hiddinghausen, Westphalia, Prussia). Her parents were Karl Giesler (or Gieseler), a successful mine owner, and Elisabeth (Hülswitt) Giesler. The eldest of twelve children and influenced by the circle of her well educated left-leaning German parents, Mathilde was well educated in languages, literature, history, and classical studies. At 19, due to an investment loss, the guide slower family suffered a major financial loss. In order to recover from the loss, a wealthy wine merchant named Alfred von Tabouillot agreed to pay off the debt in return for Mathilde’s hand in marriage. Alfred was abusive and known to drink a lot. Within a year Mathilde with her infant daughter Johanna “Fanny” left Alfred, free and penniless, writing to support them. Giesler moved to Münster in 1839 and worked as a writer, publishing columns in periodicals, prayer, books, fiction and poetry. The grueling process of obtaining an official divorce (secured in 1841) made it clear that law and custom left women and children vulnerable.

The democratic revolutions ignited her spirit. She moved in radical circles and met her second husband in 1845, Friedrich (Fritz) Theodor Anneke, (a former Prussian artillery officer and communist). They married married on June 3, 1847. Bonded by the vision of a unified, democratic, and egalitarian Germany, a couple moved to cologne in the Rhine, Providence of Prussia. Together they founded the "Neue Kölnische Zeitung" newspaper. When Fritz was imprisoned for his revolutionary writings, she took over as sole editor and publisher, becoming one of the first women in Germany to run a political newspaper. Mathile didn't miss an issue.

Anneke published a feminist treatise, Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen (Woman in Conflict with Society). In the 1847 piece defending Berlin feminist Louise Aston. Mathilde argued that society, and especially the Catholic Church, perpetuated a version of marriage that enslaved women. From that time on she distanced herself from organized religion.

When Fritz was released and took command of a revolutionary artillery unit during the 1849 uprising in the Palatinate and Baden, Mathilde rode with the unit. She didn't fight with a sword, but as an official observer and courier, witnessing the brutal collapse of the revolution firsthand. This experience of fighting and losing for liberty became central to her identity.

Refugees of the Revolutions of 1848 (the Forty-Eighters), the Anneke family fled to the United States. Following other family members, they moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She immediately saw the parallel struggles. In 1852, she founded "Die Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung" (The German Women's Newspaper), one of the first woman-own feminist periodicals in the U.S. It was published in German to mobilize the large immigrant community. Mathilde argued that the subjugation of women and the enslavement of Africans were twin pillars of a corrupt, aristocratic social order.

She faced boycotts and resistance from male printers to the periodical. Anneke continued publication in New Jersey in 1852, but the Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung failed after a few years. Anneke continued to write for other German-language publications in the United States. During her time in new jersey, she lost four children, including her oldest fritz and three younger children. Her husband her son Percy and her daughter. Hertha returned to milwaukee in 1858 and her daughter Johanna left home.

Anneke met the Anglo-American abolitionist Mary Booth, and the two developed a close relationship. Anneke moved in with Booth in 1859, while Fritz returned to Europe to report on the war in Italy. There is some disagreement among scholars over how to characterize the relationship. Anneke and Booth did live together, pool their resources, raised each other's children, and express their passionate love for each other.

Anneke and Booth moved to Zürich in August 1860. They lived with Fritz until he moved back to the United States to fight in the American Civil War in 1861. Although the Annekes continued regular correspondence regularly, they never lived together again. Meanwhile, Anneke and Booth wrote abolitionist fiction together, raising three of their children. "Die Sclaven-Auction" (The slave auction) appeared serially in Didaskalia that year, and other collaborative works would follow. They often lacked financial support from their husbands and struggled to get paid for their writing. The two women had a health problems, often incurring debt to afford necessities. To receive medical care for tuberculosis, Booth finally convinced Anneke to return to the United States in summer to see her oldest daughter and receive medical care in 1865. Anneke was devastated by the separation. She was devastated to learn of Booth's death on April 11, 1865.

When Anneke returned to Milwaukee what's another female friend, Cäcilie Kappin 1865, they opened a private girls school called “Töchter-Institut” (Daughters’ Institute). It was also known as the Mädchen-Erziehungs-Anstalt von Cecilie Kapp. Anneke earned a respect in the community. Despite her radical views, some of milwaukee's most prominent German American families sent their daughters to the school.

Anneke went on national lecture tours to raise funds for the Sanitary Commission (a precursor to the Red Cross), after the Civil War. Her speeches masterfully connected the Union cause to the global fight for human dignity, drawing direct lines from the barricades of Baden to the battlefields of Antietam.

In the 1850s, Anneke had participated in when suffrage events and became more focused on that after the war. She was a crucial cultural and linguistic translator between the Anglo-American and German-American reform movements. She became a close colleague and friend of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Miller, and Lucy Stone. She often spoke at their conventions, with Anthony or Stanton summarizing her German speeches for the English-speaking audience.

At the inaugural meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, She was elected as a vice-president (representing Wisconsin) joining women who protested that the Fifteenth Amendment had not prohibited discrimination in voting law on the basis of sex as well as race. Woman suffrage was unpopular among men in the US, especially immigrant men, who associated it with temperance and Yankee Protestantism. Anneke found herself mediating between the organized suffrage movement and the immigrant community within which she felt comfortable. In 1876, she founded a women-only chapter of the International Workingmen's Association.[9] Although she occasionally gave speeches in English, she preferred to use German throughout her life.

"One Great Movement of Emancipation"

Anneke's thought was profound and radical for European women of time. Her perspective was uniquely international. She rejected single-issue activism. She argued that you could not consistently fight for the freedom of the enslaved while denying rights to women (and vice-versa). She saw all forms of legal and social subjugation as linked. In an 1869 speech, she declared that women's suffrage was the necessary "capstone of the great temple of human freedom" they were building. She was frustrated when some male abolitionists, after the Civil War, urged women to "wait their turn" and support Black male suffrage first. She believed this betrayed the universal principle of equality and fractured the movement. She understood the American struggle as part of a worldwide, century-long fight against monarchy, aristocracy, and inherited power structures.

Mathilde remain allowed critic, of any compromise on full equality until her death in 1884. This was in contrast to activists like Stanton and Anthony. Anneke remained steadfast in her radical, universalist principles. Mathilde Anneke died on November 25, 1884, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was buried in Milwaukee's Forest Home Cemetery.

Why She Stands Out

Among the Forty-Eighters, Mathilde Franziska Anneke is exceptional because she was a female leader in a male-dominated movement, carving out a space for feminist thought within the immigrant community. She was a primary actor, not a secondary figure. She wasn't just "the wife of" a revolutionary; she was an editor, publisher, and strategist in her own right in Germany and America. She developed a sophisticated, intersectional political philosophy that linked multiple struggles for justice, long before such a concept had a name.

In essence, Mathilde Anneke was the intellectual powerhouse and moral conscience of the radical Forty-Eighter women. She channeled the revolutionary fervor of 1848 not just into the fight to preserve the Union, but into the longer, ongoing fight to truly redefine it. Her life reminds us that the great social movements of the 19th century were deeply interconnected, and that immigrant women were at the very heart of the struggle. Be inspired!

Reference and Further Reading:

Biographical Encyclopedia Entries

• Mathilde Franziska Anneke (Encyclopedia of Milwaukee)

• Mathilde Franziska Anneke (Wikipedia)

Academic and Scholarly Books

• Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke

• Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884): The Works and Life of a German-American Activist

Archival Collection

• Mathilde Franziska Anneke Research Papers, 1737-1989

Additional Resource

• Mathilde Franziska Anneke (née Giesler)