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from E. T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol 1 A - F [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971] pp. 50-51

      ANNEKE, Mathilde Franziska Giesler (April 3, 1817 - Nov. 25, 1884), German-American woman's rights advocate, author, and educator, was born in Lerchenhausen, Westphalia, the eldest of the twelve children of Karl Giesler or Gieseler, a well-to-do mine owner, and Elisabeth (Hülswitt) Giesler. She was taught by private tutors and reared in the Catholic faith. At nineteen she was married to Alfred vin Tabouillot, a French wine merchant living in Prussia who was considerably older than she. After a year and a half the marriage was dissolved, following a long legal battle which gave Mathilde custody of her infant daughter, Fanny, and enabled her to resume her maiden name.

      Although this unhappy experience undoubtedly influenced Mathilde Giesler's later crusade for woman's rights, at the time she sought solace in her religion, preparing two prayer books, in verse and prose, for Catholic women. In 1840 she compiled a volume of poetry, Heimatsgruss, consisting of selections and translations from Ferdinand Freiligrath, Nikolaus Lenau, Byron, and Petrarch and some verse of her own. Two collections of contemporary poetry followed and, in 1844, a drama, Othone, oder die Tempelweihe, produced in Münster and later repeated much more successfully in America in 1852 at the Milwaukee Stadt Theater.

      Probably the decisive factors in Mathilde Giesler's rapid transformation from a devout Catholic into a radical free thinker were her father's death in 1847 and her marriage on June 3 of the same year to Fritz Anneke, a well-educated Prussian artillery officer with a radical bent. In this time of revolutionary ferment in Germany, Anneke's interest in communism led to the loss of his army commission and as eleven-month jail sentence. During his imprisonment his wife published a revolutionary journal, the Neue Kölnische Zeitung, that was soon suppressed, and afterwards, briefly, a Frauenzeitung. Through her husband she came to know Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, and other prominent leaders of the mid-nineteenth-century radicalism. In the German revolutions of 1848 and 1849 Anneke commanded a force of 1,200 men. His tall, blue-eyed wife, her black hair cut short, rode with her husband into the battle line. When the Prussians captured the fortress Rastatt, the Annekes fled to Switzerland and France, and them joined the exodus of German "Forty-Eighters" to America.

      Settling in Milwaukee in 1849, they lectured on the revolution and on German literature, and Mrs. Anneke became a correspondent for German papers here and abroad. Her husband taught swimming and riding and worked for a time as a typesetter and, in 1850-51, as a draftsman for a railroad company in Elgin, Ill. In 1852 they moved to New Jersey, where Anneke edited the Newarkerzeitung. A few years later he went abroad as a correspondent for twelve American papers. Mrs. Anneke joined him in Europe in 1860. Anneke, like his wife an ardent abolitionist, returned to the following year to the United States to take part in the Civil War. Mrs. Anneke remained in Switzerland with the children, augmenting the little help she received from her husband by selling an occasional article to newspapers in Switzerland and Germany. After spending five months in Paris, she returned to Milwaukee in 1865. Anneke meanwhile had secured a commission as an officer in the Union Army, but he ran into difficulties with his superiors and was finally dismissed from the service in 1863. Thereafter he worked as a clerk and interpreter, sold books, and wrote for the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens and other papers. At the time of his death, in Chicago in December 1872, he was working for the Illinois Staatszeitung, and acting as agent for a German society for the aid of German immigrants.

      Marriage with this unstable, supersensitive, highly talented, and uncompromising refugee, who never found his niche in America, proved difficult for a woman torn between a desire for an independent career and her love for a romantic, restless husband. After 1861 they went their separate ways, but the marriage was never dissolved. Of their six children, three died in a smallpox epidemic in 1858 (Anneke, as a matter of principle, had refused to have them vaccinated), leaving only Fritz, Percy Shelley, and Hertha.

      The woman who was to become one of America's most prominent advocates of equal suffrage had early committed herself to the cause, publishing in 1847, a pamphlet entitled Das Weib in Konflict mit den sozialen Verhälnissen (Woman in Conflict with Social Conditions). In 1852, three years after her arrival in Milwaukee, she launched the monthly Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a radical, freethinker's journal dedicated to the complete emancipation of women; it immediately became the target of ridicule by practically the entire German-language press. With her husband's move to Newark, she transferred her woman's journal there, where it appeared for two and a half years, sustained in large measure by the editor's uncertain from lecture tours in the larger Eastern cities. By this time she had established contact with the American woman's rights movement, addressing its convention in New York in 1853. She spoke frequently at other such meetings, often combining her plea for equal rights with attacks on prohibition, nativism, and clericalsim. In 1869 she helped found a Wisconsin woman suffrage association, which she several times represented at conventions of the National Woman suffrage Association.

      Mrs. Anneke's other major interest was the Milwaukee Töchter Institut, which she opened in 1865 in association with Cecilia Kapp (later a professor at Vassar), a cousin of Friedrich Kapp, another leading Forty-Eighter. This girls' school, conducted in German, lasted eighteen years, attained a peak enrollment of sixty-five pupils, and won Mrs. Anneke high regard among German-American educators. She herself managed the whole undertaking, teaching an amazing number of classes and subjects. She supplemented the school's budget by lecturing on politics, art, the theatre, and German literature, in addition to selling insurance and writing for the Illinois Staadtzeitung. A Milwaukee historian recalled her in her later years as "a portly figure, robed in black," who "walked with a masculine and military stride" (quoted in Krueger, p, 164). She died in Milwaukee at the age of sixty-seven. At the memorial services C. Hermann Boppe, a fellow radical and editor of the Milwaukee Freidenker, delivered the eulogy. She was buried in Milwaukee's Forest Home Cemetery.

[The two-volume MS. "Biog. Notes in Commemoration of Fritz Anneke and Mathilde Franziska Anneke,: by Henriette M. Heinzen in collaboration with Hertha Anneke Sanne (1940), in the State Hist. Soc. of Wisc., is indispensable. Of less value are A. B. Faust in German-Am. Annals (Phila.), May-Aug. 1918; Anna Blos, Frauen der Deutschen Revolution 1848 (Dresden, 1928), pp. 17-23; and Lillian Krueger in Wis. Mag. of Hist., Dec. 1937 (which includes a photograph). For the history of the Forty-Eighter immigration, see Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution (1952). See also, on her woman's rights and suffrage activities, Elizabeth C. Stanton, et al., Hist. of Woman Suffrage, I (1881), 571-573, II (1881), 374, 392-394; Woman's Jour., Dec. 20, 1884]

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