Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women's Rights and Nativism, 1848-1890 9780857455130

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Women of Two Countries

Transatlantic Perspectives Series Editors: Christoph Irmscher, Indiana University Bloomington, and Christof Mauch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München This series explores European and North American cultural exchanges and interactions across the Atlantic and over time. While standard historical accounts are still structured around nation states, Transatlantic Perspectives provides a framework for the discussion of topics and issues such as knowledge transfer, migration, and mutual influence in politics, society, education, film, and literature. Committed to the presentation of European views on America as well as American views on Europe, Transatlantic Perspectives offers room for the publication of both primary texts and critical analyses. While the series puts the Atlantic World at center stage, it also aims to take global developments into account. Volume 1

Journey through America Wolfgang Koeppen Volume 2

Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights and Nativism, 1848–1890 Michaela Bank Volume 3

From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century Anne-Marie Scholz

Women of Two Countries German-American Women, Women’s Rights, and Nativism 1848–1890

≥ Michaela Bank

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

Published in 2012 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Michaela Bank All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bank, Michaela. Women of two countries : German-American women, women’s rights and nativism, 1848-1890 / Michaela Bank. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-512-3 (hbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-513-0 (ebook) 1. German American women—Political activity—History—19th century. 2. Women immigrants—Political activity—United States—History—19th century. 3. Wendt, Mathilde. 4. Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler, 1817–1884. 5. Neymann, Clara, b. 1840. 6. German American women—Biography. 7. Women immigrants—United States—Biography. 8. Women political activists—United States—Biography. 9. Women’s rights—United States—History—19th century. 10. Nativism—History—19th century. I. Title. E184.G3B27 2012 973’.0431—dc23 2012001644 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-512-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-513-0 (ebook)

Contents ≥

Acknowledgments

vi

List of Abbreviations

viii

Introduction

1

Content and Effect of Nineteenth-Century Gendered Nativism 2 “Women of Two Countries” as Critics, Translators, and Messengers 14 The Complex Place of Women of Two Countries 23

Chapter 1. A German-American Movement: Critical Opponents Imagining Opposition to Nativism 34 Mathilde Wendt’s Powerful Words: Die Neue Zeit 44 Mathilde Wendt’s Activism: Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein Opposition as a Dual Strategy 61

54

Chapter 2. Mathilde Franziska Anneke: Powerful Translator Anneke’s Identification with the Women’s Rights Movement Translating Nativism 80 Anneke’s Efforts on Behalf of the Germans 91 Ethnicity as Anneke’s Source of Power 98

33

68

71

Chapter 3. Clara Neymann: Transatlantic Messenger

111

Neymann’s German-American Political Apprenticeship 112 Women Suff rage and Temperance in Nebraska in 1882 120 Neymann’s Ethnicization at NWSA Washington Conventions 128 Neymann as Messenger in Germany 139

Chapter 4. The Transatlantic Space of “Women of Two Countries”

155

The Ascendance of the US-American Avant-Garde 157 The Paradox of Nativism 165

Bibliography

174

Index

188

Acknowledgments ≥

Without the help of others I could not have completed and written this book. Institutions have supported my research and individuals and friends have accompanied me academically and personally for the duration of at least these last four years. I am grateful for all of it. I was fortunate to receive a doctoral fellowship from the graduate research training group Public Spheres and Gender Relations in Frankfurt am Main and Kassel, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation. This gave me the necessary freedom to concentrate entirely on my research project. Moreover, the community of other doctoral fellows and professors was a stimulating and critical (in the best sense of the word) academic environment. My thanks go to all of them for creating this productive and friendly community as well as to the German Research Foundation for funding my fellowship. The German Historical Institute in Washington DC granted me a three-month doctoral fellowship in 2007, which allowed me to visit libraries in Chicago, Madison, Washington DC, and New York City and to discuss my project with a group of historians and other doctoral fellows. I thank former director Gisela Mettele for the great opportunities afforded by this fellowship. My great thanks go to the librarians at Schlesinger Library, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the New York Public Library. Sheridan Harvey and Janice Ruth, the heads of the Women’s History Discussion Group at the Library of Congress, not only assisted me with their extraordinary knowledge of women’s history and expertise about relevant archival material but also provided me with the opportunity to discuss my research with them and the group of other researchers in the field in the spring of 2006. The librarians at my home library at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, also deserve special thanks for their help in setting up an international interlibrary loan with the William T. Young Library at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I thank the editors, Christoph Irmscher and Christof Mauch, for including my book in their series Transatlantic Perspectives and for the necessary feedback and critique during the many stages of the production process. Lisa Niemeyer and Jennifer Letki read the manuscript at different stages. Their

Acknowledgments

vii

comments and suggestions were invaluable for not losing sight of my argument in historical narration and for achieving more clarity in language and style. My thanks also go to them for their meticulous work. For my entire academic career, Susanne Opfermann has been my teacher and mentor. I owe much of my academic development to her, as well as my interest in nineteenth-century women’s history. Her criticism of and comments on my work have enabled me to sharpen my ideas and arguments and have continuously been a motivation for me. I thank Susanne for always believing in me and my project. Without the company of good friends and family life at the writing desk and in the libraries would have been very lonely. I thank Malaika Roedel for having been a critical colleague, office roommate, and friend over the course of this project. Lisa Niemeyer was always there for me as my dear friend during endless telephone calls about matters concerning the project and matters concerning other aspects of life, during all the ups and downs of this long path. I thank my sister Melanie, who was my flatmate for the longest period of this project, and Tobias for his patience and understanding during the final phase of completing the project and finishing the manuscript. Lastly, I thank my parents, Helga and Wolfgang, who, with parental affection and love, have always supported me and everything I have done. Duisburg, May 2011

Abbreviations ≥

AERA

American Equal Rights Association

AWSA

American Woman Suff rage Association

ECS-SBA-Papers

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers

FD

Freidenker

HWS

History of Woman Suffrage

ICW

International Council of Women

KH Papers

Karl Heinzen Papers

MFA Papers

Fritz and Mathilde Franziska Anneke Papers

NAWSA

National American Woman Suff rage Association

NWSA

National Woman Suff rage Association

NZ

Die Neue Zeit

PWRC

Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention

WCTU

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

WJ

Woman’s Journal

Introduction

≥ In her correspondence with leaders of the US-American women’s rights movement, the nineteenth-century German-American feminist Mathilde Franzika Anneke was frequently urged to support the reform cause.1 During the 1860s until her death in 1884, this German expatriate was well-known among the community of early feminists throughout the northeast United States. Despite periods of ill health when she was unable to travel and was forced to remain at her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the US-American feminist leaders made it clear how much they needed her. We can see this, for example, in Paulina Wright Davis’s letter, which addressed Anneke as a “woman of two countries” and asked her: “I hope you will come officially as a delegate if your society are not afraid of the Union. If they are, come yourself as the representative woman of two countries as you are, and help us” (MFA Papers, no date). More dramatically, Mary Livermore also appealed to Anneke’s support of the Cleveland convention in 1869: “The Germans are wholly against us, and you have the power to make an impression on them that no one else can. I do hope you will come. I cannot now change the advertisements—everybody expects you, and will be disappointed if you don’t come” (MFA Papers, 6 September 1869). Davis’s and Livermore’s letters reveal Anneke’s dual role in the US women’s rights movement: She was considered to be a representative of German-Americans and spoke on their behalf, while at the same time she was called on to introduce the women’s rights movement’s interests to the German population. In another letter by Mary Wiley Bentley, representative of the Marathon Woman Suff rage Society in Wisconsin, the writer left no doubt that communication between Germans and the women’s rights movement was urgently needed: “We know your name is a power among the Germans and since you find it impossible to appear before them personally can you not prepare an ‘address’ in your language which will embody the principle points and send it to us” (MFA Papers, 10 September 1880). These appeals to Anneke are representative of the complex and ambivalent situation in which she found herself. She was a member of the women’s rights movement in the US as well as a member of the German-American com-

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munity, which, as Livermore states, was “wholly against” the women’s rights movement. The main reason for this opposition among Germans in the US was the assumption that US-American women’s rights reformers advocated nativism and temperance.2 As foreigners, German-Americans’ ethnic pride was insulted by the nativist rhetoric of the leaders of the women’s rights movement and thus opposed the movement. German-American women like Anneke, Mathilde Wendt, and Clara Neymann, all of whom are the focus of my study, were put into the position of mediators and negotiators between the two antagonistic groups. How did they realize such complex roles as women between these opposing poles, and in what ways did this special relationship between ethnic community and social reform movement influence the role of German-American advocates for women’s rights in the reform movement? How were they able to make themselves heard when nativism would seem to have excluded them entirely from the discourse of women’s rights, and instead appeal to a “universal sisterhood” that guaranteed the solidarity of all women? This study proposes answers to these questions and intends to illuminate the power of nativism in the women’s rights movement. Nativism, as my case studies reveal, was more than a mere political tactic, as is often argued: nativism had a real impact on the relationship between ethnic groups in the United States and created a hierarchical sociocultural order in a transatlantic space. Paradoxically, however, nativism also became a source of power for Anneke’s, Wendt’s, and Neymann’s roles in the US women’s rights movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, as it enabled them to speak publicly in order to oppose and fight back against nativism.

Content and Effect of Nineteenth-Century Gendered Nativism The nativist rhetoric of the women’s rights movement was of a particular gendered kind. It often drew colorful images of gender relations, and it usually reflected a female rather than a male point of view. In this section I will introduce some of the more common nativist arguments and focus on recent interpretations of this nativism to explain why we should hesitate when considering gendered nativism to be a political tactic. Instead, we should view it as a means of maintaining and regulating a hierarchical racial and ethnic order in which the white, native-born US-American was deemed superior. Troubles in interethnic relations provide proof of this. When speaking of the women’s rights movement I refer to that reform community that first met in Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848, and continued to organize annual national women’s rights conventions during the 1850s. Its leaders were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia

Introduction

3

Mott, Paulina Wright Davis, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and Ernestine Rose. After the Civil War this movement reformed as the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), in alliance with former abolitionists, and in 1868/69 split into two rival camps, one led by Stanton and Anthony on the side of the National Woman Suff rage Association (NWSA), the other led by Stone, Livermore, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe on the side of the American Woman Suff rage Association (AWSA). Until 1890 the two associations worked side by side and pursued different political goals by different means.3 Stanton and Anthony’s NWSA represented a broad feminist agenda including suff rage, education, marriage and divorce reforms, wages, and women’s work. Compared to this, AWSA pursued contrary goals as summarized by Henry Blackwell, one of the main critics of Stanton and Anthony’s radical approach to women’s rights and one of the founding leaders of AWSA. He wrote in the first issue of the Women’s Journal (WJ): “In order to command the universal support which is essential to political success, Woman Suff rage must cease to be treated as a symbol of social innovations. It must be urged as a purely political question upon its own merits.” Accordingly, he considered “theology, temperance, marriage, race, dress, finance, labor, and capital” inappropriate issues for the women suff rage platform (Blackwell 1870). Moreover, the two associations preferred different strategies for attaining suff rage. After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, the NWSA focused on petitioning for a sixteenth amendment, which would finally abolish any suffrage restrictions on account of sex. This strategy contrasted with that of the AWSA, which attempted to achieve suff rage on the municipal and state levels first before seeking a federal amendment. In 1877 Anthony presented her critique of the latter strategy and added reasons against it in a letter to Nancy Hall Allen, secretary of the Iowa Woman Suff rage Association: The two great powers that are now solidly arrayed against the enfranchisement of woman cannot be overcome at the ballot box of any State. … These forces are, first, what we term the Whisky Ring, comprising not only all the men who want free whisky, but all who want free gambling houses and free brothels, as well. … And the other power is the ignorant, bigoted, priest-ridden and ruled masses. In Colorado it comprises the native Mexicans, the negroes, and the Irish and German Catholics, who, with a few noble exceptions, voted a solid “No.” … The States’ rights process is wholly impracticable as well as wholly unjust. … National supremacy over the right to the freedom and franchise of every class of United States citizens must be established, above and beyond the power of the several States to abridge or deny on any account, save those of idiocy, lunacy and crime. (Gordon 2003, 328–29)

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Anger and rage seem to direct Anthony’s critique. In her eyes, the principle of achieving the vote state by state would have to fail because of the incapacity of the electorate across the states, who were dismissed as ignorant, indifferent, and immoral opportunists. Ethnic—e.g., Mexican, Irish, and German—and African-American voters were included among such opportunists. This assumption in turn justified the demand of a national solution through federal amendment. Not the ignorant masses but the intelligent political elite would make the right decisions. Overtly, NWSA’s political tactic of choosing the federal level over the state to achieve women’s emancipation expressed their view of the vote as a citizen’s right that could only be protected by the US constitution. Yet, Anthony’s arguments in the quoted letter undermine and destabilize this seemingly universal concept because they introduce the vote as the privilege of an intelligent, disinterested, and morally superior elite. Although divided by a deep ideological rift, the NWSA and the AWSA both represent strands of the women’s rights movement on which I concentrate in this study, in terms of the women they attracted and the political programs they invented. I will deliberately avoid mention of the successful, however conservative, women’s temperance movement.4 My interest is in the radical feminist movement that promoted suff rage and women’s rights on the foundation of an egalitarian human rights approach, while simultaneously basing its case on nativist arguments, as the above quote from Anthony’s letters demonstrates. The tension between inclusive human rights and exclusionary nativist ideas became crucial for German-American women’s rights reformers, and this is the subject of my study. My key sources for learning about and understanding the women’s rights movement are the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (HWS), edited by Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1881 and 1886. Precisely because of the rifts in the movement, the sources have to be read with care. Written by only one-half of the movement, HWS represents a biased selection of its activities and the people involved. Although Anthony and Stanton encouraged Lucy Stone to contribute the AWSA’s side of the story to HWS she declined the offer. The chapter about the American Woman Suff rage Association in volume two of HWS takes up just a small part of the work—only 106 pages—and was written by Harriot Stanton Blatch, Stanton’s daughter. In her latest Stanton biography, Lori D. Ginzberg remarked on HWS: “In that story, Stanton alone articulated the demand for woman suff rage, and Anthony led the charge; there was only one major organization (theirs); and the differences of principle that led to division brooked no debate” (2009, 154). Having been intended as the first official text documenting the history of the women’s rights movement, HWS is particularly interesting. What and who became part of this official story displayed the editors’—the women’s rights movement’s

Introduction

5

leaders’—politics of inclusion and exclusion. It is exactly those politics that are relevant and significant for my subject of nativism and German-American women in the women’s rights movement. To further elucidate the particular gendered form of nativism that resulted in immigrants rejecting the movement, I will analyze Stanton’s first speech given in the summer of 1848 at Seneca Falls. Much has been written about this historical event and its pioneering character for women’s public roles. The adopted Declaration of Sentiments was read—because it imitated the 1776 Declaration of Independence—as a document that introduced an “inclusive definition of political equality” (Marilley 1996, 47) while revealing the prejudiced nature of Jefferson’s thought.5 Women quoted the major premise of the natural rights law, namely, the individual’s pursuit of happiness, and applied this fundamental assumption to women without references to innate or acquired differences between women and men. Despite this assumed gender equality, the Declaration of Sentiments still stressed the uniqueness of women’s experiences in contrast to men’s and declared women to be “one-half the people of this country” who would form a natural alliance with each other. In her speech, Stanton suggested that she spoke for all women in the world by positing that women were universally degraded and regarded as inferior to men. This also encapsulated the idea of women’s “sisterhood” as a union deriving from their shared political powerlessness and it implied “spiritual bonds” that united women on gender grounds.6 As Angelina Grimké Weld put it in a letter to the 1852 Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, “[w]e are bound together by the natural ties of spiritual affinity. We need no external bonds to bind us together, no cumbrous machinery to keep our minds and hearts in unity of purpose and effort; we are not the lifeless staves of a barrel which can be held together only by the iron hoops of an artificial organization” (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, 540–41). Her use of terms like “spiritual affinity” and “natural ties” resonated with the phrase that was commonly used later, “universal sisterhood,” a concept that was promoted in order to establish a broad constituency of women united by common interests. However, in addition to this inclusive definition of women’s rights at the beginning of the movement, the Declaration of Sentiments and Stanton’s 1848 speech contained exclusionary and illiberal elements as well. These nativist and nationalistic biases are often overlooked. Judith Wellman’s interpretation of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 points out the exclusions upon which the new feminist movement was based at the very moment of its inauguration, even as it appeared to question the meaning of such limiting practices: This document is remarkable for what it excludes as well as for what it includes. Just as many male abolitionists had tried to sidestep the question of woman’s

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rights, so these woman’s rights advocates did not mention the question of race. Did they mean that all women, not only native-born white women but also black women, Native American women, and immigrant women, should be citizens of the United States? The Declaration of Sentiments certainly suggests so. (2004, 200–1)

But did the Declaration of Sentiments really suggest this? My reading of this document as well as Stanton’s speech on 19 July to the all-female audience is that it is rather ambivalent toward the question of who they meant by the term “woman.” I agree with Suzanne Marilley, who concludes that “[j]ust as Jefferson defined the rights and standing of men in universal terms but intended them only for native-born white men, so the authors of this early feminist tract also defined women’s rights universally but meant them only for nativeborn white women” (1996, 50). Let me support this judgment by elaborating on Stanton’s 1848 speech. In its opening, Stanton’s speech illustrated a concept of “universal sisterhood” and the universality of women’s experiences in the following list of examples. She claimed that: in every country and clime does man assume the responsibility of marking out the path for her [woman] to tread. In every country does he regard her as a being inferior to himself, and one whom he is to guide and control. From the Arabian Kerek, whose wife is obliged to steal from her husband to supply the necessities of life; from the Mahometan who forbids pigs, dogs, women and other impure animals, to enter a Mosque, and does not allow a fool, madman or woman to proclaim the hour of prayer; from the German who complacently smokes his meerschaum, while his wife, yoked with the ox, draws the plough through its furrow, from the delectable carpet-knight, who thinks an inferior style of conversation adapted to woman; to the legislator, who considers her incapable of saying what laws shall govern her, is the same feeling manifested. (DuBois 1992, 28–29)

This series of international examples can be understood as intended to universalize women’s experiences and demonstrate their shared subjugation. However, it also suggested a hierarchy of cultures, with the Arab at the bottom and the democratic legislator (of the United States) at the top of society. We see how a nationalistic bias traversed the idea of “universal sisterhood” and changed its conception. Throughout her speech, Stanton referred back to and elaborated on these hierarchical relationships between different cultures and nations. She gave examples of the physical equality of men and women and recalled women from India and Croatia who were subject to hard physical labor before she con-

Introduction

7

tinued with a derogatory image of German men and women: “[A]nd it is no uncommon sight in our cities, to see the German immigrant with his hands in his pockets, walking complacently by the side of his wife, whilst she bears the weight of some huge package or piece of furniture upon her head” (DuBois 1992, 31). The humiliation and subjugation of foreign nationals culminated in the following statement: We should not feel so sorely grieved if no man who had not attained the full stature of a Webster, Clay, Van Buren, or Gerrit Smith could claim the right of the elective franchise. But to have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will. (DuBois 1992, 32)

Though couched as a plea for oppressed women everywhere, Stanton’s speech ultimately reveals that the women who mattered most to her, as the collective subject of the reform movement, were the “American” ones, like her citizens of the United States. This view contradicted the initial concept of “universal sisterhood.” Her references to Noah Webster, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, and Gerrit Smith served to define a uniquely US-American identity. Male voters were judged against this standard of proto-US-Americans and it is interesting how Stanton introduced a rhetoric that mocked the rhetoric she quoted before, namely that of relegating Muslim women to the category of “pigs, dogs, women and other impure animals,” or, as she stated in a later speech of 1854, in the same group “with idiots, lunatics, and negroes” (DuBois 1992, 45). Those she did not consider “apt” US-Americans were those “drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys,” whom she then lined up against those she did consider apt: Webster, Clay, Van Buren, and Smith. In doing so she expressed her own position as a woman and an US-American: her US-American citizenship raised her (even as a woman) above those men who were not considered “apt” citizens. Claiming women’s rights, and in particular the vote, by including negative stereotypes of non-US citizens suggested, deliberately or not, that native-born white Americans should be privileged above all foreign-born—male and female. The women’s rights movement was grounded equally in the ideas of women’s solidarity and of US-Americans’ solidarity, that is, in the exclusiveness of the movement for US-Americans. Nativism of that kind was not uncommon in public discourse on women’s rights and can be found repeatedly in the speeches of Stanton and her coworkers in the cause. At times, the nativist prejudices and populist stereotypes

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that were presented led to turbulent relationships between ethnic communities and the reform movement. Members of the ethnic communities who found themselves the targets of the women’s rights reformers’ nativism felt insulted and degraded. Their reaction often led to their refusal to support the issue of women’s emancipation, not for reasons that had to do with their ideal of a gender order, but because of the nativist impetus accompanying the reform. Immigrant women who were active members of the US-American women’s rights movement as well as members of an ethnic community served an important function in this situation. Their position as “women” and as “non-Americans” reflected the tension between “universal sisterhood” and nativism. Until today, nativism has been defined first and foremost as an anti-Catholic sentiment that was primarily directed at the Irish poor and some of the German immigrants. Secondly, it has been viewed as an anti-Asian sentiment that was followed by an anti-all-immigrant sentiment that took hold in the 1880s. John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (1955) and Ray Allen Billington’s The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (1952), which have become classics in the study of US-American nativism, both stressed the historical specificity of this ideology of mid-nineteenth-century xenophobia. Nativism, as Higham put it, translated the cultural antipathies against foreigners “into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctly American way of life” (1981, 4). Nativism’s core characteristic was the fear of any kind of disloyalty to this lifestyle on the part of newly arrived, non-American immigrants. In the dogmatism and centralist structure of Catholicism, nativists suspected a threat to the republican political system of the United States. Later in the century, poor new immigrants in particular were viewed as threats to the labor force and labor union interests of US-American workers. Preventing immigrants from holding office and from the ballot was the central goal of the American or Know-Nothing Party during the 1850s. The party’s restrictive nativist proposals never gained enough support to enforce legislation, but nevertheless, as the century gradually drew to a close, nativist antipathies continued to grow. Although it is rarely mentioned, women had particular nativist interests as well. They feared being overruled by the supposedly contrary interests of naturalized immigrant men in regions with a dense immigrant population. Their nativist images often depicted hierarchical gender relations among ethnic groups. Thus, immigrants were not only represented as a threat to established political institutions but also to the reform interests of the women’s rights movement. While nativism in the women’s rights movement resonated within a broader context of nativist prejudices, it also stood on its own grounds. For my purposes here, then, I will consider this type of nativism as a particular gendered subset of the broader phenomenon. In employing nativism, women also stressed their reproductive qualities and established themselves as the

Introduction

9

ones who had given and would give birth to the US-American population. This notion was veiled in the rhetoric of “republican motherhood” that further highlighted the intellectual and moral superiority of Anglo-Saxon women.7 Their nativist mind-set elevated them to the social and moral summit of society and relegated nonnatives to the social and moral bottom. It was the interdependence of their US-American birth and their gender position as women that led these campaigners for women’s rights to create their own form of gender-specific nativism. So far, interpretations and explanations of this specific nativism have highlighted its strategic value for those who applied it. Accordingly, nativism was understood as a political tactic that strengthened the women’s rights cause in certain historical moments, particularly during the era of Reconstruction. By propagating it, these interpretations neglected the real offense it caused and the power it had in determining both the relationship between the women’s rights movement and ethnic communities, and in the formation of a sociocultural order. Therefore, I argue that nativism was not a tactic, but an ideology. It powerfully determined a person’s position and undermined an ideology of equal rights and women’s rights as human rights, replacing it with an ideology of rights as privileges. It directly interfered with people’s lives, their desires to belong to and participate in society, and their desires to matter. In provoking the opposition of ethnic communities such as that of the German-Americans, nativism also even tended to weaken the women’s rights movement. Early historiography in the field of women’s history built on an awareness that after women had won the vote in 1920 they neither voted as a unified block nor exclusively for emancipatory and egalitarian politics. We are well aware of the fact that gender is merely one position that a person assumes, and that a person’s social and political situation is conditioned by a multiplicity of factors—class, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, work, etc.—and that solidarity for political goals is founded on these different and at times changing aspects of subjectivity. Women since 1920 have realized their differences and accordingly destabilized the notion of a powerful political collective subject “woman.” Kimberlé Crenshaw summarized this revelation of the simultaneous interplay of multiple differences in the term “intersectionality” or “intersectional analysis.” She urged feminist, legal, and political research to highlight “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (1995a, 358). Intersectionality has since become an accepted paradigm not only in gender studies but also in the humanities and social studies. Beginning with the articulation of differences between women in the context of black feminism in the early 1980s and continuing with the critique of the women’s movement’s white, middleclass constituents and programs, the discussion of a collective subject “woman”

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Women of Two Countries

culminated in its total denial and the denial of the integrity of gender itself by Judith Butler. In pointing out the historical changes gender has undergone as a category of identity, Butler argues against the assumption of its coherence and consistency. Moreover, Butler states that “gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (1999, 6). As a result, the separation of gender from political and cultural intersections is impossible, or, as Elizabeth Spelman remarked: Selves are not made up of separable units of identity strung together to constitute a whole person. It is not as if there is a goddess somewhere who made lots of little identical “woman” units and then, in order to spruce up the world a bit for herself, decided to put some of those units in black bodies, some in white bodies, some in the bodies of kitchen maids in seventeenth-century France, some in the bodies of English, Israeli, and Indian prime ministers. (1988, 158)

These assumptions about gender as an intersectional category in systems of classifications are a necessary condition for a critique of the nineteenthcentury women’s rights movement, because they enable us to understand the differences within the assumed community of women and in turn help to advance any critique of the exclusiveness of the women’s rights movement, as well as its racist, nativist, and elitist mechanisms. They allow us to see that a cohesive and consistent identification as “woman” was impossible then, because any “woman’s” position continuously intersected with other simultaneous identifications. An investigation of the critical literature in the field of historiography of the women’s rights movement gives the impression that such an awareness only mattered in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist circles. Ideas of the universality of the female experience and of mutual sisterhood supposedly characterized the first phase of the movement. Aileen Kraditor’s and Suzanne Marilley’s studies from, respectively, 1965 and 1996 both concentrate on the period from 1890 to 1920, shattering the image of the radical egalitarian feminist project by drawing the attention to elitism, racism, and ethnocentric prejudices. But what of the years prior to that period? From its beginnings on, as I showed in my analysis of Stanton’s 1848 speech, the movement harbored such elitist, racist, and in particular nativist prejudices. The period between 1848 and 1890 thus requires further investigation in order to counter the impression that feminism was then made up of thoroughly different ingredients. The interpretations Kraditor and Marilley offer appear reasonable at first glance, yet, when considering the experiences and perceptions of immigrant

Introduction

11

women and men, they seem shortsighted. Let me elaborate on these interpretations. Kraditor distinguished two different and irreconcilable arguments for women suff rage at the time in question. The first was founded on the belief that natural rights, which were the basis of suff rage as an expression of self-government in the United States, applied to women as well as to men. Accordingly, suff ragists stressed ways in which women were identical to men, namely their common humanity. At times, even when male voters questioned the validity of the principle of “the consent of the governed”—because it then also applied to the crowds of male immigrants, blacks, and the supposedly inferior population of the Pacific islands conquered by the United States in 1898—women suff ragists also began to rethink the meaning of natural rights. Kraditor argued that because men began to argue for the differences between men, common humanity no longer could serve as a core argument for political equality. In turn, women stressed their differences from those men from whom white, native-born, Anglo-Saxon men distinguished themselves, and instead identified themselves with the men of their own class and race for social and political ends. Kraditor labeled this second suff rage argument the argument of expediency, because it demanded the ballot not as a political principle but as a means to gaining other social reforms. These social issues, that is, the curbing of immigrants’ influences, or the purification of US-American politics, supposedly required the Anglo-Saxon, native-born, white woman’s vote (1965, 43–45). Marilley picked up Kraditor’s criticism of US-American women’s rights advocates’ racism and elitism and argued that “to expect that woman suff ragists could have been the vanguard of a radical egalitarian transformation of US-American politics severely underestimates the ideological, organizational, and behavioral obstacles they had to overcome” (1996, 2). Against Kraditor’s either-or opposition between equal rights and expediency argument, Marilley sought to identify those arguments that were incorporated in order to overcome resistance to the women’s vote, instead of focusing on proactive arguments within the movement itself. She stressed that female reformers were forced to direct their appeals to male voters because they needed men’s political support to realize women’s political claims to power. In the process of achieving that support, women’s rights advocates abandoned their radical appeals of universal equality for nativist and racist arguments. However, they did this without losing their liberal potential, Marilley claimed. Both the strategy of convincing opponents and the adoption of nativist and racist arguments resulted in a deliberate mainstreaming of the women’s reform movement around 1890, the time when the National American Woman Suff rage Association (NAWSA) was founded:

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Women of Two Countries

Putting toleration first encouraged “respectable” prosuff rage women from the WCTU or women’s clubs to join. Courting these “respectable” members led suff ragists to use nativist and racist themes that denounced the easy political inclusion of new male immigrants, supported educational qualification for the vote, and defended southern white supremacy. In short, the decision to welcome respectable white women was accompanied by disdain for growing numbers of black and working-class suff ragists. (1996, 160)

Despite its originality, Marilley’s argument remains difficult because it leaves the overall impression that racism, nativism, and elitism in the nineteenthcentury women’s rights movement only served to win men’s votes, and therefore that it was less objectionable.8 Similar arguments were made by Suzanne Lebsock (1993) and Ann D. Gordon (2007) in their work. Lebsock criticized southern feminists’ reluctance to give up an ideology of white supremacy. According to her study, women then did so in reaction to the antisuff rage leagues that feared a liberal feminism would result in the reversal of the racial order and the end of white supremacy. Lebsock concluded that although women’s rights activists in Virginia denied this false fear, they never once questioned the legitimation of the ideology of white supremacy. “By local white standards (of which the antis’ poisonous polemics were a good example), the suff ragists’ strategy of denial was a moderate approach. To understand just how low the antis would go does not excuse the suff ragists, but it helps us locate them on a political spectrum that would have been meaningful to white southerners at the time” (1993, 65). Ann D. Gordon’s 2007 chapter about Stanton situated her elitist, racist, and nativist prejudices in the broader debate about US citizenship and suffrage. With reference to Stanton’s speech at the AERA convention of 1869 in New York, Gordon interpreted the biased justification for women suff rage as a “tactic in defense of universal suff rage” (2007, 114). Paradoxically, it was only because Stanton was convinced that universal suff rage was the one way to guarantee equal citizenship and citizen’s rights that she at times favored restrictions such as “educated suff rage.” This would have broken the male monopoly on voting and opened the way toward universal suff rage, Gordon concluded. Against the general assumption that “educated suff rage” was a principle propounded by elites to enhance their political power and majorities, Gordon responded that women and African-Americans also advocated this principle “when there was little hope for winning on the grand principle” (2007, 119). Nevertheless, women’s advocacy of educated suff rage was an expression of their self-interest as members of an elite group similar to the ways in which the groups in power sought to secure their own interests as the elite. Gordon

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focused on demonstrating that Stanton’s devaluing images of African-Americans, lower-class people, immigrants, and the inhabitants of the Pacific islands strategically aimed to exemplify the limitations and opportunities that could derive from legal and constitutional processes: by law certain groups could be naturalized and elevated to the status of the enfranchised citizen. What was true of nationality could also apply to other forms of difference, notably that of gender. While constitutional amendments could guarantee and grant rights to certain groups, they could also deprive other groups of their rights as citizens. Gordon pointed out that this observation and reasoning was central to Stanton’s arguments. This reading of Stanton’s speeches and writings is risky in my eyes because it does not take into consideration the real—and not strategic—effects these arguments had on listeners of different ethnic and racial groups, who had to come to terms with general perceptions in defining their position in USAmerican society. Stereotypes and prejudices reaffirmed differences of various kinds and established social hierarchies mostly on the grounds of naturalizing characteristics of bodies and their suitability for social positions. Groups of German-American intellectuals perceived Stanton’s speeches as nativist and on these grounds opposed the women’s rights movement. Although they advocated for political equality of women and men, they saw their interests as an ethnic community threatened and feared they would have to give up liberties and rights that they had expected to gain upon coming to the United States. My focus on German-American women in the women’s rights movement thus illuminates two interrelated aspects. Firstly, it demonstrates that a human rights discourse existed and challenged the nativist and elitist discourse of women’s rights, which at times overshadowed all else. Secondly, it destabilizes the argument that nativism, racism, and other forms of social hierarchization were merely political tactics of an otherwise good and liberal emancipation movement. Instead, they were real because they had actual effects on particular groups. In focusing on immigrants’ perception and reaction to nativism, it becomes evident that nativism weakened the women’s rights movement because it hindered German-Americans in particular from supporting this movement for reasons beyond the issue of gender equality. Thus, it was no “discursive tick,” as Michele Mitchell concludes, but Stanton’s deliberate choice to apply her particular rhetoric and “incantation[s] of ‘lower orders’” (2007, 130). According to Mitchell, Stanton’s arguments were not merely political tactics but choices made when other options would have been available. I agree that it is almost irrelevant whether she was convinced of the racist and nativist theories she expressed. Instead, it is far more relevant to focus on the reception of her rhetoric and, by doing so, to arrive at an un-

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derstanding of the real impact nativism had on the complex social order in nineteenth-century United States, and in the women’s rights movement in particular.

“Women of Two Countries” as Critics, Translators, and Messengers Who were those German-American women in the women’s rights movement? Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Clara Neymann, and Mathilde Wendt were women who appeared prominently in the critical position between German-American community and US-American reform movement. I propose that they represent different types of German women, and provide different examples of the range of possibilities available to immigrant women for collaborating with the US-American women’s rights movement and coming to grips with the movement’s nativism. To which groups of German-Americans did they belong and which groups did they represent? To answer these questions I will first give a general overview of German immigration to the US in this period. Although Germans were the largest group of immigrants to the United States in the period from 1848 to 1890, numbering about 4.5 million people (Daniels 1995, 271), they also evolved qualitatively into a major cultural and political force in the United States. Heterogeneity in religious confessions, education, professions and labor skills, and choice of settlement in the United States was characteristic of German-Americans and distinguished them from other large ethnic groups such as the Irish, which represented a more homogeneous group in terms of religion and professional outlook (Daniels 1995, 146). The distinction of German-Americans also derived from the pride they took in their German-ness, as Daniels (1995) has shown. Germans in the United States expressed this pride by celebrating their language and their philosophical and literary traditions. These shared traditions gave rise to the establishment of close-knit German-American communities that became known as Little Germanies or Kleindeutschland and a variety of German newspapers, and fostered the legendary German-American culture of voluntary associations, which sought to actively preserve the German language through song and debate. But it was not only their language that set them apart from the wider US-American (and Irish-American) population and required that they establish separate German-language institutions. Rather, it was the social diversity of immigrants that made such institutions possible in the first place, as Kathleen Conzen has argued. German associative life in the United States developed not merely to express a shared ethnic identity, but to fulfill diverse social, religious, and political interests. According to Conzen, a “multiplicity

Introduction

15

of subcommunities and organizations … [reflected] the needs and interests of a heterogeneous people” (1976, 156). Indeed, German immigrants were merchants, professionals, artisans, skilled workers, farmers, intellectuals, and artists. This preservation of the distinctiveness of their German-American culture also translated into political interests and activities in the United States. In particular, the group of about six thousand Germans who fled political prosecution in their homeland following the failed revolution of 1848/49 emerged into a strong, visible political force. They were known in the United States as the “Forty-Eighters.” However, it would be misleading to reduce the Forty-Eighters to a gang of political intellectuals and revolutionaries or to conclude that all German-American political engagement was through their hands. This would create an incomplete picture, leaving out the dimension of social crisis during the 1840s in the German states that resulted in political upheaval (Levine 2003, 236). Forty-Eighters included many educated men and women of the professional and middle classes, but they also included members of the laboring class in towns and out in the country who were economically and socially destitute. After all, the nineteenth century is often described as the century of population explosion and the century of distress (Kocka 2002, 70–75). Kocka concluded that emigration from the German states at mid-century, therefore, was indeed predominantly motivated by economic needs (Dinnerstein and Reimers 1999, 20). As Levine argued from his inclusive perspective on the Forty-Eighters, their diverse social and economic background translated into a political program devoted to “social freedom and independent existence” (2003, 237) and was comprised of different levels of the heterogeneous German-American immigrant group. The revolutionary idealists as well as the destitute laborers in the years after 1848 projected their hopes for a socially and economically better state onto the United States. The political engagement of members of this group thus occurred on the level of labor organization, party politics, and reform politics.9 Yet another sign of the political engagement of German-Americans was the fact that many educated and politicized German exiles also became the driving force of newspapers, theaters, libraries, and political and social clubs. They were liberals who were critical of US-Americans’ religious sects, churches, and clergy. In contrast to forms of institutionalized religious beliefs, Forty-Eighters represented “new ideas” and freethought. They opposed slavery, municipal government corruption, temperance policies, and blue laws on the grounds of individualistic, liberal thought (Rippley 1976, 51–52). The relationship of Forty-Eighters to earlier German immigrants in the United States was tense with regard to their political views. Earlier German immigrants sympathized with the Democratic Party, which to them represented the party of the com-

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Women of Two Countries

mon man and ideas of liberty and equality in the Jeffersonian tradition. In turn, they regarded the Republican Party as the successor to the old Whig Party, Know-Nothings, and wealthy capitalists. Republicans were connected to the prohibition of liquor, puritanical ideas of temperance, and other reform movements such as women’s rights and abolitionism. Those, however, were irrelevant issues in the eyes of early nineteenth-century German immigrants. Forty-Eighters, on the other hand, supported the Republican Party from its beginnings in Wisconsin in 1854. The anticlericalism and intellectuality of the Forty-Eighters alienated them from other German immigrants, many of whom had left their homes to pursue religious freedom in the United States, such as Lutherans and Catholics (Rippley 1976, 53). A particular political culture among the Forty-Eighters was constituted by the culture of radical democracy. Ideologically, this political platform was also linked to freethought circles. On 23 October 1872, German-American freethinkers assembled in New York City to oppose the office of the presidency. The sixty-three-year-old political journalist and editor Karl Heinzen and the young political newcomer Clara Neymann were among the speakers who brought forth arguments for the abolition of the presidency, according to a brief report in the New York Times (1872). During this convention a resolution demanding the constitution of a new party of Radical Democracy was adopted (Radicale Demokratie). In their platform, which they published as a pamphlet in German and English (thus attracting attention in both language communities), they demanded a “thorough revision of the constitutions of the United States and of the several states.” Precisely, they criticized corruption in politics, the monarchic office of the president, the special taxation of railroad companies who were exempted from paying property tax—in contrast to the average farmer who received no such privilege—and the disfranchisement of women. Among other things, they demanded “[t]he constitutional right of the voters to recall members of the Legislature and of Congress …, Abolition of the aristocratic Senate …, Abolition of the Presidency …, equal Taxation and the repeal of all exemption-laws without exception …, Political Equality of the Female and Male Sexes” (pamphlet, n.d., MFA Papers). Their agenda called for a more direct democracy in the United States, which was supposed to bring to life the vision of a democratic revolution shared by the Forty-Eighters. This broad program of radical democracy attracted advocates of freethought, liberal democracy, and women’s rights. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mathilde Franziska Anneke exemplified the relationship between different civil reform strains in the German-American community. She was a founder and leader of the Radical-Club of Milwaukee in 1872 and an active member of the freethought parish—the Freie Gemeinde—of Milwaukee from 1867 onward.

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Neymann also appeared as a lecturer in the Freie Gemeinde, was a convinced freethinker, and sympathized with the ideas of the Radical-Club. A convergence in the ideas of freethought and radical democracy manifested itself in the accentuation of political equality and the individual’s right and duty to self-government—politically, intellectually, and spiritually. In order to sharpen the outlines of this religious and political camp, we should be aware that the Freie Gemeinden in the United States evolved as a continuation of oppositional religious movements in the Germany of the 1840s. These movements arose in Protestant and Catholic churches and were critical of the increasing conservatism and authoritarian mode of religious teachings and church organization. While these oppositional religious movements, the Protestantische Lichtfreunde and the Deutschkatholizismus, fell victim to general reactionary politics after 1849 and perished in the German states, they were being revived in the United States. Since members of both religious movements had an affinity to the liberal democratic camp of revolutionaries, they had to leave Germany, and many migrated to the United States like other political refugees (Ortlepp 2004, 167–69). In the United States, Freie Gemeinden represented an enlightened worldview and opposed superstition and blind belief. In a platform of Milwaukee’s Freie Gemeinde of 1872, the following principles were established: 1. We acknowledge the unconditional authority of reason in all areas of life. … 7. We acknowledge that despite of their differences in nationality, origin or sex all humans have the same rights and same duties and that a truly democratic republic shall be the end of all our political and social efforts. Therefore, we fight all institutions, such as principality, nobility, priesthood, money aristocracy, male privilege and the like, which bring about class differences among the people.” (Freidenker (FD) 187210)

Freie Gemeinden favored enlightened, rational thought and, as we see in their platform, favored the democratic ideas propagated by radical democracy. Therefore, the Freie Gemeinden can hardly be deemed to be only religious communities. It is more accurate to say that their religion was reason and rational thought and, accordingly, their “services” were occasions for advancing this human capacity through lectures and discussions. In addition to philosophical questions of life and death the lectures also touched upon a variety of issues, such as natural history, human development, and evolution, as well as the social and political conditions affecting the lives of women.11 Radical democracy and freethought were the specific political GermanAmerican contexts that supported women’s rights as an element of an egalitarian social order. Ortlepp’s study of the variety of German-American women’s

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Women of Two Countries

clubs in Milwaukee in the nineteenth century concluded that the women in freethought communities were pioneers of women’s emancipation. Ortlepp stressed that they were the ones who popularized the women’s cause among the German-American population and sought cooperation with the USAmerican women’s rights movement (Ortlepp 2004, 184). However, as I have pointed out, their agenda shaped political and intellectual positions, and they were reluctant to give those up when approaching the women’s rights movement. Politics in general was more important to them than the specific cause of the liberation of women. As we can see, German-Americans were a heterogeneous crowd, and thus it is not surprising that the gender ideals they embraced were also heterogeneous.12 In her description of the lives of German-American men and women, Harzig (1992) distinguished between urban and rural lifestyles, which, she claimed, were particularly distinct for this ethnic group. She demonstrated this by contrasting them with mainstream US-American gender ideals. For example, on small, independent German-American farms in the Midwest, women did the house, field, and farm work. The newcomers sought financial and economic independence for their families in buying property and managing the farm. The stereotypical image of the hardworking German woman irritated US-Americans, as their women and daughters rarely engaged in field work. Never mind that this image had no basis in fact: in US-American cities around 1900, only 12.4 percent of all female wage labor outside the home was performed by German-Americans. Among the bourgeois GermanAmerican population work outside the home was considered a desirable option for women, as long as no loss of status was involved; the working class, on the other hand, predominantly regarded female wage labor as harmful. Instead, they fought for higher wages in order to secure the family income and keep women at home. Furthermore, Harzig’s research revealed that German women who worked in an US-American city did so between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, that interim period between the end of their formal school education and their marriage. For example, they worked as sales clerks in small factories or as seamstresses in sweatshops (Harzig 1992, 166). Upon marriage they were mostly relegated to the domestic sphere in the cities or to their farm and home in rural areas. Their only accepted public role, then, was the maintenance and preservation of German culture within the ethnic community and in its negotiation with US-American culture. In particular, this preservation aimed mostly at gaining wider support for the German femininity model of “housewife.” Harzig concluded her interpretation of German women’s roles in the United States by explaining that this traditional conception of womanhood among German immigrants was responsible for a lack of female support for the women’s rights movement, as “[c]ontacts with the

Introduction

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Anglo-American women’s rights movement hardly existed” (Harzig 1992, 170). Ortlepp’s (2004) study of German-American women’s clubs in Milwaukee in the nineteenth century further supported this conclusion. Ortlepp’s analyses sought to interrogate the relationship between gender and ethnicity in processes of acculturation. Clubs were public spaces in which the ways in which women saw themselves—whether as Germans or German-Americans—became particularly visible. In Milwaukee, such clubs would range from women’s church organizations, benevolent societies, women’s sections of the Turnvereine and the Freie Gemeinde, and school and kindergarten clubs, to socialist women’s organizations and female labor unions. Except in the issue of labor, socialist and freethought women’s self-conceptions closely corresponded to the traditional Victorian ideal of womanhood. As such, the German immigrant woman represented the continuation of German culture through educational and benevolent means. However, this ideal lost its potency when the immigrants joined organizations that were not primarily oriented along ethnic positions, but instead along political positions. Politics trumped ethnicity. German-American women’s roles and their ideal of womanhood—traditional or emancipating—intersected with their self-conception as members of an ethnic community. A strong identification with the ethnic community of German-Americans correlated with an equally strong hesitation in approaching US-American communities to learn more about their reform activities. Reciprocally, Ortlepp argued, a strong identification with the political ideal of women’s emancipation facilitated acculturation in the form of communication and exchange with the US-American community. Those women, however, constituted a small minority in the panorama of women’s clubs in Milwaukee (Ortlepp 2004, 260–62). Harzig’s and Ortlepp’s analyses are convincing. However, we have to keep in mind that the women’s rights movement also did not find support among the majority of US-Americans, or any other ethnic group, for that matter. The feminist reform movement was constituted by a minority; thus, the fact that its ideals had not entered the mainstream of German-American gender ideals is hardly surprising. Contacts between German-Americans and the USAmerican women’s rights movement did exist, not on a large scale, to be sure, but they were intense, powerful, and supportive of a feminist cause in the US. I have selected Anneke, Neymann, and Wendt to represent these relationships and illustrate the particular roles German-American women played, as well as the power they had in their position as “women of two countries.” Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817–1884) had actively participated in revolutionary upheavals in her native Germany, specifically in Baden in the summer of 1849. She was engaged in democratic circles before and during the

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Women of Two Countries

German revolution and was the only woman to attend the Karl Marx debating club in Cologne. Anneke edited the first women’s rights paper, FrauenZeitung, in Cologne in 1848 before she came to the United States in 1850, and is the only German-American woman mentioned as an active member in the historiography of the US-American women’s rights movement, which has led to her biography being well researched.13 Her ambivalent position between the German ethnic community on the one hand and the US-American women’s rights movement on the other, has, however, so far not been examined. In the German-American community Anneke was the most prominent women’s rights activist of her time and was perceived as the link between their interests and those of the US-American women’s rights movement. The USAmerican reform community held a similar perception of her, as the introductory passages from Anneke’s correspondence with leaders of the women’s rights movement demonstrate. Anneke represents the type of female reformer who continued the intellectual and political activities in the United States she first undertook in her native land. She thus found herself in a strong and self-assured position from the time of her arrival in the United States, and showed little hesitation in engaging in public life and politics. With her prior experience in public speaking, newspaper editing, and agitation, in combination with the preexisting networks of fellow political refugees—the Forty-Eighters—this type of immigrant woman had easy access to political circles and was eager to participate. Her participation was always focused first and foremost on her own ethnic community, but in due course her interests became wider and included issues relevant to the entire population. Her presumption to speak for all people in the United States rested on her conviction that her ideas were the right ones and on her personal experience of revolution and social change. An as yet untold success story of a German woman in the US-American women’s rights movement is that of Clara Neymann (1840–unknown).14 In contrast to Anneke, who participated actively in only three women’s rights conventions, Neymann was a much more frequent speaker at the movement’s assemblies after her initiation into the movement in 1882. She sent letters from her journeys in Germany and Switzerland to the WJ during the 1870s and 1880s, and was continuously visible as an author in this major press organ of the movement. In the same enthusiastic manner she wrote for the major German-American freethought papers Freidenker and Pionier, and was a respected political personality in the German-American community as well. Her life and letters could not be traced in archival collections, so instead I have had to excavate them from public archives such as journals, newspapers, and convention reports on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. On the basis of these sources I wish to argue for Neymann’s importance as an activist for

Introduction

21

women’s rights both in the US-American reform community and the ethnic community of German-Americans. She was not a theorist or literary writer but rather a grassroots political activist and idealist, an agitator and critic with a strong talent for public speaking. In her journeys to Europe in the 1870s and 1880s she also contributed to the extension of transatlantic ties between women reformers. Neymann had not experienced social reform work prior to her migration to the United States. She was fully trained in the German-American community of the old guard of Forty-Eighters, most prominently among them the radical and dogmatic editor Karl Heinzen,15 and from there reached out to the US-American women’s rights movement. She traveled frequently and extensively to Germany. In oscillating between ethnic positions—German, US-American, German-American—Neymann’s case illustrates how ethnicity served as a powerful source of political positioning. Her interests represented a transatlantic space of women’s rights. Introducing politico-philosophical ideas of equal human rights as the basis of women’s emancipation in the discourse of the women’s rights movement, Neymann countered nativism and elitism. Her interstitial position enabled her to be acknowledged in German, US-American, and German-American contexts, because she represented a human and political principle and not an ethnic or national group as such. Anneke was less of an agitator and worked for women’s rights from the back benches, for example, by sending letters to conventions and serving as honorary vice president for the state of Wisconsin in the NWSA. She seldom moved to the front row to address crowds at public events, while Neymann was that woman in the first row who sought to address people directly and communicate her ideas face to face. Moreover, Neymann belonged to a younger generation of women’s rights reformers, having emigrated to the United States in 1856 at the age of sixteen. Unlike Anneke, Neymann seemed not to have political incentives for her emigration. She said of herself that she first began thinking about politics when she moved from Milwaukee to New York City in 1872. She was also fluent in English—which Anneke was not—and was thus able to give speeches in English and German equally well. This provided her with many opportunities that Anneke simply did not have. The regional differences between Milwaukee and New York also played a significant role in the opportunities available to both women. New York was not just the center of the NWSA (with headquarters in the Women’s Bureau); it also had its own city woman suff rage association and was home to many members of the New York State Woman Suff rage Association, such as Lillie Devereux Blake, a friend of Neymann. The German community in New York City also formed its own Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein. Being part of such a lively political network was very different from feminist political life

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Women of Two Countries

in Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, women founded the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association as a local group of the NWSA in 1869, and Anneke was involved in that group. It was not until 1880, however, that they were able to host the annual convention of NWSA and loosen the association’s ties to New York City. Although Chicago was close to Milwaukee, it ceased to be a center for the women’s rights movement after Mary Livermore moved her paper, the Agitator, to Boston in 1869, in order to merge it with Lucy Stone’s WJ. Anneke and Neymann represent two different types of women’s rights activists and the case studies in this work seek to show the ways in which they realized their work as reformers, what their roles in the US-American women’s rights movement were, and how these activities were connected to their ethnic identities as German-American women. Because their activities were not limited to the US-American women’s rights movement but also extended to the German-American community, both women were confronted with the stereotypes and prejudices that were associated with both communities. They had to deal with nativism among US-Americans and with disappointment and anger on the immigrant community’s side; ultimately, they had to find ways to maneuver through these cultural tensions. Instead of placing herself at the center of this complex situation, the German-American reformer Mathilde Wendt represents yet a different strategy of separation and critique. Her feminist projects in the United States demonstrate how ethnicity divided the women’s rights movement. She was a founder of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein in New York in 1872 and the editor and owner of the German-language women’s rights paper Die Neue Zeit in New York from 1869 to 1872. Wendt’s and the New York–based GermanAmerican women’s rights movement’s case reveal how the nativism and prejudice of US-American women’s rights reformers supporting temperance impacted the German community in the United States. The impact was such that direct cooperation was no longer possible. At first glance, the strategy of founding a separate ethnic women’s rights movement appears to indicate the deep and irreconcilable gap between German-Americans and the USAmerican women’s rights movement. My analysis, however, demonstrates that Wendt and the German-American women’s rights movement in New York were not neglecting their US-American reform colleagues, but that their strategy was of a dual kind. It aimed at enhancing the understanding between the two groups by offering sound critique. I suggest that separation bore the potential of bypassing reciprocal accusations of nativism and temperance and thus of furthering the issue of women’s rights. Consequently, such a strategy served to improve German-Americans’ image among US-American women’s rights reformers by demonstrating to them that German-Americans were indeed advocates of women’s emancipation.

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Such women of two countries were critics, like Wendt and the reform community she headed. They were also translators, like Anneke, between political and cultural poles. Women of two countries were thus to a large degree the bearers of a feminist, human rights message, which they voiced in a transatlantic space defined by German, German-American, and US-American communities. Neymann embodied this type of transatlantic messenger. None of these roles, paradoxically, would have been significantly visible had nativism not divided the women’s rights movement and the German-American community. Nativism can thus be said to have had some productive potential in offering an impulse to raise one’s voice, despite being aggressively nationalistic as well.

The Complex Place of Women of Two Countries The roles played by women of two countries in different situations defined by nativism, women’s rights, and their ethnic community were governed by particular “rules.” Factors determining the scope of their actions included ethnicized identities and political views, powerful and real stereotypes, and, above all, mutual hybridity in a transatlantic space. Ethnicization, stereotypes, and hybridity as individual concepts help to describe and understand the complex place of German-born feminists in the United States. First, I wish to approach the issue of how we can address ethnicity meaningfully without tending to essentialize this category of subject positions. Immigrant women stood out in society because they spoke a language other than English, wore different clothes, practiced a certain religion, or were familiar with political systems that were not necessarily democratic. These differences culminated in an ethnic identity, which immigrant women adapted and which at the same time was ascribed to them. Because this ethnic identity presented itself not as a unified and total subject position, as the self-perceived ethnic identity and the ascribed ethnic identity were often at odds, it is almost misleading to speak of “an ethnic identity.” Instead, as Stuart Hall argued, the idea of “identification” can do justice to the fact that “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured. … They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation” (1996, 4). Hall further pointed out that “identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (1996, 6). Given these ideas, identification is a process that occurs in and is restricted and influenced by discourses. Therefore, identity temporarily allows for identification with other subjects within this discourse and enables individuals to gain political power as members of a col-

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lective. At this point, a clarification of the concept of the discourse and “subjects within this discourse” seems helpful to aid further understanding. In his Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault defined discourse as a field: “[T]his field is made up of the totality of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence that is proper to them” (1992, 26–27). In addition, he showed that that which remains unsaid and unheard also has to be understood as an integral element of the discursive strategy. The silenced utterances do not constitute the boundary of the discourse but are elements next to, or moving across, other spoken utterances. The ways in which something is not said and heard as well as the relationship between the spoken and unspoken elements are central in the analysis of the discursive formation (1998, 27). Foucault deemed the characteristic dynamic of the discursive formation in the following manner: “[I]t would be the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time” (1992, 32–33). Discourses as fields were fused by a game of rules, a game of power. This power, Foucault argued, should not be mistaken as a merely juridical and repressive power acting to subjugate a subject, but has to be understood as a productive force producing and enabling subject positions (1998, 86–91). This productive force could act to affirm as well as to undermine the status quo. As such, it is an integral element of the concept of power (1976, 95–96). What sounds pessimistic in Hall’s reconception of identity as processes of identification occurring in and influenced by discourses becomes a productive force given the possibilities Foucault highlighted: the possibilities of resistance. Identification, therefore, always implies the possibility of not actively identifying. For our question of the conception of ethnic subject positions, this implies that identity occurs in a strategic field of power relations and that it is conditioned in moments of identification or nonidentification. This view helps us to understand the discrepancies between a self-definition as a member of an ethnicized group and the ascription of an ethnic identification from nonmembers of that ethnicized group, which, we can say, also stem from this possibility. Being thus discursively produced, ethnicity as a subject position oscillates between subjugation and resistance. Particularly on account of this ambivalence, ethnicity can become a source of empowerment. For the purpose of this study I present the concept of ethnicity as a specific historical and discursive category, as opposed to earlier concepts of ethnicity as a primordial category. Clifford Geertz saw people’s essential need for belonging satisfied by the reliance on a shared ancestry and culture and promoted the primordial character of ethnicity as ancient, unchanging, and inherent in a group’s blood or past (1973, 268). However, Werner Sollors defined ethnicity as “an acquired modern sense of belonging that replaces visible, concrete

Introduction

25

communities whose kinship symbolism ethnicity may yet mobilize in order to appear more natural” (1989a, xiv). Sollors’s now prominent idea of the “invention of ethnicity” marked the category as a cultural collective “fiction” brought about in specific historical moments under specific power relations. It was a category that no longer relied on real kinship but instead on the symbolism of kinship. It thus evolved as a sociocultural product in group formation processes. My view of ethnicity stems from the perspective that Conzen et al. (1992) have put forth. They sought to base ethnicity in real-life contexts and social experiences and viewed it as “a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts, and amplifies pre-existing communal solidarities, cultural attributes, and historical memories” (1992, 4–5). Thus, historicizing ethnicity and understanding ethnicity, as brought about discursively and over periods of time, would help us counter both the ahistorical notion of ethnicity as primordial solidarity and the idea that ethnicity could be invented from scratch at any time. Ethnic groups then can no longer be understood as unified, complete entities but as part of a process characterized by constant interactions with “others” or “foreign” groups and with different forces within one’s own ethnic group (Conzen et al. 1992, 17). Viewing ethnicization—rather than ethnicity—as a process of ongoing interaction and negotiation also enables one to account for the active participation of immigrants in defining their group identities and solidarities. Conzen et al. (1992) stressed the necessity of focusing not solely on the relationship between an immigrant group and the dominant culture, but also on integrating relationships between various immigrant groups. This is important because it takes into account the fact that immigrant groups were heterogeneous in themselves. In order to defend the immigrant group’s cultural values and its claims to power, status, and resources in the new society, these internal differences had to be reconciled. Processes of ethnicization were also always inextricably intertwined with renegotiating and redefining “American-ness,” what it meant to be an US-American, and what was “American.” Mass immigration to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century had transformed the larger US-American society by the introduction of a pluralistic social order. This transformation occurred in a specific historical moment, in which other transformations challenged US-Americans’ own identity. Westward expansion, the political and economic power struggle between North and South, and the transformation of work through industrial progress all added to an overall reformation of US-American identity. The process of ethnicization of immigrant groups in the nineteenth century was always related to the invention of an American identity. Ethnicization as a process reflected on all of society and in effect produced a variety of group identities, which ac-

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counted for the struggle over visibility, power, and resources in ongoing processes of interaction and negotiation between different groups (Conzen et al. 1992, 5–6). Ethnicization is also a process of categorization. Kimberlé Crenshaw reminded us that “[t]o say that a category such as race or gender [or ethnicity] is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world” (1995a, 375). Instead, categorization as a mode of subject formation and identification is always an expression of the power system within which it occurs. Power acts on the subject through categories. Additionally, categorization is a mode of experiencing the world and a fundamental order of things. Categories belong to this order and to the fundamental codes in a culture, in which every subject is situated (Foucault 1970, xix–xxi). Given this perception of ethnicization as a form of identification embedded in an ambivalent power system, the question of boundaries between categories and the flexibility of such boundaries evolves. Stanley Nadel has demonstrated in his 1990 study about New York City’s Little Germany that ethnicity no longer needed individuals or groups to subscribe to exclusive ethnic identities; instead, contexts could determine the choice of an ethnic identity. The “German” in New York or St. Louis could be transformed into an “American” upon a return to Europe. Many German Protestants in America, finding that they had to deal with rabidly anti-Catholic Americans, preferred to stress their identity as Protestants and downplayed their Germanness—some even went so far as to create German sections of American nativist (antiforeign) societies. … The ability to choose between several possible ethnic identifications is often a distinct advantage in complex societies, and it appears that people constantly made (and make) such choices. … Any theoretical concept of ethnicity that fails to allow for the possibility of making such choices can only impoverish our understanding of complex social realities. (1990, 6)

Ethnicization as a process oscillated between these two mechanisms and remained an ongoing challenge of negotiation and alignment between dominant perceptions of one’s ethnic group and often conflicting self-definitions. What needs to be addressed by the historian are the power relations that constitute the discursive field and represent categorizations that order the world and produce social realities. The central task of this would be to arrive at an understanding of how power is distributed and utilized to gain a powerful subject position. In Crenshaw’s words, it is not the mere existence of categories (ethnicities, genders, political camps, etc.) that needs to be criticized, but the “particular values attached to them and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies” (1995a, 375).

Introduction

27

Above all, ethnic (and gender) stereotypes display those particular values of the represented categories. Stereotyping is indeed one mode of categorization and thus one mode of creating social realities and (ethnic) hierarchies. Originally, the stereotype as a term was used in printing, describing a metal printing plate that allowed for repeated printing from the same surface. Its technological features are still active in a metaphorical sense when we speak of stereotypes: stereotypes are imprinted in our minds, that is, they are firmly implanted in our minds and memories; stereotypes stamp individuals with group-specific traits and ascribe specific traits to individuals in order to categorize them in an ethnic, social, religious, or political group. Gordon Allport, in his 1958 study The Nature of Prejudice, explained that this repetitiveness was a central characteristic of stereotypes, as they “[were] socially supported, continually revived and hammered in, by our media of mass communication, by novels, short stories, newspaper items, movies, stage, radio, and television” (200). Accordingly, the repetitiveness of particular representations is the source of those stereotypes’ power. To further define what a stereotype is, we can extrapolate from Walter Lippmann’s useful phrase that they are “pictures inside our heads” (1997, 7), that is, collective imaginations. Stereotypes need not only be repeated and “hammered in,” for example by the mass media; they also need to be shared by a group of people. Being imagined, they can be deemed fantasies of other social groups’ typical characteristics. However, the question of whether this fantasy contains a kernel of truth and rests on observations that can be regarded as real has to be scrutinized. Allport’s study, for example, builds upon the relationship of the stereotype to truth. He highlights that stereotypes are generalizations and simplifications that do not necessarily contain a kernel of truth, and as such do not essentialize the categories that they attribute. Therefore, the stereotype is “an exaggerated belief associated with a category. Its function is to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category” (Allport 1958, 191). This conduct can be favorable as well as unfavorable. Furthermore, the stereotype serves a social function, according to Richard Dyer, as it defines those who do not belong to a society. Stereotypes always define representations of outsiders, of others, of those who are not expected to be in the center of a given society. They become expressions of the power grid in a society and represent the invisible hierarchies that order groups of people (1993, 16). Stereotypes produce a sociopolitical reality and order and thus have to be understood—despite their imaginative character—as real representations of the world. Not only do they constitute a social reality, but, as Astrid Franke has argued, they “evoke a range of ideas and diffuse associations as well as perhaps intense emotions” (1999, 23). The emotional dimension she mentions

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is crucial, as we shall see in the analysis of stereotyping in the German-American community and the US-American women’s rights movement. Degrading images triggered feelings of insult, shame, and anger, and led to hostility and antagonism between the stereotyping groups. Immigrant women—“women of two countries”—were confronted with these stereotypes and the hostility they evoked in the US-American women’s rights movement and the German-American community. They faced the task of negotiating and correcting perceptions to further reciprocal understanding and eventually to gain support for the women’s rights reforms among GermanAmericans. I argue that their potential for intervention into these dominant stereotypes in the form of mediation and translation arose from the hybridity of their position. In fact, this thought of intervention is central to Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and a “third space”—concepts that enable a more critical understanding of migration processes and cultural differences. Accordingly, culture is considered as hybrid and ambivalent, and the idea of juxtaposed static cultures is superseded. The importance of hybridity derives from its “transformational value of change, which lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the one, nor the other, but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both” (1994, 25). The hybrid position characteristically becomes an interstitial space, a space of translation as negotiation between oppositional and antagonistic elements. This hybrid position in a “third space” between oppositional and antagonistic binary positions becomes the interstitial position from which something new could emerge. Existing authorities and meanings can be undermined, shattered, or brought into motion: thus, “newness” can be brought into the world. This “newness” is not characterized as a substitution for an original but as an integration of foreignness, a shift of meaning, a fragmentation and particularization of positions. In processes of cultural translation, differences are linked to and merged with one another for the supersession of multicultural juxtapositions. Translation enables the production of meaning by mobilizing oppositional elements in a passage through a “third space”: “It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha 1994, 37). Bhabha’s idea of a “third space” offers a new perspective for debates about ethnic difference. However, the concept falls short of offering an alternative to the thought pattern of binary structures and dualisms, as hybridity is always bound to the idea of two oppositional elements that are brought into motion in a third position. Although this process is constructed as endless,

Introduction

29

dependent on geopolitical positionalities, and is nonteleological, it might appear limiting. But in spite of the dualist context, it does take into account the powerful reality these binary structures have for many groups and individuals. Although categories that bind societies together and establish social structures are created and perpetuated in everyday lives, they cannot just be denied and denounced because of their constructedness. On the contrary, many lives are lived in these categories and depend on their boundaries. I consider it only responsible and necessary not to ignore their reality. Constructions and categories do have a reality, and this is not to say that they are “true” or absolute—quite the reverse. Nineteenth-century German immigrants in the United States were confronted with powerful stereotypes of their ethnic group. At the same time, they held idealist notions about USAmerican democracy and liberalism themselves and constructed their identities and positions along these lines. Taking this conflict into account, the central facet of Bhabha’s concept, that is, the potential for intervention in binary oppositions by means of translation, can serve as an adequate model in the interpretation of immigrant women’s roles in the US-American women’s rights movement. In my understanding, translation is a deconstructive process, which makes understanding and alteration of existing and dominant representations and binary oppositions possible. Nevertheless, Bhabha’s positive notion of the empowerment of the subject in the “third space” remains problematic. For example, Bhabha speaks of the “agency of foreignness” and the “dialectic of cultural negation-as-negotiation” as central effects of the hybrid moment (1994, 228). Thus, the hybrid subject is assigned power and agency to recognize existing power relations, perceive existing differences, and be free and independent to translate them. This seems to me a too positive perspective. Our focus instead needs to be directed toward the dependencies of the hybrid subject on existing power relations and on the cultural, political, and social contexts that influence the process of translation as well. Thus, as an interpreter of hybrid moments, I will take into account the mere possibility that the potential of the “third space” for transgression is not used and that the hybrid subject fails in bringing newness to the world. Possible failure or success of hybrid moments results from discursive power relations and constellations, as I will show. To sum up, ethnicization, stereotyping, and hybridity facilitated the complex setting of the public actions of women of two countries to varying degrees. Ethnicization as a mode of identification, and accordingly an element in the process of positioning, is ambivalent. As it is embedded in power relationships, it is not a one-dimensional process; rather, the subjection and empowerment of the individual occur simultaneously. My case studies reveal that ethnic

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identifications not only resulted in subjection and inferior positions but also enabled speaking positions that relied on and changed in different contexts, as Stanley Nadel suggests. The eminent position of immigrant women’s rights reformers derived from their hybrid status between German and US-American identities, as well as between traditional and emancipating ideals of gender relations. The productive potential of their hybridity—in contrast to Bhabha’s conception—was limited by the powerful reality of stereotypes that existed, by strategic personal and political positioning, and by economic situations. Despite these limitations, immigrant women were regarded as powerful messengers and translators and called upon to advance women’s rights interests as well as cultural/ethnic interests. Paradoxically, the stereotyping in nativism enabled German-American women to ascend to the powerful and authoritative speaking positions they held. Their maneuvers through the complexities of political interests, ethnic pride, nationalistic biases, and nativism are at the center of their public stories in this transatlantic space in the United States and Germany.

Notes 1. In this study I chose to use the modern term “women’s rights” over the original nineteenthcentury term “woman’s rights movement” in order to allow for an easier reading today. The grammatically incorrect and awkward-sounding singular subject “woman” in the name of the first feminist movement was used by nineteenth-century feminists also when they spoke and wrote of “woman’s rights,” the “cause of woman,” or “woman suff rage.” Nancy Cott pointed out that the usage of the singular “symbolized, in a word, the unity of the female sex. It proposed that all women have one cause, one movement” (1987, 3). 2. I follow historian Tyler Anbinder’s suggestion by using the word “nativism” in its nineteenth-century connotation of “anti-immigrant sentiment” instead of in its broader conception as a complex figure of nationalism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and racism that has come into usage more recently (1992, xiv). 3. Thorough histories of the emergence of the women’s rights movement and suff rage associations in 1868/69 include Flexner’s Century of Struggle (1974) and DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage (1999). 4. A comparative history of the temperance and the suff rage movements is presented by Giele in Two Paths to Women’s Equality (1995). According to her, temperance and suff rage represented distinct prototypes of feminism. Temperance was concerned with the enhancement and uplifting of the traditional female role of wife and mother, whereas suff ragism focused on achieving the same rights for women as for men (2–3). Radical and broad feminism after 1890, when the NAWSA was founded, increasingly focused on the vote exclusively, and established the core of the feminist movement I examine in this study and deem the women’s rights movement. 5. Examples highlighting the inclusive liberal ideology in the Declaration of Sentiments are: DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage (1999); Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), 16–20; Hoffert, When Hens Crow (1995); and Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (2004).

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31

6. Although in nineteenth-century discourse women commonly referred to their “sex” as the natural foundation of their roles as women, I will not perpetuate this discourse in this study and instead refer to “gender” throughout. In doing so I take into account poststructuralist thought that denounced the distinction of sex and gender and revealed the cultural and historical construction of sex itself and its naturalization. The idea of the natural origin of a binary gender division follows normative and cultural constructions; thus, it ultimately has to be seen as inessential and as a powerful collective fantasy. Judith Butler further developed this thought: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. … As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … [T]his production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender” (1999, 10–11). Since these thoughts also shape my perspective of historical gender orders, I refrain from using the term “sex” to describe what, after all, comprises one single category, gender. 7. Linda K. Kerber discussed the rise of the “republican motherhood” discourse in the years following the founding of the United States, explaining that “the Republican Mother was an educated woman who could be spared the criticism normally directed at the intellectually competent woman because she placed her learning at her family’s service. … The Republican Mother’s life was dedicated to the service of civic virtue. She educated her sons for it; she condemned and corrected her husband’s lapses from it. If, according to Montesquieu’s commonly accepted claim, the stability of the nation rested on the persistence of virtue among its citizens, then the creation of virtuous citizens was dependent on the presence of wives and mothers who were well informed ” (1980, 228–29). Apart from the concept of women as republican “helpmates,” this discourse of women’s political role also gave rise to women’s self-confident claim to actively participate in political decision making. Women’s political behavior was redefined as “valuable rather than abnormal, as a source of strength to the republic rather than an embarrassment” (Kerber 1980, 284). The intersection of women’s reproductive qualities and political participation was (ambivalently) expressed in the rhetoric of “republican motherhood,” which was reinvoked in nineteenth-century female nativism as well. 8. See also Ann D. Gordon’s critique of Marilley’s argument. She concluded: “It is a thin line, it seems to me, between political expediency and unprincipled opportunism. To say of suff ragists’ racism or elitism that ‘the men made them do it,’ does not make it more palatable” (Gordon 1998, 205). 9. Levine mentioned trade unions, antislavery reform, civic reform, and participation in the Republican Party after 1854 (2003, 239–47). 10. All translations unless otherwise noted are my own. I would like to thank the series editor Christoph Irmscher for his assistance with some of the difficult cases. 11. An example of the repertoire of lecture topics is given in the publication of Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi’s lectures, which she presented during her stay in the United States from 1887 to 1889 to various audiences in freethought circles. Her lectures focused on the following topics: Forces of Fate and Providence, Heathen and Christian Superstition, The Relationship of Freethought to the Social Question, The Unity in the Universe, Humans as Products of their Education, Women’s Condition and Women’s Rights, Scientific and Moral Materialism, Religion and Moral, Effects of Christianity, and The Happiness of Life, Death, Cremation (HenrichWilhelmi 1889). Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi was a German woman and made the acquaintance of Clara Neymann when the latter visited Germany in 1884 and 1885.

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12. More recent scholarship in the field of migration history has stressed the role of gender in the migration process and thus contributed to an understanding of the shifts, changes, and maintenance of gender ideals in immigrant societies (Gabaccia 1994; Harzig 1997; Gabaccia and Ruiz 2006b). The output of US gender migration history up to 2006 has been discussed in Gabaccia and Ruiz (2006b). Harzig posited that migration is a “complex process in which labor and marriage markets, the division of labor and migration traditions, family networks, and gender all interact. The process affected cultures of origin and receiving cultures, as well as individuals” (Harzig 1997, 3). In her case study of German-American women in Chicago, Harzig suggested that new opportunities in the United States meant that gender relations and ideals had to be renegotiated and reshaped. This had to do with the shift from a rural to an urban living environment. She noted, for example, that men’s labor often revolved around industrial work, whereas women’s labor was restricted to running a household (1997, 5). 13. In Germany, biographies of Mathilde Franziska Anneke have been published by Ruben (1906), Henkel and Taubert (1976), Wagner (1980), and Schmidt (1999). Publications in the United States include the articles and books by Bus (1989) and Piepke (2006). A selection of Anneke’s short stories and essays was published by Wagner in 1983. 14. Even after extensive genealogical research, the death date could not be established. 15. Karl Heinzen (born 1809 in Grevenbroich, Germany; died 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts) participated in the second revolutionary upheavals in Baden in 1848/49. He arrived in New York in 1850 after having been banished from Europe. As a journalist and author he worked first for a number of German-language papers before, in 1859, becoming the editor of the Pionier, which served as the organ of his radical political thought until 1880. Heinzen was too radical and uncompromising (almost doctrinaire) in his political thought for many German revolutionaries and Forty-Eighters in the United States. His outspoken and direct style of journalism ignited many public disputes and turned Heinzen into a rather isolated political activist. His biographers describe him as a grumbler and wiseacre who was deserted by his former revolutionary partners and evolved into a bitter and sarcastic dogmatist (Wittke 1945; Dobert 1958, 105–117).

Chapter 1

A German-American Movement Critical Opponents

≥ Having discussed the typical gendered nativism of US-American feminists in my introduction, I will now focus on German-Americans’ resentment toward the US-American women’s rights movement. This case of German-American opposition centers on the figure of Mathilde Wendt, owner and editor of a German-language paper devoted to the cause of women’s rights, Die Neue Zeit (NZ), who took part in the founding of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein. In words as well as in deeds she was at the center of a German-American oppositional women’s rights movement in New York City during the 1870s, and represented a critical voice against the US-American women’s rights movement. The case of Mathilde Wendt and the New York German-American feminists allows us to gain insight into the strategy of ethnic division and to inquire about the causes and aims of such a strategy. At the age of 20, Wendt, née Neymann, arrived in New York on 5 October 1848, together with her mother Harriet and two younger brothers, Emil and Adolph.1 They apparently joined their father and husband in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a place which in the 1850s became a flourishing ethnic center of German-American culture. There, Mathilde married Charles Wendt. Her husband had immigrated to the United States from Berlin, arriving with his family on 10 August 1841. Neither family appears to have been political refugees, or Forty-Eighters; it seems likely that they left Germany for economic or other reasons. Immigration records list Wendt and the other adults in the two families as farmers. Family ties also linked Wendt to Clara Neymann, who became her sister-in-law through marriage to Emil Neymann.2 Little is known about Wendt’s husband, Charles, or the fate of the family, who seemingly suffered from economic hardships that also might have restricted Wendt’s public political activities and personal freedom.3 There is evidence that her husband engaged in activities of the German liberal-republikanischer Verein, a freethought and reform association connected to the American Liberal Leagues.4 Censuses after 1870 no longer listed a person by the name of

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Mathilde Wendt, yet we know that she continued public work in New York. For example, her name appeared in the reports of a Ladies Protective Health Association in New York from 1885 until 1891.5 The censuses further indicate that Wendt bore four children, and that one daughter, Alma, who was born in 1859, apparently died in early childhood. Her other three children were Emma (born in 1852), who, in 1873, was one of the first female students to graduate from Columbia College in New York according to HWS, Arthur (born in 1853), and Edmund, called Edda (born in 1856).6 Unfortunately, the fate of Wendt’s family could not be established beyond this information. As to her engagement in the women’s rights movement, I have established that Wendt served as a member of the NWSA executive committee for New York in 1884 and as an honorary vice president of the NAWSA for New York between 1893 and 1919. Despite this and the fact that she was elected NWSA delegate to the 1873 International Congress in Paris, she never spoke at any of the US-American women’s rights movement’s conventions, nor did she publish in any of the English language women’s rights papers. It is very unlikely that she did not speak English well enough. Only in one instance was her short letter of greeting read at a women’s rights convention, the International Council of Women (ICW) in Washington DC in 1888.7 Wendt’s engagement in the women’s rights movement was sporadic and passive. Instead, she represented a particular German women’s rights movement in the United States, in opposition (or in addition) to the existing USAmerican movement. Before I elaborate on Wendt’s case, let me illustrate a discourse that is fundamental for understanding Wendt’s critical position in the women’s rights movement.

Imagining Opposition to Nativism When speaking about nativism and German-American opposition to it, it seems feasible to look more closely at US-American women reformers’ reasoning and their propounded stereotypes. One—although retrospective—judgment can be found in the insider’s history of the suff rage movement in the United States written by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Shuler. These authors traced the repeated defeats the movement had suffered from 1869 to 1920 in different state and national campaigns. The divide between US-Americans and immigrant communities figured prominently among the elements they blamed for these defeats. Their master narrative concluded that “there had been hours for the Indian, the Russian, the German, the Chinese, the foreigner, the saloon, hours when each had decided the limits of woman’s sphere, but no woman’s hour had come” (1969, 127). Catt and Shuler listed

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35

ignorance and corruption as mutual characteristics of all these immigrant groups. Germans were incited by the American Brewers’ Association, an interest group of the liquor trade, to not vote for women suff rage in Nebraska in 1882 because it would have meant prohibition (1969, 111–12). Russians in South Dakota in 1890 were depicted by Catt and Shuler as simultaneously illiterate and corrupt because instead of pursuing their own interests in elections they became mere puppets of the saloon keepers: South Dakota permitted foreigners to vote on their first papers, and there were 30,000 Russians, Germans and Scandinavians in the State.8 Thousands had been there from six months to two years only. These men, unable to read or write in any language or to speak English, were boldly led to the ballot boxes under direction of well known saloon henchmen, and after being voted were marched away in single file, and, within plain sight of men and women poll workers, were paid for their votes. (1969, 116)

These two feminist “historians” used nativist prejudices and categorizations in their narrative as a structural element in tracing the steps women had taken to win the vote and the defeats women had continuously suffered. Their narrative was staged to culminate in the suff rage movement’s final goal of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Accordingly (and for strategic reasons), they presented women as the last group in society to achieve their rights, long after “less valuable” groups received theirs. It cannot be doubted that the relationship of women’s rights reformers to different ethnic groups and interest groups influenced election outcomes and that these special relationships mattered. A particular constellation of reciprocal perceptions and stereotypes along ethnic boundaries informed collective behavior and created a general atmosphere of hostility between US-American women’s rights proponents and ethnic communities. This hostility at times could not be superseded, and even among those non-Americans who were in favor of women’s rights, it instilled a desire to form an alternative women’s rights movement parallel to but independent of the US-American women’s rights movement. The relationship between German-Americans and USAmerican women’s rights reformers was of a specific kind, particularly because the Forty-Eighters were generally interested in public affairs and in political reform, and thus in participating in these discussions. It is not my aim here, however, to trace German-Americans’ voting behavior and their actual lifestyle. Rather, I am interested in the images of that lifestyle others held, which formed public opinion, evolved as stereotype, and influenced how women’s rights reformers thought about immigrants, as well as how immigrants perceived the women’s rights movement.

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The first mention of a separate German-American women’s rights movement can be traced to a series of articles in Karl Heinzen’s Pionier, which appeared in 1868 and 1869 and, among other things, a lengthy and detailed convention report. This convention of German women in Roxbury (near Boston) was opened by their president, Ida Johanna Braun, who stated the following: Dear attendants. I would have never dreamed of having this privilege today because I have never dreamed of the possibility that the German women of this country, whom one never saw but in the beer gardens and never heard of but in the mockeries of men, would demonstrate such an active participation in public matters, particularly in the questions that we are about to discuss here in assembly. (Pionier 1868, 16 December, 4)

Braun’s opening remarks leave no doubt that this demonstration of interest in public issues, particularly women’s rights, was unexpectedly large in the German-American community. The convention lasted for three days, and the participants not only discussed the necessity of women’s emancipation, but also of forming a German women’s rights movement in the United States to oppose the preexisting US-American women’s rights movement. The reasons for this split of the movement along ethnic lines (and no longer along gender lines) were explained in speeches and discussions about the resolutions. Together these offered a sustained German-American critique of the US-American women’s rights movement. Before I look at this critique, a general remark about this particular source— the convention report—seems in order. It was published in the Pionier between 16 December 1868 and 31 March 1869 in a series of sixteen articles. From the fact that the article appeared without attribution of an author we can assume that the article was written by the editor of the paper, Karl Heinzen himself.9 No other paper (WJ, FD, regional German- and English-language daily press) provided an account of this convention, although the Pionier presented it as an outstanding historical event. The names of the participants in the audience and on the podium appear—with minor exceptions that I will point out in the course of my analysis—in no other documents, and indeed are those of fictional characters. Ultimately, during the course of my research, I discovered half a sentence in the FD which revealed to me that the “Konvention teutscher Frauen” had actually been an invention: “If they want to gain not only the sympathy but the strong help of all friends of freedom, the women must take up that point of view which Karl Heinzen assigned to them in his report about the ‘Teutsche Frauenconvention in Frauenstadt’ (which unfortunately only took place in his fantasy)” (FD 1882e). Except for sugges-

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tions in the text itself, this was the only hint I could find that both the report and the convention were fictitious. Moreover, the purported president of the convention was introduced by the name of Julie vom Berg, which was one of Karl Heinzen’s pen names (Blaschke 1997, 356). The identification of Berg with Heinzen is important to note, as the character’s role during the convention was that of the critical commentator and interpreter of resolutions and oppositional arguments. In this character’s comments we are presented with Heinzen’s commentary and opinion, which would have been obvious to contemporary readers of the fictional text. Textual evidence for the fictional composition of the report includes satirical elements, exaggerations, and a “happy ending.” One of the male opponents of women’s rights was named Herr Schuerze (Mr. Apron) and was introduced as “a smug gentleman with the face of a fox, whose diplomatically sarcastic demeanor expressed his confidence that he would greatly abash the ladies. He was a politician from the West and considered himself a great statesman” (Pionier 1869a, 3 February, 2). The resemblance of this figure to the GermanAmerican senator of Missouri, Carl Schurz, was obvious. Another male opponent, Dr. Blüthe, was presented as a grotesque figure, who, when woken from a state of “trance” by a loud noise, immediately rose to proclaim confused phrases. In order to hear his true opinion about women’s rights, the convention decided to put him back into a state of trance to interview his subconscious. Heinzen’s text brings to light this man’s corrupt and opportunistic nature. He parroted the ideas of his employer and did not give his own opinions. This episode ended with the flight of Dr. Blüethe from the hall screaming, “Heinzen’s comedies!” (Pionier 1869a, 10 February, 3–4). In satirical fashion, Heinzen, as the author of this piece of fiction, used this figure to ridicule his “enemy,” Gustav Bloede, the coeditor of the conservative German paper the New York Demokrat. According to historian Carl Wittke, such disgraceful feuds between editors characterized German-American journalism.10 In the characters of Dr. Blüthe and Herr Schuerze, we clearly see Heinzen’s critique of GermanAmerican political and intellectual leaders. The rhetorical mode of the satire even enhanced this critique as it increased the distance between the ridiculed and the ridiculer and thus set Heinzen clearly apart from the represented editor. The last example of the fictional nature of the text is the “happy ending” of the convention report. Its structure is that of a fairy tale or colportage novel, in which everything ends well in terms of dominant moral standards: the women of the convention were invited by the regional all-male German-American radical club to a dance. They only accepted the invitation, however, on the condition that the women be allowed to dress as men and vice versa: “The new order of things proved excellent all night and everybody agreed that they had

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never before enjoyed and amused themselves so much on such an occasion.” The ending established yet another “new order of things”—the relationship between US-American and German women, which was at the center of the convention in Roxbury: A few attending American women were of the opinion, however, that the atmosphere at a German women’s convention would be much more humane and gemuetlich than at an American one, and they declared their resolution to promote the former. By the way, among the men in attendance no one received more accolades than the Turner Schwartenbach. His main award, however—if we may gossip—was his engagement to Miss F. from New York, the most beautiful and charming girl of the entire circle. (Pionier 1869a, 31 March, 4)

The fictional character of the “Konvention teutscher Frauen” does not diminish but indeed enhances its value for my inquiry into the mutual perceptions of Germans and US-Americans. Fiction does not have to comply with the existing social order and is freer to enter into utopian and fantastical realms. In doing so, I conceive fiction as a comment on reality or as a vision of reality; it can become a subversive act within the present “order of things”— both its creative imagination and reception.11 The present example functions as a comment on the historical relationships between German-American and US-American women, the differences between the ethnic groups, and the necessity of establishing a strong German-American women’s rights movement against the existing US-American movement. The figures taking part in this imagined convention appear as types and stereotypes of German and USAmerican women and men. They not only represent different political positions and different worldviews, but also—and this is the particular value of fiction—an evaluation of these positions. The ways in which the figures were introduced (e.g., Herr Schuerze), interacted with each other in dialogue, or left the scene (e.g., Dr. Blüthe), were dramatically composed and reflected the author’s values. Two female figures were at the forefront of the convention, the president Ida Johanna Braun and Julie vom Berg. The latter engaged in discussions during the convention and countered the male opponents’ arguments, while Braun gave speeches at the beginning and end of the convention. The fundamental perspective of this convention and the reasoning behind a separation from the US-American women reformers were explicated in Braun’s opening speech. First, she argued that it was the duty of German women in the United States to act in solidarity with US-American women reformers, as the rights they were fighting for would also benefit them. It would be a shame to merely receive the right to vote as a gift, “like slaves that were given a right as a bonus”

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(Pionier 1868, 16 December, 4). It was a matter of honor, in her eyes. Her second argument for German women’s commitment to women’s rights derived from her perception of US-American women: I predict that, if women are granted the right to vote, the political party that seeks to limit the freedom of social life by moral police and seeks to expand the authority of the clerics by religious coercion will be significantly strengthened. What it has not achieved so far, it will conceivably achieve now with the help of American women who are generally more dependent on the representatives of religion than American men. This party’s goal will be achieved if those women’s additional votes are not made powerless by a pull in the opposite direction. And who shall and will provide this pull? Only the German women! (General Applaus.). (Pionier 1868, 16 December, 5)

The image established by Braun of the religious and pious US-American woman whose actions were guided by the clergy joined the women’s rights movement with the Christian temperance movement. This was a fatal link, as the temperance movement was disliked by the majority of Germans in the United States for its restrictions of individual freedoms and social customs, such as the consumption of alcohol.12 The moral stance of the temperance movement derived its legitimacy from Christian, particularly Protestant, ethics of work and worship. Leisure and activities associated with it, such as enjoying a meal and drink, or talking and smoking in company and other informal socializing, ran counter to such principles and were therefore considered illegitimate. Rather, time not spent working should be spent worshipping.13 The leisure activities mentioned above, however, were deeply ingrained in the German lifestyle. Germans brought with them to the United States a particular beer hall culture: they installed breweries, joined choirs and music clubs, and established a distinctive “festive culture” (Conzen 1989, 45–46). Conzen suggested that German ethnicity from the 1840s onward was intertwined with the emergence and proliferation of the specific German Vereinswesen. Vereine—voluntary associations—offered ways of liberating the individual from traditions and realizing the humanistic belief in progress and cultivated life (Bildung). Together with like-minded individuals, this kind of self-improvement could be achieved in social reform, art, and learning. In accordance with the humanistic assumption that humans possess both sense and sensibility, and live in practical as well as aesthetic and emotional worlds, Vereine combined cultures of learning and education with cultures of cozy sociability and friendship—Geselligkeit. Braun’s critique proposed that this cozy sociability, which had become the epitome of German community life in the United States, was at risk of being eliminated. Moreover, the opposition against the clergy

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that she put forth hinted at the intellectual and political position from which she was speaking, that is, that of the freethinker. This position could be found frequently in Heinzen’s Pionier, for example also in an article “Deutschamerikaner und Frauenstimmrecht,” in which “knownothingism, bigotry and temperance” were mentioned as three issues which annoyed the Germans (1869b). So, while Braun in the report accused US-American women of being dependent on the clergy and Biblical dogmatism, German women were established as the exact opposite, free and independent, representing humane, liberal, and democratic principles. Theirs was the standpoint of universal humanity and universal human rights. In the course of the convention, a pastor’s offer to say a prayer to open the proceedings—as was good custom everywhere—was repudiated by a woman who clarified: “I have not prayed ever since I began to think” (Pionier 1868, 16 December, 5). Emancipation from religion—from the clergy in particular—characterized the ideal German woman. The German woman in Braun’s speech was represented as the only counterweight to illiberal temperance politics. What about men? Braun argued that German men could be totally at the mercy of US-American women, who would use their ballots to install temperance politics and thereby restrict German liberties. It was German women’s ballots that could override or support temperance politics. German women could take “revenge” on German men by boycotting elections in general. German men, Braun claimed, subjugated them based on a separation of gendered spheres instead of supporting the cause of gender equality and equal opportunities to pursue individual freedom. Braun said: Should we let them [the German men] down? We want to come to their aid, not out of generosity but in order to help in securing justice and freedom. In order to be ready for that it is necessary to appear on the battle field early on for training and practice. In assisting the German men in their fight against temperance tyranny and religious fanaticism we also have the best opportunity to demonstrate to American women an example of intellectual freedom and to express our gratitude to them for already having preceded us in the struggle for political freedom. (Pionier 1868, 16 December, 5)

According to this appeal, the differences between the Germans and the USAmericans involved the dichotomy of “intellectual” and “political,” that is, the dichotomy of theory and politics, of passivity and activity. In her farewell address, Braun referred to this dichotomy once more, this time, however, pertaining to the differences between women and men: women were traditionally classified as the “passive accessory” and as such considered as the opponents of the male half of humanity. But now, women appeared as agents in the public

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and political realm, thereby becoming men’s new rivals and their “hostile antagonists.” Up to this point, history had charted a continuous struggle of men against each other. The following demonstrated a new perspective, Braun proposed: “It is a divorce of the two fitting halves of humanity—600 million women confront 600 million men, so as to assert, at first only through representation of a small number of pioneers, that they are humans as well” (Pionier 1869a, 31 March, 3). “Braun” applied this dichotomy of passivity and activity in order to describe two unrelated axes of differences. On the one hand, she used it to illustrate the ethnic differences between Germans and US-Americans, and on the other hand it supported her image of gender differences. As the two speeches bracket Heinzen’s fictional convention report, they suggest a parallel link between gender and ethnic differences. Consequently, the ethnic differences between US-Americans and Germans paralleled the difference between men and women. Following this logic, Germans were feminized and subjugated by the masculine element (US-Americans). They were as inferior as women were in relation to men, in the contemporary gender order.14 However, as the women’s rights movement proved, women rose to action and left behind their associations with passivity. Accordingly, with regard to the relationship between German and US-American, this legitimized the Germans’ claim to power, just as the women had a legitimate claim to power. The proposed new order would be one in which the formerly passive and subjugated elements would wake up to rebel against this exclusion from an active and powerful position. The exposed position of German women in the United States stemmed from this logic, according to which German women had a dual task. It was incumbent upon them to free themselves from two intersecting roles: their passivity as women and their passivity as Germans. Heinzen’s made-up resolutions represented the consensus of his fake convention, since they were prepared and introduced by a committee and then discussed, altered, and adopted by the entire convention community. As such, the resolutions of the “Konvention teutscher Frauen” represented the consensus of these German women. Opposition to the resolutions was uttered by individuals representing the standard arguments of the time. Julie vom Berg, as a member of the committee of resolutions, responded to all criticisms and in all cases extinguished the argument—dramatically illustrated by the departure of the opponents from the convention scene. In the following my interest lies in the supposed consensus among German-American women and in the supposed antagonistic arguments against their position. I understand this fictional representation as a specific German-American position that included dominant—that is, typical—perceptions of social groups and their political and cultural interests.

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According to Berg, the resolutions sought to illuminate questions and issues otherwise neglected in US-American women’s conventions. The central difference between German women and their US-American counterparts was the former’s repudiation of religion. This issue, however, did not evoke opposition as it was presented as a mutual consensus. Controversy erupted, however, around the question of marriage reform. The importance of marriage derived from the notion that it was a foundation of human social existence in the cooperation of both sexes. Accordingly, as the backbone of democratic society and as an institution to advance mutual happiness, marriage should be understood as a relationship between two sovereign and free individuals; because it was a contract freely entered into, people should be free to dissolve it as well. This ideal of a free partnership should also be reflected in the sharing of property in marriage. In case of divorce, property should be divided equally between the partners. Another fictional convention attendee, Johanna Fuchs of Buffalo, criticized the idea of shared property in marriage. In her eyes this would endanger wealthier women, who would then no longer be able protect their property independently. Moreover, it would lead to an increase in the number of divorces, as people would take advantage of this practice in order to “make money.” Therefore, Fuchs demanded the separation of property. Berg commented on Fuchs’s critique. First, she clarified that in putting forth this demand for community of property one would have to consider, too, the need for a generally improved society, where such wretched behavior and the possibility of betrayal no longer existed. But above all, Berg opposed the separation of property as it contradicted the principle of love. “How could the relationship of two lovers who lead a life together and see the same spirit grow again in their children agree with the calculating mind of a businessman or lawyer who keeps books about his dollars and her dollars? Heinous dissonance! Odious contradiction! … A financial partition wall must necessarily also create a moral one, a partition wall of emotions” (Pionier 1869a, 3 February, 3). The separation of property would lead to a separation of emotions and, therefore, she claimed it contradicted the ideal of romantic love. This issue, however, was not merely an issue of love versus partnership. The controversy also touched on ethnic positions and illustrated German perceptions of US-American women, with the latter presented as materialistic and incapable of true love and marriage. The reforms of married women’s property rights that had been enacted since 1848 in the different states had indeed expanded women’s rights to control their own earnings during marriage and allowed them to remain in control of their individual property.15 The differences, drawn along ethnic divisions, that Berg’s comment established assigned the qualities of love and devotion to the side of the Germans, and the lack of these same emotional characteristics to the side of the US-Americans, who repre-

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sented the material world, economic interests, and business. In this instance, introversion served as a German female feature superior to the extroversion of the prototypical US-American female character. Again, the dichotomy between “passive” and “active” served to distinguish women belonging to the two ethnic groups. If, as I argued above, we consider this dichotomy as a gendered one, it is also evident that German women’s rights activists—at least in Heinzen’s fiction—work to defeminize US-American women, while they see themselves as remaining true to their feminine “nature.” Passivity and emotionality epitomized femininity and were embodied by German women in the United States, who were therefore destined to represent women’s interests in a particular German women’s rights movement in the United States. They became active in order to preserve their femininity as emotionality. The analysis of Braun’s speeches and of the debate between Fuchs and Berg illustrates the central structures of the text and the power grid that kept gender and ethnic positions in flux while at the same time reaffirming them. One further point of interest, however, is the depiction of German men. German men constituted a group of voters against which the US-American women’s rights reformers continuously fought, and against which nativist prejudices were raised. Therefore, the depiction of German men by a German man, Heinzen, is telling. The first man on the scene of the convention was introduced as “Editor.” He represented a German-American journalist of supposedly few intellectual qualities, as indicated by the language he spoke, which was a gibberish composed of both German and English words. The women criticized him, saying “here, we speak German.” This silenced him. The second man was the Pastor Goetzling, who offered a prayer to the convention. After the resolutions were read, Herr Backfuss from New York appeared on the platform. He reminded the convention of the fact that equal rights also required equal duties. As long as women did not fulfill the highest duty of defending the country as soldiers, they were not entitled to the highest right of voting. Berg responded to this argument that women had participated as nurses, cooks, etc., in wars, and therefore fulfilled their duties as well. But above all, she stressed the inhumanity of war and instead argued for pacifism. Violence as a means of solving political problems was outdated and no longer had a place in the new social and political order. The argument was defeated and Herr Backfuss left. Herr Schuerze, the politician from the West, claimed that the entire question of women’s political rights was a theoretical question, because in reality no majority, not even of women, supported it. Berg responded to this argument as well, and compared the women’s rights movement to the abolitionist movement, explaining that the latter had also been a movement of a minority and yet had not been illegitimate or of minor importance. The

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ones who were free had fought for those who had not been free. Men as free citizens should, therefore, support the liberation of women, who were not yet free. Finally, Herr Gerstaecker16 warned the women that they would also lose their privilege of being treated gallantly by men, for example, by being offered a seat on a crowded train. What these men have in common is an opposition to women’s rights. Their different arguments represented the variety of (German) male voters’ positions. To summarize, structurally, the convention report reflected new boundaries in the women’s rights movement in the United States. By considering not only the hierarchical relationship between women and men, but also the hierarchical relationship between Germans and US-Americans in the United States, the Roxbury convention introduced a new axis of difference and replaced the male-female divide, which traditionally characterized the women’s rights movement. The desired political divide ran along ethnic lines and brought about separate German and US-American communities in the women’s rights movement. While the transverse new division was overtly visible, further levels of meaning were attached to it, as I have shown. The binaries woman/man and German/American were enriched by the dichotomy of passive/active; the intersections of these terms helped create social and political hierarchies, attaching positive value to the position of German women and devaluing USAmerican women. In the relationship between German-Americans and the women’s rights movement, this dichotomy remained prominent. Rhetorically and metaphorically, it served to differentiate the two ethnic groups and to justify the political claims of women and Germans. In this work of fiction, the position of the German woman was elevated to the most powerful and significant position in the context of the women’s rights movement in the United States. But how powerful did this position prove in reality? I will investigate the realization of this imagined discourse of opposition by looking at the case of New York’s Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein and Mathilde Wendt’s activities.

Mathilde Wendt’s Powerful Words: Die Neue Zeit What was implied in the Pionier’s fictional report of a German women’s convention finally took place, in real life, in March 1872 in New York City, where a Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein was founded.17 This association represented a German-American women’s reform network in New York, which found an outlet in the German-language paper Die Neue Zeit, (NZ), edited by Mathilde Wendt. Unlike the Pionier, the NZ did not unambiguously oppose the US-American women’s reform movement. The articles reveal ambivalent

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dual strategies for gaining support in both otherwise antagonistic camps. As far as the writers were concerned, US-American feminists should realize that Germans were not entirely against women’s emancipation, while the German population in the US should, in turn, understand the validity of radical egalitarian politics. In any case, the paper was welcomed by the established New Yorker Staatszeitung as a “new fighter for equal rights” (1869a) and thus clearly placed in the reform community. The weekly German reform paper Die Neue Zeit was published in three volumes between 25 September 1869 and 15 June 1872 in New York. Wendt was editor in chief and owned the paper, together with F. Labsap,18 from September 1870 until it closed down in June 1872. Wendt relinquished the paper to Labsap after a year-long struggle with him over some obscure differences. Labsap then continued it as the Sunday issue of his other paper, Oestliche Post, in St. Louis.19 With Wendt’s departure from the editorial team, the NZ lost its character as a public advocate of women’s rights among GermanAmericans. The slogan “Equal Rights for All” codified the paper’s platform and its central goal, the propagation of women’s rights, as was also explained in the first issue’s editorial: All humans are born equal and are entitled to the same rights. Man and woman stand on the same level before the law and must necessarily enjoy the same rights; and if all rights find their realization in the suff rage, if without suff rage they are only acts of mercy, then it must be irrefutably clear that the right to vote must be granted to women, in order to secure the position which justice and their intellectual capacity assign to them. (Das Comite 1869, 1–2)

The equality of women and men and cooperation between nations were considered principles of the republic. Just as politics in a republic should aim at establishing and preserving the welfare of the people, the same egalitarian principles of the state presumably would filter as ordering principles into people’s social lives, family organizations, and workplaces. The editors considered the right to vote as a means to those ends as well: it synthesized all natural rights and was, therefore, the right of all humans. The NZ served as a public organ for such an egalitarian discourse of universal rights. In the absence of correspondence between the editors or the publishing house and the sources pointing out the composition of this German-American circle in New York, this chapter concentrates on the discourse of women’s rights as it materializes in the paper: Who constituted the paper’s audience? What did writers for the NZ say about women’s rights and about the women’s rights movement? In what ways did the US-American and German-American discourses differ or overlap? In focusing on these issues we can evaluate the

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NZ as an example of the antagonistic relationship between German-Americans and the US-American women’s rights movement. The formation of an exclusive public of German feminists in the United States, therefore, implied separation and opposition. Firstly, who read the NZ? The new paper attracted about five hundred to six hundred subscribers after its first year of existence, as Wendt indicated in a letter to Heinzen on 12 April 1872 (KH Papers).20 This rather small audience is indicative of the general sentiment against women’s emancipation in the German-speaking community in the United States. The editors’ estimation of their audience revealed their thinking about the educational and emancipatory goal on which this public organ focused. The paper aimed to emancipate women, particularly German women in the United States, who were considered dependent and subjugated by their husbands. To the surprise of the editors, among the readers were also many women; how many exactly, we do not know. German women’s interest in the NZ was perceived as a sign of German women’s emancipation and independence. Accordingly, the editors were enticed to conclude: It appeared to us that our paper was not as necessary as we had thought when we founded it, and with amazement and delight we see that the German women in America, of whose dependence we have had so many accounts, are not at all averse to the general progress, the improvement of their own and their fellow sisters’ situation, and that the German men, at least in the circle of the family, grant their women equal rights. Then suddenly, one after one another, three letters of cancellation poured in, however, not sent by the women who had subscribed our paper directly, giving their own addresses, but by their masters and rulers. … Our paper is a necessity after all! (NZ 1869b)

It was the stated principle of the paper to make German women visible and heard, and now they did make themselves heard. In fact, the NZ as an enterprise rested in the hands of women. The title design of the paper—an ivyframed figure of Justitia, Roman goddess of justice and law, on a pedestal with the slogan “Equal Rights for All”—was a woodcut by Alice Donley and Laura E. Bower. The editors argued that these women exemplified the potential of female artists for excellence: “If practical proof were required that the female sex is as capable of excelling in all professions as the male sex, if the path to those weren’t cut off from then, then the female artists and female physicians who compete with the artists and physicians for the laurels in New York today would provide more than enough evidence” (NZ 1869a). Not only did women fill the creative posts, the sales of the paper were handled by the female-led advertising agency “Volkmann, Smith & Co, General American, German

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and French Advertising Agency.” The WJ commented: “Miss Volkmann is a blonde young beauty from the land of Bismarck; Miss Smith is a Virginia Lady, despoiled by the late war; and Mrs. Wendt is a Juno from Faderland, with flashing eyes and raven hair. … They are assisted by eight nimble-footed nymphs, and employ only the gentler sex” (WJ 1870b). The editors pursued and realized not only the ideal of giving women a voice but also providing them with equal employment opportunities. Produced by and for women, the NZ was a significant outlet for the German-American discourse of women’s rights reform. Wendt authored three prominently featured series on women’s rights entitled “Die Frauenfrage” (The Woman Question), “Die Frauenrechtsbewegung” (The Women’s Rights Movement), and “Kurze geschichtliche Uebersicht der Frauenrechtsbewegung, in Europa und den Ver. Staaten von Nordamerika” (Short Historical Overview of the Women’s Rights Movement in Europe and the United States of North America). The following considerations evolve from my analysis of these texts and epitomize the specificities of the political discourse among GermanAmerican women. The first series, which discusses the “woman question,” intended to present the historical development of the social and political position of women, which, Wendt argued, had always equaled that of the slave. Wendt argued that now was the time to demand women’s emancipation in the family, state, and society. Besides narrating women’s situations in different cultural and historical contexts, she addressed a common argument among women’s rights opponents that women were superstitious, vain, jealous, and unjust in their relationships with other women. Wendt argued that these characteristics and “hereditary defects” (Erbfehler) were remains of the past and needed to be contextualized historically. Women’s public existence over the course of history had been justified solely on account of their bodily existence, while being denied any influence in the family or over the affairs of state. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that women sought to advance their physical attraction and beauty, as this would under such radically unjust conditions have also increased their individual value. Vanity (Putzsucht) led to superstition and lies, which, however, necessarily had to develop in the character of women, because they became their only weapons in fighting brutish and forceful men. Wendt concluded: “These so called ‘hereditary defects’ of the female sex, vanity and cruelty against their own sex, are, as we saw, no natural defects but have developed consequently out of the first conditions of human society, when raw violence and brutality of the strong sex could only be repelled by the cunning and slyness of the weak sex” (Wendt 1869a, 10 November, 116). Until this point, such an explanation of women’s character was uncommon among German-Americans and US-Americans. Before her, the German

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journalist and educator Amalie Struve, who was living in exile in New York City after the revolution in the German states, repeatedly argued against the Putzsucht of US-American women, contrasting it to the practicality and virtuous character of German women.21 In the German-language paper Sociale Republik, Struve wrote: “Vanity and an exaggerated love of luxury completely control American women. … In the oppressed Europe you find a greater simplicity and true love of art among the women and daughters” (1859, 2). Struve condescendingly characterized US-American women by attributing to them a passion for finery, beauty, and luxury, thereby providing the case for Wendt’s later interpretation. Wendt, however, did not ethnicize the image of the vain woman. In historicizing the image, she turned it into a universal characteristic of femininity that could be changed once women were regarded as people in their own right beyond their bodily existence. Wendt’s different point of view was derived from her deeper integration in the US-American culture. In addition, Wendt’s special interpretation demonstrates the characteristic strategy of the German-American women’s rights movement in New York. By founding a separate ethnic movement, they pursued a dual strategy of reaching a German public in the US through advocating women’s rights, while simultaneously seeking an audience in the US-American women’s rights movement to alter the nativist image of Germans. The NZ apparently did not intend to reinforce antagonisms between German and US-American women. The supposed female characteristic as articulated by Wendt applied to all societies in which women gained their value in the family (as bearers of children) and in society (as decorative elements of a male partner), based on their physical attraction. Unlike Struve, Wendt participated in the German-American community and the US-American women’s rights movement. Much like Anneke or Neymann, she was situated in a hybrid position between those poles. In deconstructing the image of the US-American woman that dominated Struve’s writings, Wendt weakened the established polarization. She avoided ethnic stereotyping and condescending attitudes, presenting instead a transethnic image of women’s historical situation that applied to Germans, US-Americans, and other Westerners alike. While Wendt put forth a universal position supporting the idea of “universal sisterhood,” she and the NZ also criticized the US-American gender order. She contrasted it to a German gender order, confronting considered falsities with references to institutional differences between states or with a socialist standard of equality. The latter was the case in Wendt’s second essay, entitled “Die Frauenrechtsbewegung,” which discussed women’s emancipation as a step in the direction of social justice. The demand of social justice evolved as a typical element in German-American women’s rights discourse. Women’s emancipation was an issue of social justice, not a moral or merely

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political question. The battle for the premise that equals should be treated equally was waged in the arena of work: women should be paid equally for their work. This in turn required that women have the same educational opportunities as men, so that they are qualified for whatever job they aspire to. While the US-American context demanded women’s rights on the foundation of their citizenship—which then required equal treatment protected in the constitution—Wendt’s arguments established a sacred right to work—“ihr heiliges Recht an die Arbeit” (Wendt 1869b, 4 December, 127). In practice she demanded that women have the freedom of choice in work and equal opportunities in education. This would guarantee women’s independence, particularly as more women than men lived in modern societies and, for various reasons, had no opportunities to marry and be provided for by a partner. Even in marriage, a woman could no longer entirely depend on her husband, as the macroeconomic situation had changed over the course of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization: people were thus more vulnerable than in previous eras and marriage as an institution of provision (Versorgungsanstalt) no longer existed for a woman. Wendt argued and demanded that women become workers and citizens at the same time. In that we [i.e., the Americans] lag tremendously behind and because the women recognized that by and large they have nothing to expect from the workers and their representatives, they threw all their strength behind their political campaign, and now want to become citizens first and then workers. And we too [i.e., the German-American editors of the NZ] agree that only in that manner the question will be solved quickly and to the satisfaction of the majority. (Wendt 1869b, 4 December, 127)

A dual strategy evolved of simultaneously securing women their rights as citizens and as workers. As Wendt’s preferred strategy, it combined German and US-American discourses and attempted to make socialism an integral part of the women’s rights discourse. This strategy prominently reappeared in the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein when a socialist revolution and social equality were established as the ends of women’s emancipation, and not vice versa, as will be shown below. In the second series of articles, two aspects of Wendt’s history of the women’s rights movement in Europe and the United States appear to me to be noteworthy: firstly, the tension between the pride of German intellectuals on the European and North American continents as well as the ignorance of the women’s rights cause among the German population in the United States; and secondly, Wendt’s biased depiction of the US-American women’s rights movement, which gave more credit and praise to the branch constituting

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the AWSA than to the Stanton- and Anthony-led NWSA. This unbalanced representation points to Wendt’s position in the community of the women’s rights movement. Wendt claimed that, “just as in all questions concerning the progress of human society, the German mind power gives the first impulse” (Wendt 1870d, 1 January, 181). From such a statement the series launched into an overview of the historical development of the women’s rights movement. Although theoretical impulses had come from German thinkers—she mentions Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s 1774 essay “Ueber die Ehe” (On Marriage)— the French had been the first to practically intervene for women’s liberation. Wendt claimed that in the United States the movement had been ignited without any prior theoretical agitation. This overture to her historical narration of the US-American reform movement, its leaders, and its institutions established a difference between the United States and Europe, between action and theory. Similarly, the speakers at the imagined “Konvention teutscher Frauen” strategically applied this dualism to legitimize their separation from the US-American women’s movement. Wendt presented it as a historical truth and a generic, essential difference between Germans and US-Americans that served to elevate the German intellectuals’ self-confident position in the United States above the US-American one. This application of the active/passive dualism was highly ambivalent: the Germans’ intellectuality and lack of activism added to the image of the idle, lethargic German introduced above. In contrast, the US-American man and woman of action were considered more positive, because they actively advanced a course of reform. What remains is the fact that the supposedly essential difference between Germans and USAmericans was a difference between theory and action. This dichotomy was a vehicle in the German-American discourse of women’s rights for making the claim for the superiority of the German element in the United States as well as to demonstrate the backwardness of Germans in the women’s reform movement. Having established a central and powerful position for Germans’ contribution as thinkers and theorists to the women’s rights movement, Wendt moved on to highlight Francis Wright and Ernestine Louise Rose as “foreign-born” women who had been the first speakers for women’s emancipation in the United States. These two immigrant women represented further foreign elements that had groundbreaking influence in the development of the movement in the US. The ambivalence of this strong and powerful German (and foreign) position evolved in her description of the German public in the United States. Despite the Germans’ role as early visionaries and theoreticians of women’s rights, and despite their contribution to the US-American public discourse of women’s rights, the German-American community apparently did not have

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many women’s rights supporters among them in 1870. As evidence, the essayist presented the fact that only four of the three hundred German-language papers and magazines in the United States advocated women’s rights. Those were Karl Heinzen’s Pionier, the Neue Welt of St. Louis, the Columbia in Washington, and the NZ in New York (Wendt 1870d, 26 March, 275–76). The public image of the German was that of a traditionalist, not of a reformist. Reactions in the English-language women’s rights press likewise demonstrated the need for a German-language paper that would encourage women’s emancipation among German-Americans. Both The Revolution and the Agitator welcomed the NZ. The Revolution wrote: “Die Neue Zeit is the German paper for which we have so long been hoping” (Miller 1869). This friendly peer review continued by listing the content of the paper’s first issue. The Agitator was more elaborate in its praise of the paper and in May 1869 announced: In New York, a new German Women’s rights paper is to be published—“Die Neue Zeit”—The New Era,—with the motto, “Equal Rights for All.” The most renowned writers in German are secured for its pages, and it is to represent the special tendency of German intellectual life in the United States. There is need of this paper, for only one of all the German papers in this country is in sympathy with the movement for the elevation of woman. Most of the German papers bitterly oppose it. (1869)

In turn, Wendt was not as generous in her writing about the US-American women’s rights movement. Her introduction of its leaders revolved around the person of Lucy Stone, whom she praised: “She is the only woman among the outstanding women of the women’s rights party who had received a thoroughly solid education. She took the classical course at Oberlin College, the only institution of higher education that admitted girls in the day, and received an excellent diploma” (Wendt 1870d, 8 January, 196–98). Wendt presented Stone as a learned intellectual. Although she did mention other early leaders of the women’s rights movement, such as Lucretia Mott, Paulina Wright Davis, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Wendt presented them as speakers and agitators but not as educated women. Nevertheless, they too were learned women who had attended institutions of higher learning. Wendt clearly prioritized a German (theoretical, learned) over an US-American (activist) approach to women’s emancipation. Moreover, Wendt’s ascribing of a prominent position to Stone could be read as a sign of Wendt’s own position in the women’s rights movement after the schism of 1868/69 and the founding of the NWSA and the AWSA. The qualifiers with which Wendt described the founding of the rival associations are telling and reveal a personal leaning toward the AWSA. First, here

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is Wendt’s neutral description of the NWSA: “Here, the National Suffrage Association was founded, which was joined by many satellite associations of the whole union.” One paragraph below Wendt introduced the AWSA: In November of 1869 a new, great association was founded whose president is Henry Ward Beecher, the American Suffrage Association. The officers are the women: Mary A Livermore, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and many others. This party primarily works in the states of New England and now has its own widely distributed and well equipped organ: The Woman’s Journal, published in Boston and revised, set and dispatched by women. (1870d, 26 March, 276)

The latter description contained more details than her comments on the NWSA, employing favorable qualifiers such as “great” and “well equipped.” The mention of the individual officers’ names presented the AWSA as personal and vivid, whereas the representation of the NWSA remained impersonal and anonymous. Anneke also commented in a letter to her husband Fritz on the two rivaling US-American women’s associations. Unlike Wendt, however, Anneke did not support the founding of the AWSA, nor did she think highly of its founders, as the following passage demonstrates. Once the AWSA was founded, she wrote to Fritz: I do not acknowledge the After-National-Association, because a well organized National Association, founded in New York in May this year, exists, namely with Elisabeth Cady Stanton as president and vice presidents in every state (I am appointed for Wisconsin, for example.) This association holds too many radical elements so that the nativist church and temperance league could not comfortably fit in. Thus, the rift occurred. For a while the Cleveland Association will be dominating here. Therefore, the undecided and sycophants commit to it (à la Mathilde Feodowna Wendt.) Livermore is an intriguing smart politician. (Wagner 1980, 353)

Two things should be noted: in the same way that the US-American women’s rights movement split into two separate societies, women such as Wendt and Anneke, despite sharing a German-American ethnic position, participated in this split and became advocates for one of the rivaling parties. The two women’s different stances toward US-American feminists provides proof that these ethnic positions were not stable, but on the contrary, differed and changed through processes of ethnicization. Anneke, as vice president for Wisconsin, supported the NWSA and its founders, Anthony and Stanton, whereas Wendt apparently supported Stone and Livermore in their endeavor to establish the AWSA. One’s position in this game of rivalry was central,

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as Anneke’s letter suggested, and identification in this situation also defined the position of the German women’s rights reformer in the United States. The US-American reformers became—for political as well as personal reasons—figures of identification for German reformers, and the latter’s choice determined their position in the German-American community, illustrating also the gaps within that community. Anneke and Wendt were apparently separated by this gap because they identified with oppositional camps of the women’s rights movement. In Anneke’s eyes, Wendt lost her credibility and suffered a loss of any good reputation that she might have had. In the letter quoted above, Anneke dismissed Wendt as undecided and a “sycophant.” To conclude, Wendt’s narration of the history of the women’s rights movement illustrated her pro-AWSA position, while she simultaneously expressed her position as a German in the United States with ethnic pride. This pride did not lead to a separation and a negation of the US-American movement, as Heinzen’s “Konvention” had demanded. Instead, Wendt supported the USAmerican suff rage community. In claiming the theoretical and intellectual origins of the women’s rights question for Germans, she rejected the stereotype that Germans sought to maintain a traditional gender order and opposed women’s emancipation. Rather, Wendt’s claim suggested that Germans had a tradition of emancipating thought and felt in no way antagonistic toward the cause of the women’s rights movement. Like Heinzen, she still prioritized the German over the US-American position by charging the German with intellectual and theoretical force, but in contrast to Heinzen she did so from a position of basic sympathy with the US-American women’s rights movement. Not only did the NZ pursue the goal of giving German women a voice, but it also served the function of conveying political and cultural news to its readers. The spectrum of news was diverse. In addition to US-American political and cultural news, the paper included political news from Germany, serialized novels and literature by German- and English-language writers, and reports about the progression of the women’s rights movements in the United States and Germany. The consideration of both “battlegrounds” for women’s rights demonstrated that the position of the NZ in the battle for emancipation was informed by German thought and US-American activism. This discourse of women’s rights in the German-American oppositional public was less distinct from the US-American discourse than was imagined in the “Konvention teutscher Frauen in Roxbury.” Although its leaders still marked and activated their differences along ethnic lines and although they indeed lifted the German woman above the US-American woman, the strategic reason behind it was not only nationalistic: in Wendt’s discourse, the divisions within the German community in the United States and the division between German women and men and between radicals and conservatives

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were the underlying reasons for the formation of a rational German-American women’s rights discourse. This new discourse should help change the public image of Germans in the US-American women’s rights movement. Only if Germans were viewed more positively by US-American feminists would the antagonism between the two camps cease and women’s rights be enforced.

Mathilde Wendt’s Activism: Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein On the evening of 21 March 1872, “no less than 2000 persons” assembled at the new Turnhalle in New York to participate in the first public meeting of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, according to a report in the WJ: “The audience was essentially a German one, there probably being scarcely a dozen persons present, belonging to other nationalities” (1872). The crowdedness of the hall also featured prominently in Heinzen’s Pionier: “Shortly past seven o’clock some gentlemen and ladies arrived to take their seats in the front rows and at eight o’clock the hall which seats nearly one thousand persons was so crowded that doors wide-open the crowd had extended to the entrance hall. Probably more than 100 persons could not enter at all” (A. 1872). The New Yorker Staatszeitung commented that although the “weak and beautiful gender” represented a large part of the audience, the “raw, despotic and stronger gender” dominated the audience (1872b). These introductory remarks leave no doubt that this event was of major interest to the German-American population of New York and that it was also of interest to the broader women’s rights movement community, including the readers of the WJ. What was its significance in the special relationship between German-Americans and the women’s rights movement in the United States? Historian Mari Jo Buhle situated the club in the Socialist movement of New York and further explained that although Auguste Lilienthal “rose to prominence after this event [the founding meeting of 1872], she, like her comrades, lacked a stable constituency and could never utilize the full range of her talents and energy” (1981, 3).22 Thirty years after Buhle’s publication, what is known about the history of this society has not changed. It remains unclear how it developed; who its members, officers, and audiences were; and how it ceased to be an active part of a German-American women’s rights movement. I discovered the final reference to this association in the WJ of 28 March 1874 in the form of a report of the “regular public meeting” of the German Woman Suff rage Association of New York (M.V. 1874). The Pionier (1872), the NZ (1872a), and the New Yorker Staatszeitung (1872b, 1872c) featured reports of the initial meeting and the speeches that were given. Wendt, as the president of the new association, opened the meet-

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ing and introduced the three speakers: Lilienthal, Clara Neymann, and Dr. Adolph Douai.23 While the need for initiating a separate German women’s suff rage association was not central to Lilienthal’s and Neymann’s speeches (Douai’s speech was not discussed in the reports), the female speakers focused on the political and theoretical dimensions of women’s emancipation. Like the NZ, with its commitment to women’s rights, the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein did not negate the US-American women’s rights discourse altogether; rather, it drew much of its energies from it. To the assembled members, it seemed only logical that the ethnic community of German-Americans would fulfill a destiny of safeguarding individual freedom and democracy in the United States by subscribing to women’s rights. Implementing women’s rights, however, became an endeavor of mediation and negotiation, not between the US-American community of women’s rights reformers and the GermanAmerican community, but between the German radicals and intellectuals in the United States and the extended German immigrant population comprising farmers and skilled and unskilled workers. The members of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein sought to reach the German community, including German voters who would not have been sympathetic to US-American women’s rights reformers on account of strong reciprocal stereotypes and prejudices. While a politically engaged immigrant woman might not have found it necessary to separate from the US-American community, her hybrid status and ethnic pride required her to address herself to the German community while simultaneously trying to alter the Germans’ image in the eyes of the US-American women’s rights movement. I will now try to highlight two central elements of the German-American women’s rights movement. Firstly, the alternative discourse constituted by socialism and freethought; and secondly, the cooperation with their US-American counterparts. In her opening speech at the founding convention, Lilienthal spoke up for women’s enfranchisement and opposed the prevailing arguments against it. She argued against the assumption that because women could not serve as armed soldiers they were not eligible to citizen’s rights. She opposed the fact that women’s brains were supposedly smaller than men’s and thus intellectually less capable. Furthermore, she spoke out against the social norm dictating that women remain in the domestic sphere. Finally, she argued against the notion that the influence of the clergy would increase once women had the right to vote. This last argument was relevant in the German-American context, as the fictional convention at Roxbury had made clear. This, then, constituted the central issue of opposition and the main factor for the division and ethnicization of the reform movements. Lilienthal said: I believe that the power of the parsons cannot grow further, that power created by men who have made our laws until now. We want to liberate the world from the

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clerics. Our religion is human dignity, love of humanity, freedom and equality! We are the ones who attack the foundation of religion, the Bible, and shatter the one of all dogmas: He shall be the Lord! Together with the Bible the entire old and rotten edifice shall go down! (New Yorker Staatszeitung 1872b)

The collective “we” in Lilienthal’s address remained ambivalent, neither clearly implying the German women’s rights movement inaugurated here nor the US-American women’s rights movement represented by the NWSA and the AWSA. Yet, strong opposition against religion and reference to the philanthropic religion of human rights, freedom, and equality suggested an exclusive collective “we.” To speak out against institutionalized religion and in favor of overthrowing reliance on the Bible in 1872 introduced a discourse different from the US-American women’s rights movement’s discourse on women’s rights. US-American women’s conventions’ programs, with regular prayers and religious services, prove that religious belief and a form of female piety were still valid discourses in their movement. Lilienthal, however, presented these religious discourses as invalid and rejected them. Thus, she situated herself outside the US-American women’s rights discourse in a discourse of enlightened and philanthropic women’s rights (in the community of German-Americans). Her rejection of religion served as a doctrine, expressing her attachment to a particular discourse.24 As a German-American woman, Lilienthal had to take up a discourse that differed from the US-American women’s rights movement’s discourse on women’s rights. Opposition in the German-American community to women’s emancipation primarily stemmed from the observation that the reform movement was based on and reiterated religious doctrines that were regarded as a sign of dependence and a lack of freedom. The distinct discourse of women’s rights in the German-American community, therefore, evolved from the rejection of this religiousness and the establishment of a discursive doctrine of “freedom,” “human rights,” and “equality.” These doctrines and a prohibition of religiousness brought about a German-American women’s rights discourse and resulted in Lilienthal’s ambivalent straddling of the US-American and German-American women’s rights movements. This is clear in her dual strategy, whereby affirming the particular antireligious discourse of women’s rights allowed her to reach the German-American community that would have objected to the presumed religiousness and superstition of the US-American women’s rights movement. The flip side of this strategy was not the total neglect of the US-Americans’ movement, but quite the contrary. By adhering to a doctrine that could convince German-Americans of the righteousness of a feminist reform, the image of Germans in the United States would also change within the US-American women’s rights movement. This dual strategy

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was characteristic of the ambivalent position of Lilienthal, Wendt, and the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein. In addition to the antireligious doctrine, the contents of the reported public meetings of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein display the group’s affiliation with the German-American Socialist movement. Neymann, Alexander Jonas, and Mathilde C. Weil were the speakers between 1872 and 1874 who addressed socialist issues of wages, hours, and labor. I argue in what follows that the concentration on socialist politics represented the second distinctive element in the German-American women’s rights discourse. Neymann’s address at the opening meeting in 1872 brought together a socialist ideal of independent work with considerations about women’s education and marriage: Once the wife is trained to work, she can also contribute to the family’s provision. … But currently the wife might have to work more than the husband and what is the outcome? The poor woman throws herself into the open arms of prostitution. Look at the pasha-like position of a house servant pocketing 8 to 10 dollars each month, and compare it to the miserable lot of a housemaid, who hardly earns the double!25 Is it surprising that despite of the notorious lack of good housemaids no female being decides to work? (New Yorker Staatszeitung 1872b)

In her address, Neymann criticized how women received a limited education, which curtailed their options to work and taught them how to become obedient housewives. The unequal distribution of power between husband and wife contributed to the “rottenness of family life” (Fäulniß des Familienlebens), which she conceived as the source of the “rotten circumstances in the lands” (verrottene Zustände der Staaten). Subsequently, she demanded a reform of marriage. Furthermore, and most central to her argument, was her critique of women’s low wages, which forced them into prostitution, another feature of social and moral “rottenness.” Equality between marriage partners, equal wages, and equal opportunities in education would all lead to women’s independence and ultimately to the “refinement and betterment of the human race” (Veredelung des Menschengeschlechts). Women’s rights and suff rage in particular were elements of a much broader political (socialist) agenda. Weil’s speech at the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein’s public meeting in March 1874 centered on the question of equal wages for women and men. She presented examples of jobs in which women were paid less than men, because they were female and disenfranchised: The administration at Washington, a short time ago, determined to lessen the expenses of the Government, and concluded to make this deduction in the Trea-

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sury Department. Only a female clerk, copyist, who received $36.46 per month, was dismissed, probably because she could be of no political service to the Administration as the male clerks are. This is another proof that women suffer by not being admitted to the ballot. (M.V. 1874)

The implied accusation in the given example was that of corruption governing Washington. As they had no political power, women counted far less in the offices of administrators; they were irrelevant because they would not be able to give their votes to any of their bosses. Therefore, Weil argued, women’s work in this administrative sector was precarious because they were disenfranchised. The general precariousness of women’s labor was proven as well: women, because they lacked opportunities to choose their education, had only limited options to work. The increasing introduction of machinery and industrialization affected women more than men, as they had fewer alternative work opportunities. Only the vote, educational opportunities, and equal wages would improve women’s lot. Weil and Neymann saw women’s rights in the context of human progress, and subsequently Weil ended her address with great pathos: “Give to Woman the highest possible development, socially and politically, open to her every field of activity; then she will not only clearly understand the questions of the time, but work according to the principles of this great Republic” (M.V. 1874). Both women claimed women’s rights as an element in their vision of socialist reform. Women’s rights, moreover, served as a vehicle to achieve socialist goals. Their proximity to the socialist movement evolved as a further distinctive feature in the German-American women’s rights discourse. US-American women’s rights reformers such as Livermore and Anthony shared socialist goals as well, but whereas socialism functioned as one element in the emancipation of women in the US-American women’s rights discourse, it evolved as the chief end of agitation in the German-American discourse, valuing as it did women’s enfranchisement as one means to the individual’s economic independence and social justice. Socialism and freethought, then, were the two doctrines constituting the German-American women’s rights discourse. Despite the exclusiveness of this discourse and its distinction from the dominant US-American discourse, members of both groups sought cooperation, as the following example shall demonstrate. In May 1873, the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein invited members and friends to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NWSA in New York, and so displayed an overlap of constituents between the two associations. The invitation announced the following ladies as speakers: “Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Madame Anneke, Charlotte B. Wilbour, Matilda |Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, Clemence S. Lozier, M.D., Mathilde F. Wendt, Olympia Brown, Lillie Devereux Blake” (Das Agitations-Committee

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1873). The egalitarian integration of Wendt and Anneke concealed the otherwise palpable differences between the two societies. Anneke, however, stood out in this list as she was the only woman not mentioned by her full name, but by the respectful form of address, Madame Anneke. This raised her above the others on this list and presented her as the grand dame of the movement, an honor which generally only Lucretia Mott received. Contextualizing this source in the German-American women’s rights discourse, the elevation of Anneke becomes a signifier of the self-confidence the German-American discourse felt in relation to its US-American counterpart. That this was conceived rather differently in the US-American women’s rights discourse can be concluded not only with reference to the deeply ingrained nativism of the movement, but also from the invisibility of the German-American movement in the US-American movement. As an entry in Anthony’s diary indicated: “Tuesday, May 6, 1873. Anniversary National W.S.A. Apollo Hall—New York—Meeting good as could be with no newspaper advertising” (Gordon 2000, 606). The announcement in the German-language paper had remained invisible to Anthony and seemed to be irrelevant to her. Whereas the Germans remained invisible to Anthony, the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein explicitly appealed to German-Americans’ solidarity with the US-American women’s rights movement and with Anthony in particular when she was convicted of illegal voting: “At the evening session beginning at 8 o’clock Miss Susan B. Anthony will tell the story of her trial for having cast a supposedly illegal vote. Because of its extraordinary importance of this issue, all members should attend” (Das Agitations-Committee 1873). This issue of women’s attempts to vote and to register as voters was also hotly debated among German-Americans. Another instance of the solidarity of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein with their US-American colleagues was the 1872 presidential election campaign. It coincided with the “new departure” among women’s rights reformers. This label became the heading of a new strategy to gain women’s suff rage, whereby women argued that under the articles of the constitution they were citizens and therefore entitled to vote. Presuming their rights as citizens, women registered to vote and then went to the polls to cast their votes.26 Already prior to Anthony’s case and her public trial in June 1873, female reformers had demanded the right to vote for these reasons. Wendt was among those women who attempted to vote in New York.27 She wrote about it in relation to the presidential elections and the position of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, and I will quote at length from her letter of October 1872 to Karl Heinzen: This year, I consider the No President agitation as a disaster. It robs us of half of our radical supporters. … As the only [German-American] suff rage organization

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in the United States we lose ground, and this seems more disastrous now that women, in a few years, will doubtlessly have the right to vote. Then, the gangs of priests and temperance fanatics will rear their hands and we Germans will no longer have any influence, since we did not help the American women and, instead of eagerly supporting them, did nothing for them. From a practical point of view, it is none of our business whether we have a president or none. … [W]e are only political zeroes and appendages of any random man who happens to be our husband. In my eyes we and the radical men have the primary duty to turn these zeroes into numbers before we actively engage in any other kind of reform. (KH Papers)

Wendt addressed two levels here. Firstly, she explained that it was the duty of German women to support the US-American women’s rights reformers, as only then would Germans be in a position to participate in political decisions. Secondly, Wendt spoke as a woman, as, in her own words, a political “zero” or nonentity. For these reasons, she considered it the responsibility of the German-Americans to support women’s rights. And she appealed in particular to German-American radicals to prioritize women’s suff rage over other reforms, such as the “No President” agitation Heinzen and Neymann represented in October 1872. This was an argument for more direct democracy, which opposed the pseudomonarchic institution of the presidency in the United States. According to Wendt, the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein would be fighting a losing battle, as such agitation would result in their vanishing from the political scene altogether. Exiting a political arena that women had only just entered, through their support of a presidential candidate and their attempts to vote, would have been self-destructive, and as a result the German women’s rights movement would lose any political influence. Women were now engaging in party politics and thus demonstrating their fitness for political power. The German-American radicals’ argument against the presidency undermined this newly gained political power for women, because it undermined the grounds on which they based these powers and thus functioned as an exit strategy for the German-American women’s rights movement. Thus, Wendt argued vehemently for deferring the “No President” agitation and supporting the issue of women suff rage during the presidential campaign. Wendt was convinced that the German-American discourse of women’s rights could not function on its own and in stark opposition to the US-American movement’s discourse. She argued that separation was unwise because it limited future opportunities for the participation and political influence of Germans in the United States. While German women defined themselves against what they considered to be the aberrations of their US-American co-

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workers in the women’s rights movement, Wendt suggested that they collaborate with each other. German-American women could thus ultimately become the redeemers of the United States in safeguarding republican principles.28

Opposition as a Dual Strategy Juxtaposing Heinzen’s imagined German women’s rights movement in the United States with the real one reveals an interesting discrepancy between the two. Whereas the fantasy stressed opposition to the US-American women’s right’s movement’s strategies and the movement’s supposed support of temperance policies, the examples taken from reality did not uphold this assumption. Instead, it built a strategy of support. Women’s rights activism sought to represent a beacon to the German community in the United States, on which the German population would focus its attention and be guided by, as well as represent a beacon for the US-American women’s rights movement by signaling the willingness among the Germans to reform. Nevertheless, it was necessary to remain in a separate community outside the US-American reform movement so as not to lose credibility among the German population for its opposition to the US-Americans’ strategies. Surprisingly, nativism and temperance did not feature prominently in the discourse of women’s rights in New York that I have examined, although they were the central features among German opponents to the women’s rights movement. These issues appeared to be “bypassed” in the NZ and in the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein. I argue that this “bypassing” of heated issues was a necessary strategy in helping German-American women’s rights advocates fulfill their dual role of becoming a beacon within both ethnic communities. In order to avoid harming their place in either of them, a “third space” had to be invented that could function universally in all Western societies. In her historical overview of women’s positions, Wendt introduced gender as a historical category that could become such a “third space.” In the discourse of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, moreover, the socialist revolution filled this space. Despite “bypassing” the US-Americans’ critique of the Germans, Wendt and other New York women ambiguously reinstated the idea of German superiority. This sense of superiority rested on two foundations: first, the Germans were deemed to be intellectually advanced; second, they had a holistic vision of a socialist revolution. Taken together, these aspects confirmed their position as the vanguard of women’s rights reform. In doing so they also put forth their critique of US-American reformers who, they argued, were unable to fulfill this task:

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[W]e claim that once the present female leaders of the women’s rights movement have reached their goal, we cannot expect any other relevant reforms. Of course, new forces will come forward, but their goals will be of various kinds and only a few will be open to socialist tendencies. Militant socialism, however, will then have lost the concentrated power of today’s women’s rights movement, which shares with it at least the negation of the present order, as its helping force. (NZ 1871d)

It is evident that these politically radical Germans associated with NZ and the Frauenstimmrechtsverein wanted to lead a socialist “revolution.” GermanAmericans understood women’s rights as one element of socialist politics and justice. The NZ argued that these higher aims were not central in the US-American discourse. This strategic and political difference legitimized the German-American women’s right movement as a quasi-separate reform movement. Therefore, German-Americans, in order to secure their political and cultural influence, were called on to support the women’s rights movement so that after the enfranchisement of women a socialist “revolution” could be initiated under the leadership of Germans, who represented the intellectual predecessors of socialist ideas and enlightenment thought, as stated repeatedly in this German-American discourse. “Bypassing” antagonisms strengthened German political influence in the United States, as mere opposition was conceived as an exit strategy, something that the example of the 1872 presidential campaign showed. Despite its separation from the US-American feminist movement, the German-American women’s rights movement thus also strengthened the transatlantic space in which it was situated. The Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein represented not just one pole in a dichotomous ethnic relationship, but settled in a third space of negotiation through differentiation. I consider such a space to be a transatlantic space, as it prompted motion between the binary system of US-American and German (European) positions. The real “fantasy” of the German-American women’s rights movement evolved not as a total separation and negation of the US-American movement, but materialized—although ambiguously—to support the US-American discourse. At times, and in particular with regard to the socialist “revolution” in whose debts the women’s reform rested, a German ideal was established, creating ambivalences that complicated the special relationship between German-Americans and women’s rights in the United States.

Notes 1. This information is taken from ship passenger lists. In addition to this information, marriage certificates and census data have been consulted to establish a general biographical narrative.

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2. Mathilde Wendt and Clara Neymann appeared to have had a complicated, even unfriendly relationship, however. Wendt wrote to Heinzen on 12 April 1872: “Unlike my sister in law Mrs. Clara Neymann, with whom I have totally broken and of course also with my favorite beloved brother, who is a plaything in the hands of his vain and corrupt wife” (KH Papers). 3. The censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870 list Charles Wendt as a distiller and reveal an increase in his personal estate from $7,000 in 1850 to $15,000 in 1860. However, by the time the Wendt family moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1870, the value of the family’s estate had diminished dramatically to just $1,000. In a letter to Karl Heinzen, dated 18 April 1872, Wendt mentioned that she would have to rely on and provide for herself in the future (KH Papers), and in a prior letter dated 12 April 1872, Wendt wrote to Heinzen that her husband’s property situation had changed dramatically: “Since my husband’s financial circumstances had changed in a critical way” (KH Papers). 4. Wendt’s inclusion in this group was indicated in a call for a meeting of the New York liberal-republikanischer Verein that appeared in the New Yorker Staatszeitung on 29 March 1872 (1872d). He was mentioned as one of the organizers of this meeting. In the following report of the meeting he remained unmentioned. The club demanded that the politics of expediency should be replaced by a politics of principles (New Yorker Staatszeitung 1872a). This network of German liberals was affiliated with the network of German freethinkers. Freethought and liberalism had their American counterpart, and as Neymann vehemently demanded in 1878, collaborated with each other. She wrote: “Now is the time to consider where German influence and German thought could be put to its best possible use! For those who emphasize a practical occupation and who want to see their well-considered thoughts realized in concrete action, there seems to be no better association than the ‘Liberal Leagues,’ which primarily seek to realize what German freethinkers have been seeking for years—the creation of a completely atheistic state, from which any religion is altogether banished and which safeguards everyone’s unrestricted intellectual growth” (Neymann 1878b). 5. In an 1885 New York Times article this association was introduced as follows: “Five ladies, richly dressed in furs and silks, attended by a physician and a sanitary engineer, explored the mysteries of the east side slaughter houses yesterday. They were a committee from the Ladies’ Health Protective Association—Mrs. M.F. Wendt, the President of the association; Mrs. A.M. Sparks, Vice-President; Mrs. C. Fendler, Mrs. F. Stiebel, and Mrs. F. Loewenberg, all of whom live in the neighborhood of First-avenue and Fiftieth-street” (1885). This association was active in safeguarding the sanitary code in the city and in particular in the slaughterhouse district, and so provided opportunities for political activism among women at the neighborhood level. Julia Thomas reported for The Woman’s Tribune in 1888: “This Society was organized by ladies who were roused into action by the vile odors that invaded their homes and threatened the health of their households, viz., those arising from the slaughter houses, built and conducted in violation of the sanitary laws of the city. … This new year, 1888, marks the beginning of the fourth years’ work of the Ladies’ Health Protective Association” (Thomas 1888). 6. “In October, 1873, Mrs. Devereux Blake made an effort to open the doors of Columbia College to women. A class of four young ladies united in asking admission.” HWS then gave the names of these four women in a footnote: Emma Wendt, daughter of Mathilde Wendt, is among them (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 3, 410). 7. The report of the ICW included: “Mathilde F. Wendt sent from New York her greeting to the Council, and begs that the work of Madame Anneke may be remembered, since it was she who contributed so much to the German Revolution of 1848. In that year Carl Schurz and this brave woman, forced to leave their Fatherland, sought in America the freedom denied them at home. To him, our nation opened the way to every honor, save only the highest; to her it denied even the exercise of the natural right of self-government” (Report of the ICW 1888, 368).

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8. The Naturalization Act of 1802 declared that immigrants had to file “first papers,” meaning that they had to declare their intention to become citizens as well as their allegiance to the United States government before they could apply for naturalization. In the nineteenth century immigrants could declare this intent at any time after they had arrived in the United States. Some states had voting laws allowing those immigrants who had declared their intent to vote in state elections and on the ward and municipal levels. At times, as Catt and Shuler criticize in the quote above, some voters had very little knowledge of language, customs, and political interests because they had arrived very recently. “First papers” were no longer required in the process of naturalization after 1925 (Smith 1998, 25). 9. Karl Heinzen edited the Pionier from 1859 to 1880 (the year he died) in Boston. After his death it merged with the Milwaukee FD. He understood the radical paper as an organ of truth and justice. Carl Wittke, in his studies on the German-language press in the United States, praised Heinzen as ranking “near the top of German-American journalists of the nineteenth century, as far as ability and perseverance are concerned” (Wittke 1952, 275). Moreover, the Pionier was the only consistent German-American paper that had championed women’s rights from the outset. Wittke also mentioned Anneke’s Deutsche Frauenzeitung and Mathilde F. Wendt’s NZ as two further papers on the German-American market. Both papers, however, were shortlived compared to the Pionier and had a small audience (Wittke 1952, 162). 10. Wittke further explains that a new kind of personal journalism emerged with the group of intellectual Forty-Eighters. The new German-language papers became the personal organs of their editors. Wittke sees parallels for this development on the American side, where the Tribune became the mouthpiece of Horace Greeley. (On the side of women’s press, I would add, The Revolution is another good example of this type of personal journalism having represented Stanton’s and Anthony’s political agenda.) According to Wittke, the “disgraceful feuds” often ended in actual physical violence or in court where editors sued each other for slander, exaggeration, libel, and deliberate falsehoods (Wittke 1952, 264–66). 11. In Opfermann’s study of nineteenth-century female writers, the author stresses the potential of art (and literature in particular) to question the given and valid discourses in their present order, to point out and establish contradictions. This characteristic of fiction pertains to both the act of producing and reading the text (1996, 34–35). 12. Until 1835, according to Hochgeschwender, the United States was a “republic of alcoholics” (2007, 105), meaning the per capita consumption of alcohol was nowhere higher. According to evangelists, drinking was a sign of a weak character and lack of self-discipline, and they regarded alcohol to be satanic and demonic. Liberal philanthropists began to form temperance societies, which aimed at influencing people to reduce their consumption of alcohol. Evangelists radicalized this concept, saying alcohol was sinful and had to be prohibited altogether. Temperance societies were turned into antialcohol societies. The campaign culminated in the first prohibition law in Maine in 1850. Women of the evangelical middle class rose to become the leaders of this movement in the 1850s, and their public agitation was prominent (Hochgeschwender 2007, 104–6). 13. Hermann Wellenreuther showed this dynamic in his article about American perceptions of Germans as expressed in travel reports between 1800 and 1840. He pointed out the ways in which American travelers perceived Germans to be slow and idle. Germans were represented as doing their chores slowly and in turn spending a lot of time eating good food. Americans concluded that Germans wasted their time. Time, in the Americans’ eyes, should be used to an end and should not be wasted for leisure activities that lacked a higher purpose. Germans’ usage of time was connected to “impassive phlegm and absolute stupidity,” as Washington Irving observed (Wellenreuther 1997, 54). 14. As we will see, Neymann applied this dichotomy of passivity and activity to her descrip-

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tion of German and American women as well. So did Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when she described the differences between German immigrants and herself (see Chapter 2). 15. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1848 in New York, for example, declared that a woman would not lose the right to dispose of her property when she married. The 1860 law further provided that married women had the right to keep their earnings from labor or services: “and the earnings of any married woman from her trade … shall be her sole and separate property, and may be used or invested by her in her own name” (Quoted in Kerber 1980, 570–71). 16. Most likely this character represented Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1872), a prominent nineteenth-century German traveler and writer. His two popular novels, Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (1846) and Die Flußpiraten des Mississippi (1848), were influential in creating an image of the United States in Germany. Between 1867 and 1868 Gerstäcker traveled to North America and Central America again. Perhaps, since this journey immediately preceded Heinzen’s “Konvention teutscher Frauen,” the traveler encountered Heinzen (Historische Commission 1879, vol. 9, 59–60). 17. The only mention of this association, yet no analysis and further examination, can be found in Häderle (1990, 88–89) and in Buhle (1981, 3). 18. Except for the information I mention in my study, Labsap remains an obscure personality. He coedited the NZ and later the Östliche Post in St. Louis. 19. The quarrel between Wendt and Labsap was the subject of a series of letters by Wendt to Karl Heinzen. In these she described the rumors, accusations, and slander that were brought against her and in turn railed against Labsap and other members of the German-American reform circle in New York. It appears as a long story of mud-wrestling in which Wendt became the victim of the swindler Labsap. She accused him of having started an intrigue against her in order to take over the paper entirely and to push her and the issue of women’s rights away. Wendt was the first executive director and chief editor when the NZ was initiated by the German Printing Association. During the first year of its existence the paper accumulated $900 in debt. Labsap offered to join Wendt as editor and to buy the paper from the German Printing Association as partners. “I inquired about his political, religious and social beliefs and his answers were to my complete satisfaction,” wrote Wendt to Heinzen on 12 April 1872 (KH Papers). Labsap then contracted an investment of $1000 to pay the debt, which he never did. The level of financial debt increased until March 1871, when Labsap proposed to resell the paper to the German Printing Association. They declined this “offer.” Instead, he then demanded that Wendt discontinued her ownership of the paper, which she accepted under the condition that she remain editor on equal terms with Labsap. However, Labsap could not make his payments and things remained as they had been. According to Wendt’s account of this intrigue, Labsap’s attempts to kick Wendt out continued until June 1872, when Labsap had pioneered with a new paper, the Oestliche Post. He then successively ceased contributions to the NZ and let it die. Wendt was unable to buy it from Labsap then on account of the ill fate of her husband’s business activities. In April 1872 she appealed to Heinzen in Boston that he merge his Pionier with the NZ in such way that the new paper would then appear simultaneously in New York and Boston, while Heinzen would remain the editor in chief (KH Papers, 12 April 1872). This merger was never realized. In her description of the fight over the paper with Labsap, Wendt continuously lamented that she was misunderstood and that a conspiracy was knit together to harm her personally. The foundations of such a conspiracy are mysterious, but they suggest that Wendt did not have a good standing within the German-American community. This distinguished her from Anneke and Neymann, as I will show in the following case studies. 20. Wittke concluded his mention of Wendt’s paper as follows: “[B]ut her paper was small and had little influence” (1957, 162). The aforementioned letter written by Wendt to Heinzen

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is the only proof of the paper’s circulation. In comparison to Wendt’s paper, Heinzen claimed a circulation of 1,200 for the Pionier, a number that was rejected by the New Yorker Staatszeitung, which insisted that it was only 550 (Wittke, 1957, 124). The Staatszeitung, as the most successful German-language paper of New York, had a circulation of 15,300 (Wittke 1957, 77). Wittke’s initially quoted conclusion has to be considered in light of such numbers and it appears that the radical press, in contrast to the conservative press (in general), attracted fewer readers. In comparison, however, to English-language women’s rights papers, the NZ truly was small: The Revolution had a circulation of 10,000 with no more than 3,000 subscribers at its peak, and the WJ had a circulation of about 4,500 and ran continuously from 1870 to 1920 (Masel-Walters 1976; Huxman 1991). 21. Amalie Struve (born in 1824, Mannheim, died in 1862, New York) was among the FortyEighters who left the German states after the defeat of the revolutionary upheavals and in April 1851 arrived together with her husband, Gustav Struve, in New York. After their arrival in New York, both partners devoted their energies to journalistic activities. Additionally, Amalie worked as a German teacher in New York and planned to open a German school. However, she never did. She never extended her public activities to American reform circles and instead remained in the German-American community of Forty-Eighters. She knew Mathilde and Fritz Anneke and corresponded with Mathilde Anneke. Apart from the few reports of American women’s reform activities in the papers and magazines that her husband edited and published, no evidence of an exchange with American women could be found. A complete collection of the essays, reports, and literary texts she wrote in the United States has been edited by Monica MarcelloMüller (2002). For a biographical portrait of Gustav and Amalie Struve see Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen (1998). Also, Ansgar Reiß’s 2004 monograph is an excellent piece of research and interpretation of Gustav Struve’s intellectual development. The couple’s productive partnership is discussed in the study, advancing our knowledge of Amalie Struve’s life and work as well. 22. Auguste Lilienthal grew up in a village near Berlin during the 1840s in a craftsman’s family. Together with her second husband, a Jewish physician, she immigrated to New York in 1861, where both passionately supported Lincoln during the Civil War. After the war they were drawn into reform circles in New York. Auguste Lilienthal remained unmentioned in the American women’s rights movement’s documents and, therefore, is but a marginal figure only in the narration of this study. Apart from these sources, the German-American woman did not leave any papers and only seldom published articles in the NZ (for example a critical article about the celebrations of Independence Day on 4 July 1870, 1870a, or a radical article about the superstitions of religion, 1870b) and the socialist German-language paper New Yorker Volkszeitung. Her main field of public action was the socialist camp in the United States. A short biographical introduction was written by her daughter Meta Lilienthal in an autobiographical reminiscence, “Dear Remembered World” (Buhle 1981, 1–48). 23. Carl Adolph Douai (born 1819 in Altenburg, died 1888 in the US) came as a refugee to the United States in 1852 after having been indicted for treason as a participant in the revolutions at Altenburg. He first settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he immediately became an advocate of abolitionism. He differed from radicals such as Heinzen in so far as he first promoted the gradual abolition of slavery and only later developed the conviction that radical and immediate abolition would be the only solution. In 1854 he moved to Boston, where he founded a German school and kindergarten. At one time in 1856 he also was an assistant at Heinzen’s Pionier. Douai’s political thought was characterized by freethought, socialism, and communism. In 1868 he became the editor of the socialist paper Die Arbeiter Union in New York and between 1878 and 1888 edited the New Yorker Volkszeitung, organ of the German socialist movement in New York (Dobert 1958, 61–67).

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24. In his Ordnung des Diskurses, Foucault describes the doctrine as a binding and authoritative discursive element, which comprises speaking subjects as a group. The interplay between the doctrine as a type of speech and the subject is of a reciprocal character: A doctrine prohibits certain types of speech while simultaneously demanding other particular types of speech. In turn, the subjects themselves put forth words that serve the doctrine as a resource from which to generate the binding and authoritative rules that evolve as the boundaries of the discursive group. Due to this reciprocal mechanism, Foucault speaks of a dual subjugation: the speaking subject is subjugated by the discourse and the discourse is also subjugated by the group of speaking subjects (2001, 28–29). 25. The report must be flawed, and Neymann most likely meant that a housemaid hardly earned half of what a male servant earned. 26. The “New Departure” contested the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and was adopted as a national strategy of the NWSA at the Washington Convention of 1871. Women referred to the guarantee of citizen’s rights declared to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” in the Fourteenth Amendment and claimed, accordingly, their citizenship and their citizen’s right to vote. This strategy of “march[ing] into power directly, through the main political entrance, rather than indirectly, through the backdoor of the nursery or kitchen,” to say it with the pointed words of Ellen Carol DuBois (1993, 20), rested on a broad inclusive construction of the Fourteenth Amendment, according to which women claimed to be already enfranchised. Starting in 1868, women individually, and often in groups, went to the polls. The largest and most famous of these groups was comprised of the nearly fifty local activists, friends, and relatives who joined Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York, in 1872. After several cases, the Supreme Court case Minor v. Happersett in 1875 put an end to the “New Departure,” repudiating Virginia Minor’s suit and affirming that suff rage was not a right of citizenship. Suff ragists thus began their pursuit of a separate women suff rage amendment, a less radical strategy because women suff rage was no longer tied to an overall democratic interpretation of the Constitution. In addition, the strategy of a separate amendment paved the path to elitist, racist, and nativist arguments. 27. For a list of women who attempted to vote between 1868 and 1873, see Gordon (2000, 645–54). 28. Buhle (1981) describes this self-confident strategy of separation as one that aimed at lifting Germans to the level of redeemers of this foreign country by incorporating a socialist movement. German-Americans built their own trading leagues and unions in order to work against the wrongs of “native Americans” [meaning US-Americans] (4).

Chapter 2

Mathilde Franziska Anneke Powerful Translator

≥ Anneke’s powerful position in the women’s rights movement stemmed from her hybrid position as a “woman of two countries,” an identity she was given in letters by US-American feminist leaders. She had risen to prominence as the female “warrior” during the revolution in Baden in 1848 at the side of her husband Fritz—an image that Anneke herself upheld in her memoir Memoiren einer Frau aus den badischen Feldzügen. She was also seen as a “power among the Germans” (Bentley, letter to Anneke, 10 September 1880, MFA Papers) that could convince the German community of the righteousness of the women’s rights movement’s goals and strategies, and she enjoyed a high standing in both ethnic communities. As such, she was considered a spokesperson for German society. It was not only political differences and ethnic prejudices that required Anneke to work for the women’s rights movement, but her ability to speak German as well. She could thus make the women’s rights movement’s ideas heard in a non-English language community and culture. Thus, mediation in efforts of translation and interpretation characterized Anneke’s position as a “woman of two countries.” The German-American community and US-American women’s reform community, as previously shown, sustained strong reciprocal stereotypes of each other. Such “images in their heads” had material and real consequences in terms of the way they produced a social reality, influenced voting behavior, and evoked emotional reactions. Paradoxically, Anneke was thrust into an interstitial position that enabled her to gain eminent power in the US-American women’s rights movement precisely because of this antagonistic relationship. In this case study I scrutinize her position and power, and analyze the ways in which Anneke utilized it to spread the women’s rights agenda throughout the German-American community. Furthermore, in doing so I will pay particular attention to the nativist elements in the women’s rights discourse and their influence on Anneke’s position. Her role in the women’s rights movement was not that of an independent thinker and agitator, but always that of mediator and translator between oppositional

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camps. In what follows I will first explore the elements in and beyond the women’s rights discourse that enabled Anneke’s identification with the USAmerican movement, such as ideas of revolution and antislavery. Once this has been established, an investigation of her role on behalf of the German-American community and the US-American women’s rights movement will follow, and I will show that it was Anneke’s ethnicization that was her most valuable source of power as an activist between ethnic and political contexts. To analyze and evaluate Anneke’s position it seems logical to compare her with Ernestine Rose. Both shared the same antireligious and radical thought, and both considered women’s rights as just one element in an inclusive program of social reform. Although Rose was openly criticized and felt marginalized within the women’s rights movement of the 1850s, Anneke, on the contrary, was praised, invited, and well-received, despite the radical nature of her ideas. This difference, I argue, stemmed from Anneke’s firm position in the German-American community, which in turn ascribed to her a distinct and unequivocal position in the women’s rights movement. As a mediator she more or less acted on behalf of the US-American women’s movement in the German community and also on behalf of the German community in the women’s rights movement. Her agitation—most of the time in the German language—was targeted at the German-American community, and she reached out to this group in her appearances at women’s rights conventions. Rose did not assume such a clearly defined position in the women’s rights movement and, moreover, was not situated firmly in another ethnic community, for instance, that of the Polish-Americans. For the women’s rights movement, the strong political force of the German community in the United States necessitated their support for women’s rights. This substantial group of people controlled by Anneke provided her with the necessary power to be integrated in that movement. Rose, by contrast, had to confront the mainstream women’s rights movement and was less free in choosing her political opinions and in criticizing the mainstream. Maintaining a “home base” in the ethnic community of Germans in the United States and retaining a strategic distance from the US-American women’s rights reformers enabled Anneke to achieve an excellent reputation among US-Americans as well as Germans. Upon her arrival in New York in 1849, Anneke, like her compatriots and fellow political refugees, looked for relationships within the German-American community, so as to provide a linguistic and cultural community founded on the mutual experience of immigration. In a letter dated 26 April 1877 to New York socialist leader Alexander Jonas, Anneke reflected on her biography and career.1 While she continued her political and intellectual work when she first arrived in the United States, she did not reach out to US-American reformers. She wrote to Jonas that she gradually became aware of the US-American

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women’s reform activities and thus began to read and translate the writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Stanton, and Anthony for German-American magazines, but she had found no access to the movement yet (“fand aber nirgendwo Aufnahme”). However, in observing the activities of Paulina Wright Davis, Mott, Rose, and Fanny Wright, her spirits rose, and on 1 March 1852 she began publishing her German-language monthly magazine, Deutsche Frauenzeitung, in Milwaukee. Despite her eagerness about the project, the atmosphere in Milwaukee was not conducive to the magazine. German printers refused to support her project because they rejected Anneke’s idea of employing women as typesetters (Wagner 1980, 76; 26 April 1877 letter to Jonas in MFA Papers)—a sign of the prevailing opposition to women’s emancipation among German-Americans. Anneke therefore gave up the publication in Milwaukee, and in order to secure a family income, Anneke and her husband Fritz moved to Newark, New Jersey. Of the fate of her magazine Anneke reported to Jonas: In the meantime [1852] my paper and my home were moved east, where in December of the same year I returned to. A small print shop was purchased and seemed to make publication easier in the beginning. I hoped to produce the type sets with the help of women, a plan that had failed in Wisconsin. … Hence, my paper was published weekly, after some odysseys in New York and Jersey City, in Newark. … The publication of the paper was always and increasingly complicated. After its short existence of circa two and a half years my family concerns and illnesses forced me to give it up. (MFA Papers, 26 April 1877)

The family struggled financially during those first years in Newark. While Mathilde traveled the east coast in the fall of 1852 on a lecture tour to provide the necessary financial income for her family and for a printing press, Fritz stayed with their three children, Fritz (born in 1848), Percy (born in 1850), and Fanny (born in 1837 during Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s first marriage). The financial pressure lessened dramatically after those initial hardships and following Anneke’s return to the family. Both the Frauenzeitung and Fritz’s Newarker Zeitung flourished to an extent that enabled them to lead a relatively good life. Anneke bore four more children in Newark: Rosa, who died shortly after her birth; Irla, who died at age three from an illness; and the twins Irla and Hertha, who were born in 1855. Anneke’s mother migrated from Germany to live with them in 1857, and Fanny, the oldest daughter, married that same year. During those years the Annekes seemed to live happy lives. Yet in February 1858 the children became ill with smallpox. Her oldest son Fritz and Irla, one of the twins, did not recover and died.2 In desperation Anneke wrote to her mother on 19 March 1858: “Yes, dear Mother, here I stand at my life’s turning point bare of all hopes of which I have harbored so many. … With

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Irlachen we lost our zest for life, our joy. With Fritzchen we lost our happiness, all our hope” (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 94). The family fell apart in the face of this traumatic experience. The Anneke family then accepted the invitation of Sherman and Mary Booth to live in their home and they resettled in Milwaukee.3 In May 1859 Fritz left the family and went to Italy to work as a correspondent for various US-American newspapers and magazines, covering the Italian fight for unity and independence from Napoleonic rule. Fritz never returned to live with his family: during the Civil War he joined the Union troops, and then during Reconstruction he worked as a journalist in St. Louis and Chicago for the Illinois Staatszeitung and the Deutsche Gesellschaft (German association to aid German immigrants). He pursued this occupation until his death in 1872.4 During this time Anneke and her husband gradually became estranged from one another, and instances in their letters suggest their love had faded and that their separation was not only determined by the career choices they had made. This sketch of Anneke’s family situation is relevant in that it helps us understand Anneke’s career in the women’s rights movement. Such private events often prevented her from becoming more active and engaged than she was. She also never had the financial means for extensive traveling, which would have been necessary to become involved in different campaigns. Furthermore, she became lonely after the death of her dear friend Mary Booth on 5 May 1865, and after the separation from her husband. In Milwaukee on 7 October 1865, she stated to Fritz that “I have barely loved anyone as I have loved Mary, and like Mary I will never love anyone again” (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 243). She seemed to try to overcome her depression when she founded the Milwaukee Töchterinstitut, a school with a broad curriculum for girls. This project required her complete attention, and she found herself with little to no resources remaining for traveling to and attending women’s rights conventions. The letters she exchanged with members of the US-American women’s rights movement, however, give an impression of her renown. Although she did not attend conventions she sent letters that declared her sympathy with the cause. When analyzing Anneke’s hybrid position as potentially productive and able to mediate between antagonistic poles, her life circumstances enter the picture as restrictive forces, a fact that must be kept in mind as we evaluate her attempt to bring “newness” into the game of antagonistic differences.

Anneke’s Identification with the Women’s Rights Movement The idea of revolution and the humanitarian antislavery position were elements in the women’s rights discourse that enabled Anneke’s personal and

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intellectual identification with the movement. The revolutionary context from which she sprang also furthered the US-Americans’ approval of her integration in the speakers’ platform at women’s rights conventions. The antislavery cause influenced Anneke’s literary work and connected her to the circle of Gerrit Smith and his daughter, both professionally and in friendship. The first time she participated in a convention, in New York’s Broadway Tabernacle in September 1853, she gave her address in German. It is remarkable that her speech was translated by Rose, herself a foreign-born woman, and we may interpret this as a sign that immigrant women in the reform network connected easily with each other on the basis of shared circumstances, namely their being relative strangers in the United States and within the movement. Moreover, Rose’s support of Anneke provided an example of women’s collaboration. Such teamwork represented an ideal of women’s mutual solidarity and gave the impression of women striving for “universal sisterhood,” an ideal also expressed in a resolution Davis introduced to the convention. She demanded the creation of a committee to seek cooperation with European women as “this great movement is intended to meet the wants, not of America only, but of the whole world” (PWRC New York 1853, 83). Members appointed to the committee were Mott, Rose, Marion C. Houton, Stone, Caroline Heally Dale, Davis, Helen K. Hunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, and “Matilda Francisca Arneke” (PWRC New York 1853, 87). Anneke’s appointment to the committee confirms her high standing or strategic value in the movement from the moment of her very first appearance. Her experiences during the German Revolutions of 1848/49, collected in her memoir, informed this reputation and provided the foundation for her integration into an US-American women’s rights movement whose members sympathized with European refugees. By stressing her personal expectations and revolutionary ideals in her address to the convention, Anneke was able to connect to the movement, which understood itself as fighting a revolutionary battle against despotism and male domination. The significance of that first speech lay in her reflection on the immigration process and the expectations, hopes, and ultimate disappointments connected to it. As the last speaker of the convention, Anneke was confronted with the heated attacks of a mob. Repeatedly and violently this crowd inside and outside the hall was disturbing the proceedings. This upheaval further complicated Anneke’s initiation into the women’s rights movement. Not only was she not understood because she spoke in a foreign language, but the loud noise in the hall prevented her from being heard. Before Anneke presented her concerns as an immigrant woman, speakers had addressed a variety of issues juxtaposing antagonistic principles: the issue of differences between US-American women and women in the “Old World,” the concerns for the

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enfranchisement of “foreigners,” and the movement as thoroughly universal acting on behalf of humanity, were the different, even contradictory, issues of the convention. Anneke’s experience of the revolution was highlighted as it placed the demands of the women’s rights movement in the broader context of liberalism and human rights, which promised to resolve the contradictions arising over the course of the speeches. The “revolution” became an issue of mutual identification: oppression of any kind ought to be rejected and fought in order to create a society of free and self-reliant individuals. Identification with revolutionary ideals was one of the ideological pillars of the movement. Furthermore, historian Carl Wittke explained that USAmericans considered the European revolutions of 1848/49 to be a belated global fulfillment of their American Revolution (1952, 30). Intellectually and emotionally, US-Americans identified with the Europeans’ cause during those uprisings, and the women’s rights movement established this link as well. In the Declaration of Sentiments, the founders of the movement in 1848 had expressed their identification with the American Revolution as based on the liberation from colonial dependencies. Just as the founders of the United States had declared their independence from the English “tyrant,” women declared their independence from male “tyrants.” An example from the 1853 convention reveals how this identification continued to form an ideological foundation of the movement. In coming to the new continent, the first settlers sought liberty and freedom from oppressive authorities in Europe, a Mrs. Jenkins of Geneva, a signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, explained. She drew parallels between women striving for emancipation and the Pilgrims’ expectations and hopes upon arriving in the United States. She then related it to the European revolutions of 1848/49: For the love of liberty our pilgrim fathers bade adieu to the land of their nativity— the land of their prosperity—the land to which they were bound by tender ties. A mere allusion to the American Revolution brings before our minds many scenes of noble daring, of patriotic valor, the endurance of hardships and privations almost unparalleled—and all endured to prove how highly those who died and suffered, valued the priceless blessings of liberty. Recent convulsions on the European Continent prove that this desire has not faded from the world in our days—that, indeed, it is inherent in the human mind. (PWRC New York 1853, 11)

From the time of the American Revolution, US-American liberals were devoted to the idea of independence, which also resonated with the women’s rights movement. This idea of independence served as the core principle of the mutual identification of shared interests by German revolutionaries and the US-American women’s rights movement.

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When it was Anneke’s turn to speak, she moved into the position of the partisan revolutionary and agitator for freedom and liberty she once had been in Germany. She explained that there was “no freedom of any kind” on the other side of the Atlantic; yet, given the opposition to women’s emancipation that was expressed during this New York convention, and, given the disturbances that sought to hinder even a public debate of the issue, she expressed her skepticism vis-à-vis liberty and individual freedoms in the United States: “Here, at least, we ought to be able to express our opinions on all subjects; and yet, it would appear, there is no freedom, even here, to claim human rights, although the only hope in our country for freedom of speech and action is directed to this country for illustration and example. That freedom I claim” (PWRC New York 1853, 89). She combined frustration with the reality of the American dream with her appeal to continue the strenuous work of gaining freedom. This work needed to be done, as her example demonstrated, by the joint forces of a transatlantic women’s movement. Addressing her “American sisters,” Anneke stressed the necessity of cooperation: “The women of my country look to this for encouragement and sympathy; and they also, sympathize with this cause. We hope it will go on and prosper; and many hearts across the ocean in Germany are beating in unison with those here” (PWRC New York 1853, 89). During her address Anneke was repeatedly interrupted by the loud noise of opponents (New York Daily Times). Wendell Phillips had to step in to call the audience to order. He attempted to quiet them by appealing to the audience’s respect and dignity for their German guest and introduced her as a “noble woman, who stood by his [Kossuth’s] side in the battle fields of Hungary; one who has faced the cannon of Francis Joseph, of Austria, for the rights of the people” (PWRC New York 1853, 88). Although this was untrue—Anneke had never fought on the side of Kossuth—Phillips’s representation evoked an image of Anneke as a revolutionary, idealist, and reckless warrior.5 Such clearly romanticized experiences of the revolution were repeatedly evoked by the US-Americans and Anneke alike to link the women’s rights movement to the European revolutions, their liberal democratic principles, the fight against despotic monarchies, and the priority of equal human rights. The idea of “revolution” was the common ground upon which Anneke’s integration into the women’s rights movement rested. A glance at the 1870 NWSA convention in Washington DC demonstrates how effectively this identification with the revolution was in continuing to provide a common ground for integration. Years after her flight from Europe Anneke’s experiences during the German revolutions provided the foundation for her high standing among US-American reformers. Isabella Beecher Hooker wrote about Anneke’s appearance at the 1870 convention as follows:

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But Madam Anneke, the German patriot who fought with her husband and slept beside her horse in the field, carried the day over everyone else. It was fairly overwhelming to hear her English, so surcharged with feeling, yet so exact in the choice of words, and the burden of it all was that the trials of the battle-field were as naught compared to this inward struggle of her soul toward liberty for woman. Her presence, gestures, oratory, were simply magnificent. (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 2, 425)

In turn, Anneke claimed, revealing in her status as a “woman of two countries,” that she was mediating the women’s reform program to her German countrymen. Interestingly, her metaphorical language at this convention revealed her emotional identification with the women of the US-American women’s rights movement. HWS reported: “Madam ANNEKE, a German lady, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, stated that, being a foreigner, allowance should be made for her defective pronunciation. If she could not speak the English language, she could speak the language of the heart” (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 2, 422). This emotional link between women who “spoke the language of the heart” signalized that translation was not necessary in all instances. Despite their cultural differences, the women believed they shared a universal femininity that ultimately transcended these differences. The other recurring motif in the women’s rights movement’s discourse and in Anneke’s ideas was abolitionism and its egalitarian principles. The history of the women’s rights movement is frequently written as if the movement had been an offspring of the abolitionist movement. Analogies between slaves and women in the United States were frequently made and culturally embedded in versions of the abolitionist emblem of the kneeling slave. Jean Fagan Yellin’s meticulous study of the versions and variations of this emblem shows how this religiously inspired depiction of the begging slave in chains who demands, “Am I not a man and a brother?” was adapted by female abolitionists to show a female slave fervently asking, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” In her interpretations of these versions, Yellin showed how the particularly vulnerable situation of the female slave was used in gendering the abolitionist motif: the exposure of the nude female slave body symbolized weakness and vulnerability as opposed to the exposure of the nude male slave body, which revealed muscles and symbolized strength to be used to free himself. In applying a female slave emblem to the abolitionist cause, abolitionism itself gained significance. Who would free the vulnerable and weak (female) slave? The answer to this question was obvious and the need for a strong and effective Christian abolitionist movement in order to end this injustice received further legitimization. White female abolitionists such as Angelina Grimké Weld and Lydia Maria Child, Yellin explained, adjusted the abolitionist emblem to “assert their own

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right to be Women and Sisters, to define themselves and to act in the public sphere, while they condemned slavery because it excluded slave women from patriarchal definitions of true womanhood and from the domestic sphere. … At other times, they asserted the womanhood and sisterhood of all women and claimed every woman’s right to self-definition” (1989, 25). Abolitionism served as a meaningful resource for feminist ideas by providing women with a symbol of their female subordination by their male “masters.” Furthermore, women’s association with the antislavery movement prior to the Civil War laid the groundwork for the feminist movement “by articulating a set of demands for women’s rights and by acquiring the skills and self-confidence necessary to offer political leadership to other women,” according to historian Ellen Carol DuBois (1999, 19). The antislavery movement strongly influenced a number of early feminists and served as a training ground for their public roles. It also provided them with arguments for the equality of all humans and their accordance of equal rights. Anneke identified with the antislavery cause, a fact that is clear from her fictional texts, in which abolitionism stands out as a central theme. The novellas and short stories she wrote during the time of the Civil War in Zurich and published in the literary supplements of German and US-American magazines provide evidence of how abolitionism became an important perspective for women’s rights. The double oppression of the slave woman—being enslaved and a woman—was an ever-recurring issue in her literary compositions. Fiction and reality overlapped in Anneke’s stories, adding a sense of credibility and truth to her narrations. One of those narrative techniques was to let Gerrit Smith appear frequently as a symbolic figure of US-American abolitionism. In order to illustrate Anneke’s abolitionist thought I will introduce here the short novella Die Sclaven-Auction, first published as a series in the Frankfurt belletristic journal Didaskalia in 1862. The novella’s subtitle was A Portrait of American Life (Ein Bild aus dem amerikanischen Leben). It depicted and juxtaposed various political positions and social situations in order to comment on gender and race relations. The story line is rather simple: a young slave from Washington is about to buy his freedom from his master and goes to the Capitol Building to meet Senator Gerrit Smith, who at the time opposed the pending Kansas-Nebraska Bill in Congress. The young slave tells Smith about his upbringing in slavery, how he and his sister had been the children of a slave woman and her white master, how his mother had drowned her own daughter Lilie to protect her from the fate that she would have had to endure, and how he had fallen in love with a young slave girl, Isabella, who was about to be sold at an auction in Alexandria. In the next scene of the story a Dutch immigrant, Mr. Renssellar, is introduced as praising Gerrit Smith’s opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill

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in a conversation at a beer hall. Mr. Renssellar explains that not only blacks’ but also immigrants’ civil rights are at stake in this Bill, and he quotes from Smith’s speech in Congress: “That man who joins us from a faraway country, who declares his intent to settle amongst us and works with us in harmony and peace is entitled to vote with us” (Wagner 1983, 37). In the last scene of the story, the two narrative plots are combined: Mr. Renssellar attends a slave auction in Alexandria, where he buys the young slave who, in the first scene, has gone to the Capitol. From then on his name is Alfons. The next slave up for auction is the beautiful Isabella. In a dramatic finale, Alfons sends a telegram to Gerrit Smith to come to the auction and help him free his beloved Isabella. Although Mr. Renssellar bids for Isabella, it is Gerrit Smith who at the last moment buys Isabella and grants her freedom. Alfons becomes free as well through the generosity of Mr. Renssellar. Alfons and Isabella move to a small farm in New York, where the couple live happily and Alfons even starts medical school in Philadelphia. Although the plot itself seems trivial and romantic, the decisive moments of the story provide glimpses into Anneke’s critique of slavery and gender relations. The slave woman is presented as the object of her master’s lust. The beautiful Isabella cuts her hair at the auction to weaken the white men’s sexual attraction to her. In the character of Alfons’s mother, we find a dramatic expression of despair following from this sexualization of the slave woman. A mother is driven to infanticide in order to prevent her child from becoming the victim of sexual violence. These female characters denounce the double oppression of the slave woman. The white woman’s lack of rights is additionally highlighted in a short comment about the character of a slaveholder’s wife, Isabella’s mistress. As the couple does not have any heirs, the slaveholder’s property has to be sold after his death. (This is how Isabella ends up at the slave auction.) The fact that the widow has no legal rights to the property of her deceased husband remains untold by Anneke: “Her [Isabella’s] master, who by the way was her father, was killed in a duel just recently. Then his entire property had to be sold. It seemed as if it had very difficult for her mistress to part with her. … The old lady had no children of her own” (Wagner 1983, 42). Told in the short story by the auctioneer, this represents the male perspective on the widow’s situation. Her lack of rights is taken for granted, and in Anneke’s continued silencing of married women’s legal inferiority, the larger dimension of the invisibility of married women evolves. She does not assign a voice to them, nor does she lend them her own authorial voice, a fact that I consider to be a deliberate narrative strategy that serves to denounce the invisibility of women and demonstrates the necessity of giving them both voice and publicity. This protest against the situation of the married woman and the slave woman as sexual object for white male gratification appears as a motif also

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in Anneke’s short novel Uhland in Texas.6 The novella, which tells of the incident of a white slave owner’s “purchase” of Flora, a beautiful young slave girl, shortly before his planned marriage, is a perfect forum for Anneke’s critique. The slave owner claims to have bought Flora as a servant for his wife-to-be, but the reader and character addressed in the novella can perceive that he bought Flora primarily to still his own lust. As can be indicated from this short summary, Anneke’s literary works overall are critical of the inferior position of women as wives, and the particular oppression women experience as slaves, which her short stories emphasize.7 Furthermore, Gerrit Smith evolves as the symbol of political abolitionism, altruism, and philanthropy in Anneke’s literary works. In freeing the slave woman Isabella, Smith also represents the intersection of abolitionism and women’s rights reform that was omnipresent in the 1850s women’s rights movement and only disbanded during Reconstruction. Smith’s benevolence manifested itself when he frees his slaves and generously gives his property to Alfons and Isabella in New York. Anneke’s perspective on abolitionism must have been influenced also by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. Familiar themes from the novel, such as the suffering of women and mothers, the breaking up of families, infanticide, and sexual exploitation appear in Anneke’s narratives as well. However, they lack the religious undertone of Stowe’s narrative, as Maria Wagner has pointed out (1979, 14). According to Margaret McFadden, the immediate success of the book and Stowe’s international fame turned the female writer, who never supported the women’s rights movement’s cause and represented an ideology of “separate spheres,” into the role of an “unwitting ally” in the constitution of a female (international) reform network (1999, 67–76). Anneke’s example shows that women’s rights reformers were indeed motivated by Stowe’s political novel. Although Stowe’s aim had been to denounce the evils and sins of slavery, Anneke highlights the evils originating in slavery for women in particular, and takes her justification from Stowe herself. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the epitome of abolitionism, and Stowe, as the acclaimed international spokeswoman for abolitionism, had created a bond between women as a resource on which to base their collective identity. Stowe’s novel, and abolitionism in general, criticized not just the “peculiar institution” but also invoked the idea of “sisterhood” among women. As shown, the discourses of revolution and of antislavery enabled Anneke’s integration into the women’s rights movement and became the intellectual foundation for her reform activities. The discourse of revolution informed an idea of the movement’s destiny as the fulfillment of the American Revolution and “the course of human events,” the desire for independence. This desire transformed itself into a universal human desire connecting women in “uni-

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versal sisterhood” across the Atlantic as well. Her sharing in this mind-set from the beginning helped constitute the political bond between Anneke and the US-American women’s rights reformers. Residing in Zurich at the time of the Civil War, Anneke not only made the acquaintance of the famous abolitionist Smith, but also befriended his daughter Elizabeth Smith Miller. The two women’s friendship continued after their return to the US in 1865, which was when Miller first read Anneke’s abolitionist stories. Their personal exchanges turned into a “professional” relationship. Miller wrote to her “dear Mrs. Anneke” in March 1869 and explicitly invited her to attend the planned May convention in New York in 1869: “Mrs. Stanton advised me yesterday to write you & suggest that you should write to some of your European friends, asking them to come & take part in our Convention. Will you please do so? And are you really coming to New York?” (MFA Papers, no date). Anneke fulfilled Stanton’s request and wrote a letter to Gottfried Kinkel Jr., son of Gottfried Kinkel, a hero of the 1848/49 revolution: “I have been ordered by the committee of the American Equal Rights Association to induce our friends across the ocean to take an interest in our doings and, if at all possible, to send one or another delegate to our convention to be held in May. … Stand by our side, and try to win your honored father to send some words of support—he can perhaps guess which impact this would have among our Germans here” (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 343–45). Anneke confirmed her role as mediator in the women’s rights movement. She did not write on her own behalf; rather she wrote in the name of the AERA. Apparently, she did not distance herself from the community on whose behalf she spoke, but positioned herself as a member at the same time. The pronoun “our” signified this identification. The answer Anneke sent to Miller, however, suggested no such identification with the community of the US-American feminists. She asked Miller whether Susan B. Anthony could send issues of The Revolution to Kinkel in addition to her own letter, so Kinkel could get an impression of the “great efforts of the American people,” to which Anneke did not belong (Maria Wagner Collection). The distance Anneke maintained from the US-American reformers and their movement is surprising in light of the intellectual bond described and the fact that Stanton, Anthony, and Anneke organized a women’s rights convention in Milwaukee in February 1869 for the purpose of founding a Wisconsin Woman Suff rage Association. The convention was a success and Anneke, together with Laura Ross, Augusta Chapin, and Lillie Peckham, were nominated as delegates to the May convention in New York. Thus, Anneke occupied a firm position within the movement as a member of the Wisconsin Woman Suff rage Association. Her distance from US-Americans in the feminist movement that she articulated in her letter to Miller indicates

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that she did think of herself as ultimately still different: she had a task to fulfill, namely, to gain support for women’s rights reforms, in particular women’s suffrage, among Germans in the United States. Ahead of the branch convention in Milwaukee, Anneke wrote of Stanton’s and Anthony’s requests to her husband: “I shall give the name of one man, one German man (!!!), on this ground, one man with the same ideas and principles. It is hilarious! No, I said, I know no man whom I could name since my own is no longer here. Now I shall name women. Heaven help!” (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 339–40). Considering this, her official integration in the network of the women’s rights movement rested first and foremost on her ability to reach out to a German-language community, which constituted a group of the population predominantly antagonistic to women’s emancipation. This was her role, and Stanton and Anthony integrated Anneke based not on their identical views but on their very generic ethnic differences. Because she could reach out to the antifeminists among the Germans, she became part of the inner circle. Anneke as well saw a difference between herself and Stanton in 1869. She feared that her strong opposition to religion, nativism, and temperance would result in a division between them. However, she wrote that “we cannot speak of division, because we only went hand in hand in our demands, yet never in terms of its justification” (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 341–42). Anneke, then, was also affected by nativism and temperance. As the following examples will illustrate, she thus became the translator, both literally and culturally, between German-Americans and US-American feminists.

Translating Nativism8 On 27 September 1869, Stanton’s lecture tour in the western states brought her to La Crosse, Wisconsin. In front of a large and ethnically mixed audience she presented a lecture on the urgency of a sixteenth (woman suff rage) amendment that she had already presented several times that year (and also at the May convention in New York that Anneke attended as well).9 Stanton’s lecture was peppered with nativist sentiments and, in order to expose an image of traditionalist gender relations among the Germans, prominently repeated the image of the German woman, who was yoked side by side with an ox to a plow and driven by the German man. German-Americans in the audience were furious and felt insulted by Stanton’s disrespectful statement. When asked by her German-American audience where she had seen this image, Stanton referred to Anneke as her reliable source, since she herself had never traveled to Europe until then. The debate between Stanton and German-Americans did not end on the evening of her lecture, but was continued in the US-American

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press of La Crosse and in an open letter exchange between a Mr. F. Tillmann (his first name is unknown) and Anneke in the German-language paper La Crosse Nord-Stern. It was not the personally felt insult toward members of an ethnic minority group that ignited this debate, but significant differences requiring interpretation for individuals with different perspectives and who perceived images and representations differently. This open correspondence between Anneke and Tillmann has not yet been subject to scholarly examination. Susan Piepke included an English translation of Anneke’s open letter in her 2006 biography and edition of selected manuscripts. However, the source in Piepke’s study appears completely detached from its context and serves as an example of Anneke’s feminist thought and as a proof of Anneke’s solidarity with Stanton and Anthony after the women’s rights movement had split in 1868/69. I propose to take a different perspective. In contextualizing Anneke’s letter, as I will do in my reading, it evolves as a document of Anneke’s dual solidarity with the US-American women’s rights movement and the German-American community. It also documents the effects of Stanton’s nativism on German-Americans. This is how the incident in La Crosse developed: one day after the lecture, Tillmann addressed Anneke by letter. He did not know her personally, only as a prominent German-American woman who was well-known and respected for her work as an educator and as an outspoken advocate of women’s rights. In his letter he reported the following from Stanton’s lecture: Her entire lecture showed, if not hatred, then nativist prejudice and contempt of the, as she used to say, “ignorant foreigners,” and she mentioned the following: “Is it not realy absurd, that the ignorant German, who drove at his native home his wife, yoked aside aside with his Ox or Cow befor the plow, after comming to this Country, be allowed to vote, and thereby be entitled, to make Laws for the refined, and intelligent Women of America!” … She had never seen it herself, but seen it variously described in letters and you, too, Madam, had assured her that you had seen, with your own eyes how women were pulling the plow, yoked together with the oxen. … and all Germans left the hall with the same feeling: again they had assumed a rather ridiculous and contemptible position, vis-à-vis the Americans. Methinks it is certainly impossible that you have made such an absurd statement, and I would urge you most kindly, in the name of many Germans of La Crosse, to let me know immediately whether you have ever made such a comment.10 (Tillmann)

Tillmann’s description demonstrates that the conflict to him was not established along gender boundaries but along ethnic boundaries: the difference

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between “foreign” and “American,” between “German” and “American,” was filled with concepts that represented the United States as having a sophisticated culture and Germany as possessing a backward, agrarian culture. Furthermore, the differences proposed that “American” comprised concepts of gender equality and respect between men and women, whereas “German” represented gender inequality and the subordination of women by men. Different gender orders were presented as essential and natural within their respective ethnic category. Tillmann’s narrative of the lecture also pointed out that the established stereotype of German gender relations was an expression of hierarchical power relations between both ethnic groups. Because the nativist statement ridiculed and condemned German-Americans, it established the inferiority of this group in relation to the dominant ethnic group in the United States. In his eyes this perception of Germans was false and could not have been supported by a German woman such as Anneke. Tillmann appealed to Anneke’s solidarity with the German community by demanding that Anneke clearly negate or affirm whether she had reported the scene to Stanton. In a similar fashion we find this appeal to female German-American reformers in a reaction by the conservative German-American newspaper New Yorker Staatszeitung to Stanton’s nativist comment and stereotype of German gender relations. The paper criticized the German women’s rights reformers for their supposed lack of opposition to the movement’s strong nativism and the implied denigration of German-ness in the United States. German women’s rights reformers were suspect because “they do not object when suff rage for American women is claimed with the argument that the German barbarians are allowed to vote who in their home yoked their women to the plow. … Yes, they brag they were present when German immigration itself was under attack” (1869b).11 The appeal from German-Americans who felt their culture and sociopolitical status threatened by the women’s rights movement’s nativism expressed a claim to which Anneke was exposed, that is, the claim to positively represent German-ness in the United States and defend its sociopolitical status against the dominant US-American society. Traditionalists constructed German-ness on the grounds of a stable gender order in which the female was designated wife, mother, and housekeeper. Any action outside this sphere was acceptable only if it targeted the conservation and promotion of German culture, its language and values. The public role of the German woman was her role as the bearer of culture.12 It was explicitly that role to which the New Yorker Staatszeitung and Tillman referred. They reminded women who digressed from their role as German women in the United States of their ethnicity and female role. Both roles were intertwined and demanded an unquestioned alliance with German-ness in its traditional way.

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At the same time, Anneke was confronted with such appeals to solidarity by the US-American women’s rights movement. Alliance with this movement was not just an intellectual and political alliance, but it was one of Anneke’s guarantees for economic survival as well. Anneke’s work on behalf of the women’s rights movement guaranteed a source of income, as it enabled her to receive royalties for speeches she gave and promised support for travel costs, which Anneke at times could not cover privately, and so it enabled her to realize her political activism. Due to demands that she “rightly” represented an ethnic culture and maintained a professional alliance with the reform movement, Anneke’s hybrid position was precarious in so far as any action in this position always underlay the limiting influence of these power constellations. Anneke’s response to Tillmann referred to several points he had raised. She gave her opinion on Stanton’s usage of the image of subjugated German women, she positioned herself in the hierarchical relationship between USAmerican and German culture, and she interpreted Stanton’s nativist comment about “ignorant foreigners.” The form of her answer was an open letter, which did not address Tillmann exclusively but rather a broader public—the readers of the German-language paper Nord-Stern. Thus, she added weight and significance to the incident by bringing it to public attention. Before Tillmann alerted Anneke to Stanton’s nativism, Anneke had heard Stanton’s speech at the AERA convention that same year in New York. In a letter to her husband of 1869 she praised Stanton’s eloquent and intelligent speech and did not raise or criticize its inherent nativism. At that time she understood Stanton’s speech as an argument for a sixteenth amendment, not as an argument against immigration. “Her rhetoric is clear, calm and free. Her eloquence warm. Her argumentation sharp. Her humor charming and effusive. The lecture was reprinted everywhere,” Anneke commented (Quoted in Wagner 1980, 348). Why did she not respond to Stanton’s nativism then? Other letters demonstrated that she was indeed critical of Stanton’s argument for women’s enfranchisement and that she disagreed with the means she chose. Against this backdrop, the reading of Anneke’s open letter to Tillmann reveals that Anneke was convinced of the righteousness of the women’s rights movement’s cause and was apparently willing to compromise with its underlying nativism. First of all, Anneke did not admit or deny having mentioned to Stanton or anybody else the disputed image of gender relations in Germany. She replied: Mrs. Stanton’s statement in question is a rhetorical metaphor. … Whether I have ever admitted the naked truth of the premise behind that statement in these exact words, I do not know. Also, this does not really make a difference, since I have always and wherever I could openly declared that women, not only in Germany

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but in all countries and at all times, had to experience, for lack of inadequate legal protection, much deeper humiliations and deprivations than they could endure chafing under the burden of yet the lowest and hardest labor. (Anneke 1869)

She clearly stated that Stanton’s statement was a “rhetorical metaphor.” Therefore, it would make no difference whether she provided the image to Stanton. Understood as a metaphor, she claimed, the image did not reflect a particular German identity but instead reflected true gender relations, not only in Germany but in all countries in which women remained politically and legally subjugated. Given these circumstances, women could be described as being yoked to a plow and being on a par with other beings such as farm animals in the way they were ruled and mastered by men. Anneke’s translation of the image resulted in an alteration of its meaning: It was not “German” women who suffered from being yoked to a plow, but rather “women” who suffered from patriarchal legal and social conditions considered universal and independent from national differences. In that respect, Anneke’s hybrid position became recognizable and was effective in producing meaning through transgression of national and cultural differences. Transgression was made possible by a deconstructive movement and by differentiating between the two discourses that Stanton had mingled, that is, the discourse of gender inequality and the discourse of ethnic and cultural identity.13 However, her perspective as a “woman of two countries” qualified Anneke to differentiate between the two nations and their political and social systems and to express preferences. She stated unequivocally: Not without wistfulness I can conjure up to say, partly from my own observation, partly from personal experience, some dreariest images of my beloved fatherland, and not without horror I recall which heavy, nay, heaviest burden in all this is carried by my poor sex. … Compared with the dark gloomy reflections of the vice and misery of tyranny and of sorrow. … Elisabeth Cady Stanton’s image shines forth resplendently, if only as a touching, pastoral-moral idyll of our German home country. (Anneke 1869)

Although Anneke successfully undermined the stereotype of Germans as a socially and politically regressive people, she limited her translation as interpretation to affirming the tyrannous and miserable conditions in Europe. Anneke reduced Stanton’s strong nativist image to an expression of an idyllic scene of minor relevance compared to women’s miserable conditions everywhere. The reason for this relativization was Anneke’s positive evaluation of US-American democracy and its inherent opportunities for equality, which Europe lacked. The United States, she claimed, was the country, “where at

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least the seeds of liberty were planted and the sun of justice helps them grow into a tree, in whose shade all humanity will become beautiful and happy” (Anneke 1869). Europe could not offer these opportunities because it suffered from the tyranny of monarchism, which reigned over the people from behind the “crimson-colored curtains of imperial halls” (Anneke 1869). She grounded her considerations about the relationship between opposing cultures firmly in political principle and not in an essentialist and nativist judgment, as in the manner of Stanton’s statement. Furthermore, her comparative assessment of gender relations was authoritative and legitimate because it had been brought about at least in part by personal experience and not, as in Stanton’s case, through “hearsay.” Anneke explained Stanton’s reference to “ignorant foreigners” to point out women’s inferiority and subjugation in patriarchal society: Why Elisabeth Cady Stanton has chosen to illustrate the absurdity of the un-republican institutions in this country by pointing to the example of the “ignorant foreigners” instead of to the rough and ignorant men of her own country, I do not know. At least, she seems intent on emphasizing the injustice of inequality before the law to her fellow country people in all its starkest contrasts. Moreover, she envisions only a particular class of immigrants, namely the uneducated. … The educated part of the Germans, as you will understand, does not at all need to complain about her. (Anneke 1869)

The usage of nativist comment was, in Anneke’s opinion, strategically directed toward the US-American public and aimed at pointing out injustice and unequal legal conditions. Again, Anneke’s translation emphasized the strategic differentiation and analysis of a specific complexity, namely the complexity of ethnic, cultural identity and class consciousness. In doing so, she suggested that her audience not dwell in ethnic pride, but adapt a particular class consciousness that could eventually supersede ethnic differences and guarantee the same social status that similarly educated US-Americans possessed. But how could we be certain that only this well-educated class was addressed? At this point we need to reflect upon the audience of Stanton’s lecture in La Crosse and speculate who might have attended such political events. Who would have known about this lecture and who would have come? Stanton’s lecture was part of the lyceum lecture circle initiated to promote education and information in all parts of the country, not only in urban centers.14 Speakers received payment for speaking and audiences had to buy tickets to listen to the speakers, and so the lecture was only accessible to those who could afford the fees. Additionally, the lectures were advertised and afterward discussed in local newspapers, which demonstrates that the audience primarily belonged to

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a literate and politicized class. One hint is given in the report of the La Crosse Morning Leader, which wrote that “the Opera House was filled last evening with a select and intelligent audience.” Furthermore, this source clarified that Stanton spoke under the auspices of the “Library Association,” as she was introduced by its president, Mr. Woodward (La Crosse Morning Leader 1869). It is likely, then, that the audience Stanton and later Anneke addressed was an educated and politically interested group. Anneke’s appeal to social solidarity above ethnic solidarity served as a provisional attempt to move beyond ethnic stereotypes and rescue the situation. Despite her attempt to pacify insulted German-Americans, Anneke’s response introduced a new idea into the debate: it evoked a hierarchical social order based on class instead of ethnicity. Strikingly, Anneke was inconsequential in maintaining this distinction throughout her letter, not surprisingly perhaps, as she was stepping into terrain in which discourses of class and ethnicity were mingled. Although Anneke pointed out that Stanton’s statement about the “ignorant foreigner” referred only to the ignorant among the immigrant population and should not be considered as a statement about immigrants in general, she dramatically affirmed Stanton’s stereotype, even adding supporting facts, at another point in her argument: [Stanton’s metaphor should illustrate that] the immigrant standing on a lower level of culture who neither knows the free institutions of this country nor is able to appreciate them, who in his home country was legally entitled to keep his wife in bondage* (*The Prussian Civil Code grants to the husband the right to punish and beat his wife as long as he does not endanger her life, that is, as long as he does not beat her to death.) comes here and dominates every American, disenfranchised woman, since as a naturalized, sovereign citizen he becomes, thanks to his right to vote, her unofficial legislator. (Anneke 1869)

Here, Anneke confirmed that the immigrant reflected the backwardness of European political and social systems and remained on a lower cultural level; that the immigrant could not cherish the free and republican institutions that supposedly reflected the superior US-American culture; and that US-American women, therefore, had to be enfranchised to balance this cultural difference and to not let the lower reign over the higher culture. Anneke’s translation of the cultural differences and different gender orders in the German states and the United States was highly ambivalent, as the above passages reflect. To sum up, we can say that one effect of her interpretation was the affirmation of nativist stereotypes by agreeing that European systems fostered the subjugation of women and that European culture was

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inferior to US-American culture. The image of hardworking women was interpreted as a metaphor and in this respect transferred the primarily nativist statement into a statement about gender relations. Although this disclosure would have had the potential to transgress national differences, Anneke did not realize this potential; on the contrary, she covered it up again by affirming US-Americans’ superiority. A second aspect of her mediation was the explanation of the nativist phrase “ignorant foreigners.” Anneke pointed out that the phrase aimed at distinguishing between people on account of their education and intellectual capacities and was not intended as a general assumption about foreigners. She interpreted the phrase, which the audience had initially understood as condemning a particular ethnic group, as an appreciation of education and a particular social class in general. Essentially, it promoted “educated suff rage,” which became increasingly dominant in the discourse on woman suff rage toward the end of the nineteenth century.15 I conclude that despite affirming the supremacy of the American political system and its institutions, Anneke also introduced transnational—transethnic—ideals of education and democracy to her representation. In this respect she partially superseded the concrete nativist features of the US-American women’s rights movement. Unlike her US-American colleagues, who claimed “educated suff rage,” Anneke’s interpretation lacked the nativist component and represented “education” as a universal, transethnic principle. However, despite this, it remains ambiguous. Although Anneke attempted to excuse Stanton’s use of nativist prejudice in her speech and explain the underlying meaning of such phrases, Stanton’s gesture remained insulting and furthered cultural oppositions among the population. Even the English-language press of La Crosse clearly distanced itself from the representation of immigrants. Although the La Crosse Morning Leader was enthusiastically in favor of Stanton’s appearance, lecture, and demand for women suff rage, they also remarked upon the tactlessness of Stanton’s phrases: It is impossible that Mrs. Stanton could have intended to imply that all the foreign born population of the country are given over wholly to ignorance and vice, or that even a majority of them are so; and yet her frequent iteration of such phrases as “ignorant and brutal foreigners,” &c., without a single saying clause or word of qualification, hardly left room for any other conclusion. That such a conclusion is bitterly and grossly unjust, no intelligent person who has lived among our foreign born citizens would be prepared to deny. But if it were in any degree true, its obvious irrelevancy to any part of her argument gave it the appearance, we are sorry to say, of an attempt to produce a sensation at the expense of good taste. (La Crosse Morning Leader 1869)

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The Morning Leader exposed Stanton’s nativist image as a propagandist strategy, a “sensation,” and warned of the negative effects of such a strategy and the misunderstandings it would evoke in the “associations” of “foreign born citizens.” In a slightly different manner, the La Crosse Evening Democrat commented on the perception of Germans and in general supported the facts presented about women’s condition. The commentator even provided supporting evidence of the subjugation of German women in the form of quotes taken from different travel reports by such prominent men as the prolific travel writer, poet, and novel writer Bayard Taylor or abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Yet, what in their eyes appeared to be the falsity in Stanton’s speech was her demand for suff rage: “Mrs. Stanton … should have qualified her statements that none might retain the impression that the exception becomes the rule. Mrs. Stanton’s review of the condition of woman was correct in the main, but her idea that suff rage is the remedy, to us, seems wrong” (La Crosse Evening Democrat 1869b). These responses to a single argument in a political lecture represent a spectrum of positions relating to the issue. It is interesting that the issue of ethnic differences was charged with much more relevance than the issue of women’s suff rage, which was after all the central focus and title of Stanton’s lecture. In the immigrant community, we see clearly at this point, questions of ethnicity were always also questions of acceptance as a minority group, along with a struggle for the maintenance or abandonment of differing social practices and cultural rituals. I conclude that only if these struggles were solved and lost their threatening character for the sociocultural community could other struggles be fought as well. Women’s rights and suff rage, therefore, always remained critical issues in immigrant communities if the feminist discourses were not totally separated from the discourses of an ethnic and national identity. However, the disentangling of these two discourses did not appear to be an easy task. The nativist argument seemed powerful and dominant in the discourse of women’s rights and therefore was hard to shatter and alter. After La Crosse, representations of immigrants and Germans continued to feature prominently in Stanton’s writings. The nativism in her representation of Germans in La Crosse did not appear to have any consequences with regard to her representation of German-Americans or her relationship to this ethnic group. Stanton did not mention the opposition of the German-American audience in her report of the lecture tour in her autobiography; instead, Stanton dwelled on the description of the beautiful landscape, the Mississippi valley, and the kind accommodation by her hosts while staying at La Crosse. However, her description of the voyage from St. Paul to Dubuque some days later contained the following passage that I interpret as an affirmation of her nativist representations of German-Americans.16 Additionally, I interpret it as a satire of

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the situation between Stanton, the reformer, and her hostile audience in La Crosse. A burly son of Adam escorted me to the passenger car filled with German immigrants, with tin cups, babies, bags, and bundles innumerable. The ventilators were all closed, the stoves hot, and the air was like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, after depositing my cloak and bag in an empty seat, I quietly propped both doors open with a stick of wood, shut up the stoves, and opened all the ventilators with the poker. But the celestial breeze, so grateful to me, had the most unhappy effect on the slumbering exiles. Paterfamilias swore outright; the companion of his earthly pilgrimage said, “We must be going north,” and, as the heavy veil of carbonic acid gas was lifted from infant faces, and the pure oxygen filled their lungs and roused them to new life, they set up one simultaneous shout of joy and gratitude, which their parents mistook for agony. Altogether there was a general stir. As I had quietly slipped into my seat and laid my head down to sleep, I remained unobserved—the innocent cause of the general purification and vexation. (Stanton 1993, 278; my emphasis)

This portrait of the German immigrant family represented an allegory of the relationship between superior women’s rights reformers and the subordinate, traditional, and simple-minded immigrant population. German-Americans were represented as vagabonds, uncaring of their children and, due to the bad air in the coach they were sitting in, dirty and unconcerned about their own and their children’s health and hygiene. Stanton represented herself as the travelers’ savior from these unhealthy, stiff, and lethargic conditions by letting in the “celestial breeze.” This fresh air—metaphorically standing for progress and women’s rights reform—woke up the passengers and “roused them to new life.” However, the breeze had different effects on the different members of the family. The father reacted roughly and rudely. He did not realize the positive effect for himself and his family, but instead felt disturbed from his quiet and peaceful sleep. The woman and mother felt the chill and drew a naive conclusion from this fact that appeared disconnected from her personal, bodily experience in this moment. She did not realize the improvement for her body and mind but instead made a general statement about the direction of the train. Being on the train for this woman meant to be outer-directed, which she accepted without reflecting upon her being affected by this movement and without reflecting that the movement could be adapted by her to improve her personal situation. She could have opened the window to take advantage of the movement, which would suck the air into the coach and relieve and refresh her. Only the children were thankful for the breeze and were happy about it. It “filled their lungs,” purified them, and supplied them with new energy.

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Stanton’s role as the superior reformer and the “innocent cause of the general purification” remained unnoticed and unseen. Her narrative suggested that she believed in the success of the women’s rights movement and the general positive effect it would have on all of society, even on the “ignorant foreigner.” It was only due to a lack of sophistication and education that the immigrant could not realize this positive outcome and therefore opposed her as a motor of such change. Interpreted allegorically, this scene on the train provided evidence of how Stanton dealt with the charge levied against her in La Crosse. The charge was brought forth by men who felt disturbed in their lethargic, traditional way of life, and therefore opposed Stanton and any reform. Stanton reaffirmed her nativist sentiments against German-Americans, positioned herself above them, and ultimately legitimized the intersection of the women’s rights discourse with a discourse of ethnic and national identity. In La Crosse Tillmann had the final say in the debate Stanton’s lecture ignited. He responded once more to Anneke’s open letter in the same issue of the Nord-Stern in which Anneke’s letter was published. His public response sought to clarify that Anneke’s statement had introduced a further misunderstanding. Tillmann wrote that he had not intended to question the subordination of women in Europe and the United States, but had sought an intervention in the US-American perception of Germans as brutal and insensitive, which in his eyes had been strengthened by Stanton’s nativist statements. Anneke had prioritized US-American democratic and egalitarian principles in her letter and had suggested that Germans in the United States were antagonistic to these principles, which she concluded from Tillmann’s and others’ reactions to Stanton’s lecture. This assumption gave further reason for Tillmann to defend himself: I am far from arguing against the natural equality of woman in social and political terms, which is an equality withheld from her because of the selfishness of man, better said, because of the last remains of a barbaric era that does not yet recognize the sublime words: equal rights, equal duties for all humans. But thanks to the inexorably progressing spirit of civilization it will have to recognize them sooner or later. (Tillmann 1869)

It is obvious that Anneke’s “translation” did not result in a transgressing of ethnic stereotypes and differences and in furthering understanding between the ethnic groups. On the contrary, it demonstrated that Tillmann and Anneke essentially shared a similar opinion about gender relations and reform thereof. Tillmann’s intervention only intended to question the mingling of separate discourses. This, however, was a dominant argumentative figure, which Anneke, due to her belonging to the women’s rights movement and to the ethnic community of German-Americans, could not successfully neglect

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and deconstruct in her interpretation. Stanton’s continuous remarks about Germans in the United States also reflected the vehemence of the discourse and the difficulties of bringing it into motion and altering it. Piepke’s evaluation, which I mentioned initially as the only previous mention of the considered source, is limited in scope and declares Anneke’s open letter in the La Crosse Nord-Stern to be a demonstration of Anneke’s loyalty to Stanton and Anthony after the split of the women’s rights movement in 1869. My interpretation and contextualization reveal that Anneke’s letter had little to do with the movement’s split but instead was telling of the perception of nativism in the German-American community and Anneke’s difficult position between the ethnic and political camps.

Anneke’s Efforts on Behalf of the Germans The example of Anneke’s intervention in La Crosse demonstrated that she was required to fulfill the task of translation and negotiation not only on behalf of the US-American women’s rights movement but also on behalf of the German-American community. Such a simultaneous identification as woman with the feminist cause and as German with the ethnic cause was at times complicated. As an active member of the German Radical-Club and the Freie Gemeinde in Milwaukee, she became a powerful agent introducing those groups’ ideas to the reform community of US-American feminists. Having introduced Anneke as a like-minded participant in the women’s rights movement and as having been torn between the camps, I now want to focus on her efforts on behalf of the Germans in the women’s rights movement. In an unfinished letter to “My dearest Miss Anthony,”17 Anneke left no doubt about her special role as ethnic mediator in the women’s rights movement: “You are right and if nothing came to your ears about my working among my German people, I will tell you in short words the real progress which we are making.” She proceeded with a brief account of a recent convention of freethinkers in Milwaukee during which a resolution was passed proclaiming the equality of women’s and men’s rights. The short draft closed with the introduction of the Milwaukee educator Carl Doerflinger, as the initiator of this resolution, requesting to “please record it, for he is worthy to be known as a courageous character and brave man among the braves.” Anneke spoke to Anthony from her firm position in the German-American community and reported to the political allies in the US-American women’s rights movement about events among the progressive German population, in particular about reactions to the events, resolutions, and positions in the US-American reform circle and expressions of solidarity and identification.

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The common approach to the women’s rights movement by the German Radical-Club was one of congratulation and an expression of gratitude for the good work the reformers were doing. A letter was sent to the May 1873 convention of the NWSA—the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls convention—by Anneke and seventy-five others in Milwaukee, who all signed it. This letter accompanied a wreath in honor of the achievements of Mott, whom they praised as one of the first and most senior women in the movement. This laudatory aspect in the address was minor, however, compared to Anneke’s affirmation of Germans’ position regarding women’s rights, which appeared as the core principle underlying the cooperation between the two ethnic and political groups. First, Anneke sought to demonstrate the sea change among Germans that had taken place, namely, the growth of support among them. Second, she introduced the German position as a superior position to that of the US-Americans: We confidently hope that the relationship between the German radicalism and the American women’s rights movement will demonstrate to the latter also the advantages of the former, namely the emancipation from religion and all sentiment that contradicts positive science and reason, and its radical reform ideas, which, instead of merely amending the Constitution of the United States of America, seek to reconstitute it entirely. (Anneke 1873a)

As in the previous example, Anneke’s interstitial position allowed her to express a critique of the women’s rights movement. Perhaps on account of the criticism, the address was not published in the convention proceedings and only mentioned as a letter of congratulation in Stanton, Gage, and Anthony’s HWS (1889, vol. 2, 530). Although Anneke and the Radical-Club identified with the women’s rights cause, it is clear they did not identify with all its strategies. A year later, in January 1874, Anneke and the community of German political activists approached the women’s rights movement again. In doing so they declared their intention of entering into a coalition with the NWSA to further their mutual work for women’s suff rage. Anneke brought this offer to the attention of Anthony, Stanton, and other leaders of the women’s rights movement. The address, which was not published in the NWSA proceedings nor read during the convention in January 1874, was issued in German in the Milwaukee FD on 16 January 1874.18 In this address, the club explained: Living in a large city in which the majority of the inhabitants are Germans by birth or descent and being enabled by our connections to form a reliable judgment upon the views of the German-American citizens in general we would here

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state, that in consequence of the constant and fearless agitation carried on by the German Radicals, the change of opinion in regard to the Women Question has among no part of the people been greater than among the said element, though the opposition in that quarter, years ago, bore the very most character. (MFA Papers)

Here, members of the Radical-Club unequivocally stated their principles and clarified that the German-American “element” represented a fine example of the success of reform agitation and consciousness raising. Approaching the women’s rights movement thus also served the end of altering the public image of Germans in the United States. As the address sought to convey, opposition to women’s reform had waned among Germans by 1874; they no longer could be considered a threat to the reform effort. As the address implied, nativist arguments in the reform movement and stereotypes of the backward German were no longer valid. By addressing the US-American women’s rights movement, expressing solidarity with Anthony in 1872, and taking an active part in the centennial celebration of the US-American republic in 1876, German-Americans revealed their particular interest in the US-American women’s rights movement. Above all, they were hoping to alter the common perception of Germans in the US-American reform network. The ethnic community’s appeal to Anneke and to “women of two countries” that we have come across in the previous chapter was now actively realized by Anneke in 1872 and 1876 respectively. As the case of Susan B. Anthony’s trial for illegal voting will be well-known to readers, some brief introductory remarks shall suffice here. When Susan B. Anthony was arrested on 18 November 1872 in Rochester, New York, for having voted illegally in the national elections, Anneke was on hand to express her support. As I already pointed out, the presidential election in 1872 was a decisive moment for women’s rights reformers, as many women then attempted to cast their votes for the first time, like Mathilde Wendt. In July 1873, after the guilty verdict in the Anthony trial had been proclaimed, Anneke introduced the issue to the German Radical-Club in Milwaukee and urged them to agree on and publish a supporting resolution. Anneke spoke eloquently on the principle of individual self-government and demanded the enfranchisement of women in order for them to secure their interests, socially and morally. While generally the vote was understood as a mode of individual enlightenment, Anneke also interpreted the women’s vote as the foundation for moral and social security. Suff rage would guarantee women’s moral and ethical grounding and be indispensable in safeguarding the general order of humanity. Women, Anneke claimed, possessed an innate moral mandate for themselves and others, which they had to practice seri-

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ously (Wagner 1983, 223–26). In that respect, Anneke’s argument differed from Anthony’s, who advanced her argument from an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as the basic document declaring the nature of the republic. Governments were instituted to safeguard people’s “unalienable rights,” thus, “we throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights” (Gordon 2000, 554). Furthermore, however, in scrutinizing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Anthony reasoned, in a similar fashion to Anneke, that women’s votes guaranteed the prevention of chaos, a chaos that Anthony visualized had less to do with a gender difference than with an ethnic difference. She argued that the principle of exclusion would not always be applied just to women: It will not always be men combining to disfranchise all women. … It will not always be the rich and educated who may combine to cast off the poor and ignorant. But we may live to see the poor, hard working uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers, combine and amend state constitutions to disfranchise the Vanderbilts and A.T. Stewarts, the Conklings and Fentons. … Admit this right to deny suff rage to the states, and there is no power to foresee the confusion, discord, and disruption that awaits us. (Gordon 2000, 569)

Although the difference between Anthony’s nativist and Anneke’s feminist arguments were marginal, they existed. As an immigrant woman, Anneke could just not assume the nativist position, but she similarly lamented that only women, idiots, and criminals were disfranchised. Anneke’s entire argument was aimed at proving that women were neither criminals—as they were virtuous beings—nor idiots—as they were well educated and represented in all professions—and that therefore, they were superior to idiots and criminals. In making this claim, Anneke and Anthony held the same idea, namely that women deserved the right to vote not based on democratic principle or the equality of human rights, but that they, as a group, deserved it in order to counter unwise politics. This represented the argument of “expediency,” as Aileen Kraditor (1965) described it. The similarity of the feminists’ arguments suggested that Anneke identified with the US-American women’s rights movement. Like Anthony, she believed in women’s elevated position with regard to morality and virtue, a view that resonated in her open letter to Tillmann in 1869. Because the thought pattern of her arguments was comparable to that of the nativist arguments presented by Anthony in 1873, for example, Anneke likely did not feel as threatened by nativist rhetoric as other immigrants did. It is obvious that Anneke was politically torn between the ethnic groups that she had to satisfy equally, and

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that she did not entirely reject Anthony’s, Stanton’s, and other US-American women’s arguments. When she urged the Radical-Club to send a letter of support to Anthony she did so because she identified with Anthony and her position. The club followed Anneke’s request and voiced its disapproval of the ways in which German papers had treated the Anthony affair: The radical Club expresses its deep regrets about the manner (detrimental to our good name) in which most of the German so called liberal papers in this country report about the sentencing of Mrs. Susan B. Anthony. Conversely, the radical Club extends its deep-felt thanks and its warmest admiration to all papers, particularly those published in the English language which stood up against this sentencing in a manner indicative of an unprejudiced, deeply moral and truly free-minded understanding of the circumstances. (Ende 1873a)

Whereas Anneke presented a feminist critique of the guilty verdict against Anthony in this meeting, the German assembly’s response represented a critique of the ethnic press in the United States. The Radical-Club’s priority appears to have been the consolidation of the German community in the United States, for the sake of countering the assumption that Germans were antifeminists and promoting instead the image of Germans as staunch equal rights republicans. Anneke’s stance was primarily that of a woman, whereas her partners in the Radical-Club took a stance as Germans. This difference was unsolvable, it seemed, and was after all the foundation of Anneke’s position as a “woman of two countries.” She had to speak on behalf of Germans when speaking in the women’s rights movement; however, she also had to stand up to the German-American community as a woman. As an immigrant herself she had far less influence than German men in the United States or other US-American women.19 Anneke maintained an ambivalent position as a voice for the Germans in the women’s rights movement. The centennial celebration in Philadelphia on 4 July 1876 provides evidence of this. In planning the women’s protest on this occasion, Anneke assumed a leading role in initiating the circulation of a document to be signed by as many constituents as possible and sent to the official celebration committee in Philadelphia. All subsequent correspondence concerning this celebration among women’s rights reformers was directed by Matilda Joslyn Gage, president of the NWSA, who was immediately thrilled by Anneke’s proposal regarding a letter of protest: “Get thousands of signatures and have that protest arrived into Independence hall at high noon July 4th 1876, it would be the grandest & most wide-spread agitation we could create, not only over America, but over the whole civilized world our indignant

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cry would ring,” Gage wrote to Anneke on 12 September 1875 (MFA Papers). And, as would have been common for a cooperation, Gage requested the Radical-Club, on whose behalf Anneke had approached the women’s rights movement, to assume financial responsibility for this endeavor, which Anneke confirmed in her immediate response to Gage: “The radical democratic Club proposes to advocate a circulation of a Memorial to Congress this fall—and a protest after Congress shall have failed to comply with our demands. Our Club asks you in a short and decided way to prepare such a memorial and obliges itself to carry its part for printing 1000 copies of them” (MFA Papers, 30 September 1875). Anthony also favored Anneke’s proposal of an address to the people; however, she was rather skeptical as to how much influence it would have and pessimistic as to how many women would support it: Your idea of an address to the People signed by 2 or 3 millions—would be splendid to be ready then—but if signed by only a few thousands—it would seem weak—I have very little hope or faith in our women rolling up an immense list of names for their own freedom—if we wanted them to do the Herculean task for negro men—Irish men or any class of the superior sex—they would all, as one earnest woman, rush to the work. (MFA Papers, 27 September 1875)

What happened to Anneke’s initiative after the initial enthusiasm shown by Gage and Anthony? How did Anneke reconcile the Radical-Club’s idea of a protest with that of Gage, Anthony, and Stanton? In fact, Congress was not approached first. In January 1876 the regular Washington Convention took place and on this occasion an address of protest was read by Gage and adopted by the assembly. It was addressed to the “Political Sovereigns of the United States in Independence Hall assembled,” representing the text that had been initiated by Anneke, drafted by Gage, and then revised and amended by the leading women of the movement. Correspondence between Gage, Anthony, Stanton, Anneke, and Isabella Beecher Hooker during the fall of 1875 reveals how Gage sought the advice of her colleagues and also of how little help they were. Anthony was overwhelmed with work for a lecture tour and did not send any comments, and wrote: “I know you will get it right” (Gordon 2003, 208). After hearing from Anthony, Gage sent the draft in a letter to Anneke dated 6 November 1875, in which we learn that Anthony’s answer had reached Gage too late to be sent in time to Anneke and Stanton in Milwaukee. (Stanton was in Milwaukee on 7 November to give a lecture.) Gage wrote to Anneke: “I have looked over and amended the forms of protest I sent her [Anthony] and now as amended I send it to you and the Club as my idea in a general way, of the paper I should like circulated in all the States and Territories, and sent in to Independence Hall at Phila,

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at high noon July 4th 1876” (MFA Papers, 6 November 1875). Anneke did not reply to Gage for a full month. Gage even sent a letter on 4 December 1875 reminding Anneke of the urgency of the protest and her comments on it. But why had she lost interest? Apparently, Anneke and the Radical-Club had meanwhile changed their plans and abandoned the idea of a memorial to Congress; instead, they demanded that the protest be published in English and German. With Gage occupied with the preparations for the Washington convention in January 1876, and Stanton and Anthony on lecture tours, the cooperation between Anneke and the Radical-Club and the NWSA for a protest on the occasion of the centennial celebration ended. The official final protest note was read on 4 July in Philadelphia: “We, the undersigned women of the United States, … declare ourselves a part of the people of the nation unjustly deprived of the guaranteed and reserved rights belonging to citizens of the United States” (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 3, 4). The list of women who signed this protest note did not contain Anneke’s or other German-American women’s names. In sum, the collaboration failed for two reasons. Firstly, the ill-fatedness of personal and organizational circumstances: Anthony in particular appeared too occupied with other issues to take part in the preparations. She was preparing a campaign tour of Iowa, where a state constitutional amendment for women’s suff rage would be brought before the voters in the November 1876 election. She was also not in a position to support the endeavor financially that year, which in turn left Gage as chief organizer and with even more work on her hands. Secondly, the Radical-Club appeared to have had a definite idea of how the protest should be conducted and organized. Possibly, Gage’s lead in the action collided with these ideas. Why Anneke did not engage more eagerly in the preparations and support Gage in time remains uncertain. However, as I pointed out previously, Anneke’s life situation often did not allow her to travel and attend conventions. Thus, her activities remained limited to the community of German-Americans in Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Woman Suff rage Association. It was in this context and on behalf of the Wisconsin Association that she ultimately published the statement of protest referred to in the WJ and which was read during the women’s protest convention on 4 July in Philadelphia as well.20 In doing so, Anneke digressed from her initial plan of joining up the German-American radical democrats with the US-American women’s rights movement; instead, she spoke from the position of the local feminist organization, as a woman and as an US-American citizen. The only reference to the participation of Germans in the centennial protest was published in the National Citizen and Ballot Box in the issue of November 1876. The article welcomed the formation of the platform of the “German Radicals of the United States” that had occurred in June 1876:

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We recognize in their movement a grand step forward in the direction of liberty and growth, and so far as that portion of their platform which treats upon equal rights is concerned they hold the identical position embodied in the Woman’s Declaration of Rights offered in Independence Square on the Fourth. The movement for equality and justice was ignored by the American nation through its representatives on that day, but remained to be affirmed by the progressive German element who thereby prove that they possess more of the true spirit of Republicanism than those “to the manor born”—a telling reproof to the hypocrisy of American legislators. All honor to the German Radicals.

We learn from this report that the German “element” was indeed ignored in the official program. It was also ignored in the program of the unofficial celebration of US-American women. It is remarkable to see how Anneke, in speaking on behalf of the German Radical-Club, took up primarily a gender position. In the course of actions, events, and discussions, however, the Radical-Club introduced an ethnicized position, making the question of supporting the feminist cause a question of the Germans’ image in the United States. In this Anneke departed from a universal feminist agenda. Her interstitial position revealed how she sought to uphold the feminist agenda within her ethnic community, but the limits of her influence were considerable, and she never succeeded in establishing a functioning coalition. The main reason for this was that Anneke was the only person linking German-Americans and the US-American women’s rights protesters, and in that very moment when she had to limit her activities, the link was missing. She was a “power among the Germans” and therefore held a lasting position in the women’s rights movement, but she remained in this position and did not integrate on equal terms with the US-American women of the movement.

Ethnicity as Anneke’s Source of Power Despite many obstacles and hesitations, Anneke gained power in the USAmerican women’s rights movement by being perceived as a “power among the Germans.” Her German ethnicity was the source of this powerful role as translator and negotiator of women’s rights and German radicalism. In support of this analysis, a comparison of Anneke’s role to Ernestine Rose’s role appears useful, for, after all, Rose was also an immigrant woman in the United States who engaged in the women’s rights movement. Anneke and Rose shared the same radical ideas about women’s rights and freethought. While Anneke was included, Rose always remained an outsider in

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the women’s rights movement and felt deeply insulted by the nativism of Lucy Stone and other leaders of the movement. In 1854 Susan B. Anthony mentioned in her diary a conversation with Rose in which the Polish-born woman told her how she suffered from nativism from within their own ranks: Mrs. R. and myself were talking of the know nothing organizations, when she criticized Lucy Stone and Wendell Philips with regard to their feelings toward foreigners. Said she heard them both express themselves in terms of prejudice against granting to foreigners the rights of Citizenship. I expressed disbelief as to either of them having that narrow, mean prejudice in their souls. She then said I was blinded and could see nor hear nothing wrong in that clique of Abolitionists. … At length in the anguish of my soul, I said Mrs. Rose, there is not one in the Reform ranks, whom you think true . … She answered I can’t help it, I take them by the words of their own mouths. (DuBois 1992, 74–76)

Rose took them “by the word of their own mouths,” expressing the real dynamic of nativism in the women’s rights movement: it was not a political tactic but a manifestation of an ethnic social order of inequality. Ultimately, Rose left the United States in 1869, frustrated with the conservatism and the lack of a meaningful, welcome role in the women’s rights movement. Because Rose and Anneke shared similar thoughts, and as they were both critical of USAmerican nativism, it is interesting to examine why one came to prominence within the movement and the other remained an outsider. My argument is that Anneke’s high standing within a powerful ethnic group was the main reason for this difference. Rose’s standing in the women’s rights movement was that of the outsider from the very first women’s rights convention in Worcester in 1850, which she attended and where she presented her thoughts in a speech. The Unitarian minister Antoinette Brown Blackwell evolved as her main antagonist because she did not approve of Rose’s religious views: as a freethinker Rose derived her motivation for social reform work from the gospel of reason, enlightened thought, and Robert Owen’s social philosophy of equality. Deeply rooted in this philosophy, she could not easily arrive at a common basis for women’s rights with her colleagues in the US-American women’s rights movement. Rose had arrived in the United States much earlier than Anneke, landing at New York in 1836 together with her husband William, whom she had met at an event of the “Owenite movement” in London.21 By the time of her arrival she had already cultivated a strong opposition to patriarchal religion and had abandoned her Jewish faith. Moreover, she had become aware of the gender inequality and male domination in family, work, and society and had studied Owen’s social philosophy. Thus, it was not surprising that she immediately

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connected with the vivid freethought movement of the Thomas Paine Society in New York and supported Thomas Herttell’s “married woman’s property bill,” which he introduced to the New York state legislature in 1836. Carol Kolmerten’s biography of Rose tells the story of her life in the United States by depicting her as an intellectual outsider, and points to the critical position Rose had in the freethinkers’ communities of New York and Boston prior to entering the women’s rights movement. The Beacon, New York freethinker Gilbert Vale’s magazine, commented on Rose’s speech at a weekly Tammany Hall gathering of freethinkers in October 1837: “The Polish lady gave a most acceptable lecture last Sunday evening at Tammany Hall, on the evils of private property; and notwithstanding the unpopularity of the subject, and the little influence which the lecture apparently made on the audience, many of whom hugged their dollars and looked about with a smile indicating that preaching would not avail” (Quoted in Kolmerten 1999, 34). Apparently, the socialist and anticapitalist impetus of Owenism featured prominently in Rose’s speech and alienated the audience. Her particular brand of socialism was apparently not shared by the other freethinkers, and it alienated Rose from the outset. She also experienced a similar positioning in the antislavery movement. Although not all women in the antislavery movement were devoted to traditional religion, Rose’s fierce proclamation of freethought in this context was not well received and immediately relegated her to a marginal position. Moreover, she had a way of entering into public arguments with her colleagues in the reform movement that did not comply with contemporary female reformers’ virtues of true womanhood: piety and domesticity were virtues most female reformers still considered valid, and Rose’s aggressive rhetoric, sarcasm, and nondomesticity were signs of her difference. Aggressive rhetoric and arguments became obstacles on her path of integration into the reform community (Kolmerten 1999, 67–68). Rose’s first encounters with the women’s rights movement, however, did not immediately marginalize her. On the contrary, she was at first well received and praised for her talent as a speaker. Yet, even in the words of praise that were lavished on her, she was distinguished from other speakers and ascribed a unique and “peculiar” position. The first national women’s rights convention in Worcester, held 23–24 October 1850, marked Rose’s initiation to the woman’s reform community, and she was immediately nominated and approved by the convention as a member of the Business Committee (PWRC Worcester 1851, 13). Unfortunately, the Proceedings did not publish Rose’s speech and only mentioned that “Ernestine L. Rose, of New York, gave utterance to her clear, strong thoughts in her own peculiarly graceful style of eloquence” (PWRC Worcester 1851, 50). Other speeches leave the impression that most speakers were deeply rooted in the Christian religion and therefore supported women’s

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reform in order to fulfill God’s intentions.22 Humans’ equal and, above all, divine nature was the bedrock of the reform movement and the end that the movement sought to fulfill. Rose’s standpoint differed in many respects from this orthodox view, and her idea of equality rested on the premise of equal human rights and equal capacities to develop reason as the foundation for good judgment. Furthermore, Rose not only represented an outsider’s viewpoint, but she literally had no ties to the other attendees. Many of the other women already knew each other because they belonged to the same family or religious community or had attended the same educational institutions (Kolmerten 1999, 77–78). Rose must have known Stone from abolitionist meetings in the late 1840s; however, I assume that the two did not have a friendly relationship, as Rose’s remark about Stone quoted above suggested. Despite her lack of personal connections to women in the movement, Rose gained a reputation as a regular speaker at the women’s rights conventions in the 1850s and became an officer on different committees. She even served as chairperson and president of some conventions. Stone’s personal papers suggest that Rose was among the core personnel of organizers and speakers during the 1850s. She wrote to Anthony that she could not attend a convention in 1855, but that “with you [Anthony] and Nettie [Antoinette Brown Blackwell] and Mrs. Stanton and Rose [it would] make speakers enough” (Blackwell Family Papers, 30 May). Stone, Anthony, Brown Blackwell, Stanton, and Rose were at the center of the movement and its core constituents.23 Repeated references to her Judaism—despite having abandoned it in her youth already—her gloved hands, and her dark curly hair served to mark her as different and foreign. Her appearance at the first national woman’s rights convention in Worcester was described by the New York Herald as follows: Mrs. Rose rose upon the platform.—Madam President and ma dear sisters and bredren, I do regret no one rises better dan myself to speak; but I shall offer you but a few remarks on de subject before us. Mrs. Rose spoke at length, saying among other things, dat woman is in de quality of de slave … and dat when de distinction of rights between de sexes ceases, then, and not till then, will woman get her just deserts. (Quoted in Kolmerten 1999, 81–82)

This representation aimed at making the speaker sound foreign, uneducated, and, when comparing it to the representation of black speakers like Sojourner Truth, also “black.” I argue for this analogy given the fact that the black woman’s speech of 1851 was printed in the same ungrammatical slang as Rose’s here.24 But although Rose’s identity was rejected, her effectiveness as a speaker was noticed and raised fears of how influential Rose might become in the reform community.

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It is a melancholy reflection, that among our American women who have been educated to better things, there should be found any who are willing to follow the lead of such foreign propagandists as the ringleted, glove-handed exotic, Ernestine L. Rose. … This Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, with a train of followers like a great kite with a very long tail, has, for a week, been amusing Senatorial and Assembly Committees, with her women’s rights performances, free of charge. (Susan B. Anthony Collection, Albany Register, 7 March 1854)

The underlying nativism of the Register’s statement was obvious and reveals that a female reformer like Rose was never perceived primarily as a women’s rights activist, but always as an “exotic” immigrant woman. This foreignness gave rise to nativist fears that influenced and determined Rose’s role in the women’s rights movement. It led to her marginalization, despite the fact that she was an eloquent speaker with profound arguments. Indeed, the nativism of her American colleagues made it difficult for Rose to become fully integrated into the movement. Stone, whom Rose accused of nativism, made no secret of her dislike of Rose. In a letter of 25 May 1859 to Anthony she wrote: “I do hope Mrs. Rose will not be a speaker at the meeting, Mrs. Jones will make a far better speech. … Mrs. Rose is ‘known,’ but 30 people will stay away, who see her name, where 10 will be attracted of it”25 (Blackwell Family Papers). Stone’s sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, apparently also did not approve of Rose, at least not of her ideas, which is evident in the different ideas that Stone and Brown Blackwell represented.26 Rose left the United States for England when the schism of the women’s movement manifested itself in 1868/69. Kolmerten speculates about the reasons for her decision and wonders whether Rose became tired of the ongoing bickering between reformers, or whether she despaired when her closest colleagues resorted to racism and nativism to strengthen their arguments, or indeed whether she lost patience with everyone who would not see the logic of her thought (Kolmerten 1999, 251–52). Before Rose and her husband left New York, she had, however, acquired United States citizenship—possibly to remain free to return whenever she wanted. Understanding Rose’s story of repeated marginalization and of her struggle to integrate into the women’s rights movement allow us now to compare her with Anneke and to point out the particularities of Anneke’s position. Moreover, Rose’s example demonstrates that nativism and racism in the women’s rights movement not only stimulated productivity in immigrant women but also led to anger, loneliness, and surrender. Anneke’s position differed from Rose’s in that Anneke was not influenced by Owen and his social philosophy. She was influenced, instead, by a German philosophical tradition of liberal democracy and socialism that she had come

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into contact with before and during the German revolutions among the literary and political circles in Munster and Cologne. Anneke’s meeting and liaison with Fritz Anneke in Munster had a tremendous impact on her political views. These were oriented along social and economic issues of exploitation of the working population, similar to Owen’s vision of a classless society. “Prosperity, Liberty and Education for all” became the liberal democratic motto of the German revolutionaries.27 In contrast, however, Fritz and Anneke’s means of gaining this social equality were less narrowly socialist than broadly political in nature. An editorial of the Neue Kölnische Zeitung (NKZ), which the Annekes founded together with their friend Friedrich Beust in 1848, illuminated their political philosophy: “The ‘Neue Kölnische Zeitung’ is published, as the title suggests, primarily for the working population. It wants to work for their instruction and information, and on behalf of their interest and to their benefit in any possible way” (Neue Kölnische Zeitung). The inclusion of the worker in all public and political institutions was the goal of the Neue Kölnische Zeitung’s ambitions. Thus, it expressed, as its central ideal, the democratization of society and politics to replace the reign of an aristocratic elite. The radical paper was immediately censored and prohibited. Anneke then continued to publish under a new title, the Frauen-Zeitung, the first issue of which was published on 27 September 1848. In this paper she introduced the demand for women’s equality and their equal opportunity of gaining “prosperity, freedom and education” as part of the political program. Although Rose and Anneke were initiated and educated politically in different circles, they shared the fundamental ideals of equality and freedom. In addition, they shared an antireligious sentiment. Although Anneke was raised in the Catholic faith and published religious poems as a young woman, she eventually rejected religion and the church. Her early religious work was a controversial issue in the German-American community, as an article by Wendt in the NZ demonstrated. According to Wendt, the official organ of the Turnerbund in the United States, Zukunft, launched an attack upon Anneke, revealing the fact that she had published a prayer booklet in Germany. This attack should have demonstrated to the freethought community of GermanAmericans how inconsistent and superstitious women’s rights reformers were. Accordingly, women’s reform had to be mistrusted. Wendt countered this accusation: “If Mathilde F. Anneke has really commited this juvenile folly, … she has by now regretted it and atoned with all her action what she unknowingly had perpetrated. She has stepped not backwards but forwards” (Wendt 1870e). She indeed had. The Frauen-Zeitung of 1848 already included an appeal to secularization, and for the separation of church and state (Anneke 1848). In addition to her democratic social philosophy and antireligious position, Anneke seemed to be linked to Rose in her ideas about marriage and divorce.

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Anneke was a divorced woman and struggled with the limited freedom—not only in legal terms—she had had in the process of divorcing. Anneke’s first marriage to Alfred von Tabouillot in 1836 ended in 1843. It is remarkable how Anneke managed by lawsuit to obtain custody of her daughter Fanny. Even more unusual was the fact that she was found innocent in the divorce trial and her ex-husband was ordered to pay alimony for his daughter. But, although Anneke succeeded legally, a letter by Annette von Droste-Huelshoff, the acclaimed German poet, revealed that Anneke had lost social integrity as a divorced woman. Maria Wagner quotes a letter by Droste-Huelshoff in which she mentions her mother’s warning about meeting a divorced Anneke (Wagner 1980, 28–29). She should avoid Anneke, as Anneke was “sehr genant,” meaning “very embarrassing,” a reference to the fact that she was divorced.28 Thus, notions that were brought against Stanton and Rose in 1860 that divorce and marriage equally affected women and men could never have been shared by Anneke, who had experienced the exact opposite. Anneke developed her concept of marriage as a partnership founded on mutual love in her essay about Louise Aston entitled “Das Weib im Conflict mit den Socialen Verhältnissen” (Woman in Conflict with the Social Condition), which she wrote in the winter of 1846/47. She remarked that Aston was forced to give herself to a man without having been in love. By mentioning this, Anneke expressed sympathy with Aston for such female misery and further offered an interpretation of Aston’s poems telling of unfulfilled love and life. “The longing of devoted love is not stilled in true unification, and this is the surge breaking the glowing heart’s impetuous waves” (MFA Papers, no date). This heartrending impression of Aston adds yet another dimension to Anneke’s comprehension of marriage and partnership. Rejecting the practice of Versorgungsehe—marriage designed as an institution of provision—on the one hand, yet not clinging to a religious ideal of marriage on the other hand, Anneke advocated the ideal of partnership founded on love and argued that marriage was designed for the purpose of individual happiness and fulfillment. Although she did not write or speak publicly about the issue of marriage and divorce reform in the United States, she might have sided with the radical Rose on the issue at the time in which it gained attention. We can see how similar Rose’s and Anneke’s political thoughts were, but Rose was perceived as an outsider, whereas Anneke received invitations to attend conventions, was addressed as “my dear friend” by Stanton, Anthony, Davis, Gage, and others, and was highly appreciated in the movement. Anneke’s appreciation in the movement, I argue, was indeed an appreciation of her valued role and less an appreciation of her thought. Her role was clearly defined as a mediator and translator between the women’s rights movement and the German-American community. Antagonism between the two groups

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conditioned Anneke’s position and required that she take up this role. Rose, on the contrary, had no such role to fulfill: apart from the women’s rights movement, she was situated in the freethought movement, which was favorable toward women’s rights as an egalitarian principle anyway. Although freethinkers brought charges of religious dependence against the women reformers, they were not generally opposed to the cause of the reformers, an effect that was obvious in the German-American community. Lacking a well-defined role in the women’s rights movement, Rose was judged more critically by the mainstream of the movement. Although Anneke, who never succeeded in speaking English properly, never attempted to integrate into the movement community fully—always having understood herself as a “woman of two countries” between cultures—Rose attempted to achieve full integration and acceptance. In a community prone to nativism and racism, Rose’s foreignness, in addition to her radical thought, had the effect of ostracizing her, whereas for Anneke foreignness became the source of her power. Although Anneke’s reputation was outstanding, receiving invitations and praise for her work, she never achieved an executive or campaign position in the women’s rights movement. She never aspired to the level of the leaders and organizers. Her thoughts were heard during conventions by US-American and German audiences, but the obstacle to these public appearances was her limited command of the English language, which meant a translator was always required. Translation, however, not only served the function of linguistic understanding but was also a mode of negotiation between antagonistic positions. This negotiation could only occur in the interstitial, hybrid position that immigrant women held. Despite its productive potential, which evolved as the characteristic feature in Bhabha’s conception of the hybrid position, examples from Anneke’s case illustrate that her hybrid position in and of itself was never productive, but that productivity depended on other social, political, and economic circumstances. In Anneke’s case these circumstances sometimes hindered the productivity of her public position. Illness, death of family members, and financial desperation were the hardships that prevented her from a much more intensive participation in the reform movement. Yet above all, Anneke’s immigration experience influenced her position in the women’s rights movement. Her status as an immigrant was intertwined with the experience of revolution and a politico-philosophical vision for humanity and society. Liberation from civil, political, religious, and gender inequalities was the goal of her vision. After the abatement of the liberal democratic revolutions in the German states, Anneke, like most of her compatriot refugees, transplanted their sociopolitical vision in the United States and hoped to see there the fulfillment of their expectations. Anneke expressed these expectations and their immediate disappointment in her speech at the

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1853 Mob Convention in New York. This vision of a social and political revolution, however, linked Anneke “naturally” to the US-American female reformers. They mutually strove for women’s liberation from male domination. The experience of revolution evolved as the common ground in the “universal sisterhood” between Anneke and US-American reformers. The experience of revolution also set her apart from the US-Americans because hers was an experience of the failure of revolution. Thus, revolution evoked diametrically different connotations in the two ethnic communities, as US-Americans were reminded of their successful revolution against the British in 1776, whereas Anneke was reminded of the failed attempts in the German states. Anneke also shared other ideas and positions with US-American feminists that fostered a sense of mutual identification. Abolitionism and the creation of a feminist tradition and intellectual heritage were elements that evolved into a set of shared values among female reformers. In Anneke’s approach to US-American feminists, translation in a literal sense had a central function. Translation of each other’s writings and thoughts, for example, produced an intellectual community of resources into which diverse individuals were integrated by translation or inscribed themselves by translating the texts of others. Despite the similarities, Anneke’s relationship with US-American reformers was also characteristically ambiguous, as she always remained a speaker on behalf of the Germans. This ambiguity—her identification and simultaneous differentiation—was characteristic for Anneke’s public position in the United States: she was the “woman of two countries” in the women’s rights movement and the pioneer of the German-American women’s movement.29 Anneke, in order to fulfill these roles, had to be firmly situated in the German community in the United States. Her ethnic difference ultimately was the foundation for her position—and not their shared theoretical foundation—which was considered powerful and influential. However, because she was almost the only woman adopting this hybrid standpoint, she was not always successful as a negotiator and translator.

Notes 1. Alexander Jonas was part of the German-American reform community in New York City as indicated by his appearance in one of the assemblies of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein. In 1874 he spoke about the political emancipation of women with regard to an ideal, egalitarian form of marriage (Oppenheim). 2. Medical immunization had been available at that time already, but many—including Fritz Anneke—mistrusted it. Immunization from arm to arm was common at the time, and, therefore, in many cases transferred other illnesses as well. The dangers of immunization were limited in 1870, when the vaccine was generated from cows (Wagner 1980, 95).

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3. Sherman Booth was a Wisconsin democrat, supporter of the Free Soil movement, and editor of the Milwaukee Free Democrat. He was involved in a public court case in March 1854, when Joshua Glover, a runaway slave from Missouri seeking refuge in Racine, Wisconsin, was found by his Missouri “owner.” Glover was captured by the federal marshal and his deputies who physically tortured and imprisoned him in Milwaukee. Racine citizens protested against this treatment, and Sherman Booth rose to prominence as the enthusiastic abolitionist who addressed a speech to the gathered crowd of protesters. During the protest, the crowd entered the prison and freed Glover, shipping him to Canada and securing his freedom. Sherman Booth, however, was arrested and sentenced to a one-month jail sentence and a fine of $1,000. The trial against the Supreme Court and against Glover’s former “owner” lasted for thirteen years, during which an additional charge was brought against him. In 1860 he was accused of having seduced and raped a fourteen-year-old girl. This alleged crime led to the estrangement from his second wife, Mary Corss Booth. Mary Corss of Connecticut became the close and dear friend of Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who supported her during the hard times when Booth fell into disrepute. Mary wanted to leave her husband, but her financial situation hindered her from doing so. In 1860, she traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, accompanied by her friend Anneke and their children. In Zurich, Mary began to translate and write poetry. She should not be mistaken for the prominent nineteenth-century writer by the same name, however (D. Butler 1999). 4. Fritz Anneke died in Chicago on 6 December 1872. He was killed in an accidental fall from an elevated sidewalk (Sanne 1977, 2). 5. This false anecdote about Anneke’s participation in the Hungarian revolution on the side of Kossuth in the report of the “Mob Convention” also entered HWS (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 2, 571), which did not correct it. Anneke indeed admired Kossuth and dedicated a poem to him, which was published on 10 November 1851 in the Sunday edition of the New Yorker Staatszeitung. The occasion for writing this poem was the arrival of Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, from his exile in Turkey to the United States. Kossuth traveled in the United States and addressed the bodies of the legislatures, German communities, and intellectual and political circles. On Anneke’s poem, see Fittbogen (1937) and Wagner (1980, 373–76); for an account of Kossuth’s tour of the United States in 1851/52 see Emerson (1852). 6. Uland in Texas is also included in Wagner (1983, 49–186). 7. Literary historian Dorothea Stuecher argues that Anneke found a perfect symbolic resolution in the figure of the slave woman to reveal the oppression of all women. In freeing her fictional female characters, like Isabella in Die Sclaven-Auction, Anneke symbolically expressed the solution to women’s social subordination by denouncing any form of patriarchal oppression: that of the slave master toward slaves as well as that of men toward women (Stuecher 1990, 71–73). 8. The sources discussed in this chapter and the central aspects of my interpretation were previously published in my 2008 article “Uebersetzung als Spiel. Migrantinnen als Uebersetzerinnen der amerikanischen Frauenrechtsbewegung im 19. Jahrhundert.” 9. In 1870, the population of La Crosse County was 20,279, of which 42 percent were foreign-born. One-third of these immigrants were born in the German states; they were the largest ethnic group, followed by Norwegians, Bohemians, English and Welsh, and Canadian. Information based on La Crosse Library (2007). 10. The first paragraph of this extract from Tillmann’s letter was written in English, the other two paragraphs in German. 11. This article referred to Stanton’s speech on the occasion of the annual convention of the AERA on 13 May 1869 in New York. It was the same speech she presented in La Crosse and at other places on her lecture tour. (Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1869)

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12. As Ortlepp showed in the case of the Milwaukee Turnverein, the idea of gender equality was vehemently opposed, and the concept of women as men’s supporters and helpmates prevailed. Only some local Turner groups accepted the idea of gender equality during the 1870s (Ortlepp 2006, 68–69). Blaschke shows that German women in the United States fulfilled the role of bearers and keepers of a specific German culture and were seen as a stable element, preserving the idea of home in the foreign American society (1997, 75). 13. This deconstructive movement represented that which Jacques Derrida describes as the play of differences, constantly and endlessly differentiating, thus never arriving at a total and final position. Everything new is immediately at stake and at play. “If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions” (Derrida 2001, 365). 14. Lyceums were part of an American system of adult education programming in the nineteenth century. It originated as a means to morally and culturally uplift the individual and to further self-improvement. Lyceums were founded in 1826 by Josiah Hobrook in Milburry, Massachusetts. By 1836, three thousand lyceums had been established throughout the country, offering a variety of subjects. Prominent speakers were invited to offer lectures and debates, receiving good pay in return. After the Civil War the programs were professionalized and organized by central booking agencies in the larger cities of Boston, New York, and Chicago. Among the speakers were Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Lucy Stone, Mark Twain, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It provided an extended platform to social reform movements such as the women’s rights movement and aided in their growth. 15. Marilley analyzes the strategic shift toward educational qualifications as a principle of suff rage. She interprets it as a means of white reform leaders’ racist and nativist biases as well, claiming that “educated suff rage” actually invoked the preference of a white, native-born, Protestant government and electorate. Anneke’s use of this discourse was thus highly ambiguous (1996, 161–64). 16. The passage in the autobiography was not written in 1898 when it was published, but appeared first in December 1869 as an editorial correspondence to The Revolution, that is, only a few days after her appearance in La Crosse. 17. Anneke appears to have drafted most of her letters. Some in the archival collection remain unfinished draft versions, such as this dated 30 September 1872 (MFA Papers). 18. It remains unclear why Anthony had not read the address of the Radical-Club during the Washington convention. A report of the club meeting on 4 January 1874 in Milwaukee indicated that Anthony required correspondence of the club for the convention on 15 January. Immediately, the Radical-Club wrote their address and Anneke was charged with translating and sending it to Anthony. In a letter to Anneke, Anthony claimed that neglect of the address during the Washington convention occurred due to technical problems, but possibly, the content of the address was too radical to be included in the convention, as Andreas Etges speculates in his paper “Equality and Education” (Andreas Etges Collection, 17–18). HWS, however, mentions the letters of the Radical Democracy of Milwaukee in the short report of the convention, and I consider Anthony’s apology credible (1889, vol. 3, 34). Anthony’s main reason for not reading the address during the convention stemmed from the fact that the movement at that time lacked a press organ in which such addresses could have been published. This was indeed an obstacle for the movement after the end of The Revolution and before the founding of the National Citizen

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and Ballot Box in 1881 and Clara Bewick Colby’s The Woman’s Tribune in 1883. Besides, the radicalism in the club’s address did not exceed the radicalism of other addresses and letters that were previously published and presented. Etges, however, might have a point considering the address Anneke sent to the NWSA convention in May 1873, in which she expressed a critique of the American women’s rights movement and implied the superiority of Germans’ political thought. 19. Annette P. Bus pointed out this dual suppression of the immigrant woman in her discussion of Anneke’s involvement in the suff rage movement: “One must take into account that women, due to their position in society, do not have the same options and alternatives as men. And immigrant women might not have had the options available to both immigrant men and American women” (1989, 88). 20. “She [Anneke] has just signed the following document, which was given to the world as a declaration of independence on the part of women: Whereas, The men of this country, in the presence of the assembled nations of the world, are gathered at Philadelphia, to celebrate the Centennial birth of their glorious Republic; and Whereas, The women of the Government—after a century of boasted liberty—are denied the right of self-government, the right of trial by jury of their peers, taxed without representation, and governed without their consent; therefore, Resolved, That, as mothers, daughters, and wives of this republic, we cannot celebrate this grand jubilee, but bow our heads in shame and degradation for the disfranchisement of 20,000,000 women, one-half the Republic. Resolved, That this celebration is not a celebration of the independence of the whole, but only half, of the people of this Government. The other signatures to the paper are Fr. Ross Wolcott, President of the Wisconsin Association, and Mrs. Josephine Pearce, Secretary of the same, both most estimable and gifted ladies” (WJ 1876). See also Stanton, Gage, and Anthony (1889, vol. 3, 39) for a note about Anneke’s letter. 21. The “Owenite movement” in London during the 1830s characteristically harbored persons who shared a vision of the unity of “all classes and all nations.” One of the movement’s important conferences was called the “Association of All Classes and All Nations”; Rose was among the attendees and even presented one of the resolutions, in which she expounded the link between socialism and anticlericalism (Doress-Worters 2008, 6–7). 22. For example, a Mr. H.H. von Amringe said at the end of his speech: “The providences of the most high are awaiting the regeneration, by the Divine Spirit, of the new man, male and female, in the image of God, as promised to the seed of the woman. Let us, therefore, no longer retard the operations of the Word of God, but proclaim the entire and Christian doctrines of truth, peace, and liberty. Away with lordship of the strong over the weak, with sovereignty of the HUSBAND, BROTHER, and SON, over the WIFE, MOTHER, and SISTER” (PWRC Worcester 1851, 45). 23. Stanton, however, because of the maternal duties she had to fulfill, did not attend women’s rights conventions again until 1859. Although absent, she sent letters in which she expressed her thoughts and gave her support to the movement. 24. At the women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, Sojourner Truth gave a speech that was represented with the intention of making her appear “black,” simple, and uneducated. The report by Frances Dana Gage of Truth’s speech ascribed to the speaker the following slang: “‘Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibe me any best place!’ And raising herself to her full height, and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked. ‘And ain’t I a woman?’” (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 1, 116). Nell Irvin Painter’s scholarship on Truth has revealed that this representation was false and that Frances Dana Gage in this instance invented the “black” image of Truth, which then entered the history of the movement in being integrated as the only document about that appearance in

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HWS. Now it serves merely as a myth and, moreover, makes us aware of the racist underpinnings of the women’s rights movement and its hostility toward foreignness (Painter 1996). 25. Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock Jones (1813–96) was an abolitionist and women’s rights reformer. She lectured in Ohio during the 1840s and probably met Stone and Brown Blackwell at Oberlin College. Between 1846 and 1849 Jones and her husband Benjamin Jones edited the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the official organ of the Western Anti-Slavery Society (Lasser and Merrill 1987, 74). 26. This can be supported also by the fact that Brown Blackwell and Rose in particular held numerous heated discussions about the nature of marriage, and marriage and divorce reform. The National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York in May 1860 was the arena in which the two women—along with Stanton—argued this topic. The convention report is a valuable source thereof (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 1, 688–737). 27. This motto was brought by German expatriates to the United States. The German women’s reform movement in New York in the 1870s represented this motto as well. The NZ chose it as their heading and program. 28. Wagner explains that the word “genant” was used to describe a divorced woman (1980, 29). It was an uncommon or also a colloquial expression. 29. In an obituary the editors of the New Yorker Staatszeitung wrote: “With Mrs. Mathilde Franciska Anneke, who died the day before yesterday in Milwaukee at the age of 67 years, the German-American women’s rights movement loses her pioneer” (1884).

Chapter 3

Clara Neymann Transatlantic Messenger

≥ Very much like Anneke, Clara Neymann, née Loew, was a well-known public woman in the German reform community of the United States, too. The actions and ideas of this German-American woman, who was also a prominent member of the women’s rights movement from the 1870s through the 1910s, are at the heart of this case study. Her life, including biography, activities, and ideas, has remained untold until now. As we have seen, Anneke’s power derived from her firm and stable position in the German-American community, which provided her with a strategic role in the US-American women’s rights movement. By contrast, Neymann’s power—both in the feminist reform movement and the ethnic community—came from her ability to shift between ethnic poles, confirming that which I deemed “ethnicization” in my introductory remarks. Both the potential to expound feminist arguments in the interstitial position, thus transcending antagonistic stereotyping, and the potential to shift—in multilingual fashion—between theses ethnicized poles were characteristic of Neymann’s role as messenger in and for the USAmerican women’s rights movement. The challenge in examining this woman and her activities is the fragmentary source material: a collection of her papers does not exist, and she is mentioned in neither contemporary nor newer encyclopedias. Genealogical information about her is limited to information about her two children. This makes the search for living descendents, who could serve as a source or “archive” of sources, impossible. Despite these obstacles, I found her name frequently mentioned in numerous women’s rights contexts, which enabled me to rediscover Neymann as the important German-American women’s rights activist she was. She was a member of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein in New York, which suggested commitment to the German-American community. She was a member of different city, state, and national women suff rage associations and appeared frequently as a speaker in conventions. During the last decades of the nineteenth century she regularly traveled to Germany and

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Switzerland, where she pursued academic studies and was invited by different women’s clubs and organizations to lecture on women’s rights. For unknown reasons Neymann disappeared from the women’s rights reformers’ community after 1898. Her “philosophical paper on Marriage in the Light of Woman’s Freedom” during the anniversary convention in Washington DC in 1898 was the last recorded appearance of Neymann as a speaker (Neymann 1898; Proceedings of the 30th Annual Convention of the NAWSA 1898; Washington Post 1898). She remained a member of the NAWSA and continued to contribute financially to the association.1 I believe that it was no coincidence that she disappeared from the women’s rights platform at the same time that the second volume of the The Woman’s Bible was published in 1898. NAWSA leaders openly rejected the project at the time, and forced its leading editors, authors, and the publication itself out of their community. In her fascinating and meticulous study Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (2001), historian Kathi Kern has demonstrated how Stanton’s marginalization and almost complete exclusion from the women’s rights movement came about as a result of her participation in The Woman’s Bible, which assembled feminist interpretations of selected Bible passages. As Neymann was a member of the revising committee for the second part of the book, as well as the author of five short essays2 in The Woman’s Bible, I suggest that she had experienced a similar fate as Stanton and other radical critics of Christian religion. Assuming that this had been the case, Neymann becomes even more interesting as a woman of two countries: She managed to become a significant and central figure in the women’s rights movement, side by side with leaders such as Stanton, Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Clara Bewick Colby, before finally losing influence and disappearing, when the movement took a more conservative turn at the end of the nineteenth century. The present stock of sources reveal Neymann as a powerful force in her time, as one of the most prominent women’s rights activists among the German-American community, as one of the best speakers of the US-American women’s rights movement, and therefore as an outstanding representative of “women of two countries.” To what extent was the power of the hybrid space available to Neymann? How did she confront nativism and ethnicization in the women’s rights movement? Because she also went back to Germany frequently, I also consider her a transatlantic messenger. This case study will show that Neymann was a human rights advocate in a transatlantic feminist space.

Neymann’s German-American Political Apprenticeship Neymann first became a political lecturer for women’s rights on 21 March 1872 at the first convention of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein in New

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York (NZ 1872c). By the end of that year she had sought Karl Heinzen’s advice to realize her plan to professionally lecture in big cities other than New York. She spoke to German audiences in February, March, and April 1873 in the Midwest (Pionier 1873b), and the preparations for this successful lecture tour are documented in letters she addressed to Karl Heinzen between 24 October 1872 and 6 March 1873. These letters are the only written documents by Neymann, which also provide insight into her private and emotional life. Because Neymann is unknown to most readers, I deem it appropriate to introduce her and offer some biographical information. “Mme. Neymann is a native of Carlsruhe, Baden, and came to this country when 18 years of age. She acquired the English language within the last eight years. She began her work among the Germans about twelve years ago” (WJ 1883b, 136). Based on this information, Neymann did not learn the English language until about 1875. By that time she had already lived in the United States for close to twenty years. As she was later praised for her oratorical excellence and fluency in both languages, this information seems dubious. It remains unclear as to when and to what extent Neymann learned the English language, but we know that her first activities as a public lecturer took place in the German community in the United States before she reached out to English-speaking audiences. As to her date of immigration, the information she provided in an article in the WJ seems more reliable: according to the piece, she was sixteen years old when she entered the United States in 1856 (Neymann 1884d, 378). She married Emil H. Neymann in Milwaukee on 10 July 1858 and moved to New York in 1872, where she began her career as a political lecturer.3 A statement Neymann made in a letter she wrote in the summer of 1884 to the WJ from Karlsruhe, Germany, suggests that she immigrated to the United States on her own and that her parents and sister had remained in Germany. Neymann’s husband had passed away a few months before this visit, on 9 February 1884. “In Carlsruhe,” she wrote, “I found my good mother. The joy of meeting my relatives in the old home was mingled with sorrow for the loss we had sustained. My mother and sister had, on a former visit, learned to love and appreciate my husband, whose generosity, joviality, and genuine goodheartedness made him beloved wherever he went” (Neymann 1884b). In a letter to Karl Heinzen of 6 March 1873 she mentioned a relative, Louis Walkl, in Chicago (KH Papers). It is possible that she went to the Midwest to stay with family members who had immigrated to the United States earlier. We know that Neymann’s political thinking began when she married Emil Neymann in 1858 and continued to develop after they had moved to New York. Her husband played an important and motivational role in her process of becoming aware of political and social problems. In an obituary Emil Neymann was praised as a reformer himself: “After his emigration to this country

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his energies were enlisted in the cause of progress and reform. In the antislavery struggle, in the movement for women suff rage, his voice and his purse were ever on the side of human enfranchisement” (Blake 1884). His wife described him not only as her “protector” but also as her intellectual companion: My husband was broad and liberal in his views … and it was he who first encouraged me to break away from the customs and traditions which have hedged in the women of Germany, shutting them out from that larger life, which is the noblest product of civilization. We read and studied together, and when our children came, there was an extra incentive to search for truth, for we had their future to think of as well as our own. (The Woman’s Tribune 1888a)

As her intellectual companion, he stimulated her thinking and interest in political and other public issues. But Neymann also had other reasons for becoming a public speaker and activist. As she wrote to Heinzen: In all my striving to go upward and forward I have always only followed my innermost nature that is driving me to use that bit of strength and ability I feel inside for the benefit of my fellow human beings. Every reform, every progressive and free idea resonates in my heart; how would I become unfaithful to what I once recognized as good and just. What could stand higher than the human? What could be more interesting and elevating than preoccupying ourselves with the welfare and woe of our fellow human beings? (KH Papers, 12 November 1872)

The juxtaposed statements shed light on two different aspects of Neymann’s motivation to become a public political lecturer. The first passage suggests the need for feminist intervention in order to confront German women with the unequal gender order they were subject to and ultimately to liberate them. The second statement illustrates Neymann’s humanistic idealism, which she felt derived from her inner nature and intuitive compassion for her fellow women and men. Despite this idealism, Neymann also sought to make the reform platform her professional terrain and economic base: “As I have chosen the occupation, the profession of a lecturer, I will speak only for money” (KH Papers, 8 December 1872). Her humanistic motivation, which stemmed from her compassion toward humankind, was clearly superseded by her rational decision to choose a profession and earn an income from it. In this tension between idealism and economic interest we can also discern a form of female empowerment: by requiring financial reimbursement the woman reformer elevated her intellectual and political work from a female philanthropic act to a professional and political act, which required studying and time and therefore had economic value.

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Although Neymann was a self-motivated woman, she sought the advice and support of others as well. In particular, Heinzen’s influence on Neymann’s career and political views was significant and can be traced in the letters she wrote to him from the day after their first encounter in New York. He became her admired idol, both personally and intellectually; he was her advisor and served as a middleman between Neymann and German-American clubs, which could host her lectures. When she first visited Heinzen and his wife in Boston in January 1873, she connected strongly and emotionally with Heinzen. The form of address in her letters changed from “Worthy Mr. Heinzen” to “My dear good Papa,” a far more intimate and affectionate form of address. She wrote: “How I would have loved to sit at your feet and chatted about this or that. I felt that you understood me and would have liked to listen to me. But society requires that we suppress our best feelings and hide them from each other. … This can never prevent me from being near to you in mind” (KH Papers, 5 February 1873). She closed this letter with the following words: “Now my kindest greetings to your dear family and my best regards to you from your loving daughter Clara Neymann.” Given the difference in age between them (Neymann was thiry-three years old, Heinzen sixty-four in 1873), the expressed intimacy signalized the character of their relationship, which resembled the one between student and mentor. Neymann chose Heinzen, the established and honored public celebrity, as her mentor to accelerate her career, receive critique, and be introduced to important political reform circles. By the time Neymann engaged in her 1873 lecturing tour in the Midwest, she was already cherished as “the most successful of these German agitators” (Milwaukee 1873). The German-American author of this article mentioned Neymann, together with Heinzen, as members of the German-American community “who are labouring with untiring fidelity to spread rational ideas on all social, political, and religious questions” (Milwaukee 1873). Among the German-American population, political and social reform held a subordinate status to other public issues. “The great majority of the Germans have always been bitterly antagonistic to the extension of social equality and suff rage to her [i.e., woman]” and thus, the need for mediators to mobilize this large group of the population for the cause of women’s reform became evident (Milwaukee 1873). Initially, then, Neymann held the same position as Anneke, namely that of a mediator and translator. Neymann further believed in the reformer’s task to make people think and to influence them to reflect upon their lives and society, in order to make them aware of social and political injustice. In her eyes, her personal and female nature required that she take up the mediatorial work of the reformer. The role of women in the reform work was altogether special. She believed that women were calmer and therefore more eager to rationally consider and

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judge situations than men. It was her female duty to intervene in conflict because women were not as easily led by pride and evil thought as men. “It is the duty of women to step in to reconcile, particularly if one is seized with equal vehemence by good as well as evil, as you are my dear Papa; then the calmer nature of a woman is not too much out of place” (KH Papers, 27 February 1873). Women, she claimed, were naturally suited for sociopolitical reform work: thus, mediation and intellectual mobilization evolved as core principles in Neymann’s conception of this reform work. In her reports to Heinzen about her lectures in the Midwest, she stressed the effect that her appearances had on women in particular. She wrote of little revolutions her lectures ignited and demonstrated the success of her mobilization efforts. Although she believed in the universality of a female nature and considered women’s abilities to negotiate and mediate a condition for the work of the reformer and political lecturer, Neymann’s German(-American) identification played a significant role in her public arguments. She spoke predominantly to German-American audiences in Detroit, Milwaukee, Sauk City, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Washington DC during her first tour in March and April 1873, as she sought to make an impact among this particular group of society (Pionier 1873c). In reminding her German listeners of the “despotism” they fled to seek liberty and freedom in the United States, she appealed to their sense of civic responsibility to fight despotism and work toward the improvement of social and political liberties everywhere. “In no other country,” Neymann argued in her lecture in Chicago on 7 April 1873, “could the woman question make such progress as in this. The greater the despotism in the rule of a country the less the women were considered. The more liberal a land, the more rights were given to women. Germany was a despotic country, and women were, therefore, treated there as slaves” (Chicago Daily Tribune 1873). Because of their specific experience as immigrants who knew both the suffering from a constrained monarchic system in the German states as well as the opportunities of a democratic society in the United States, Neymann suggested that this group was well suited for political action and improving democracy. Anneke’s speeches at the national conventions in 1853 and 1869 resonated with Neymann’s argument. In the German-American community, the immigration experience was politically charged and became a leitmotif in the immigrant women’s rights reformers’ speeches. In doing so, their ethnic difference was used as a source of empowerment in the speeches of the German-American women who argued on behalf of women’s rights. The Milwaukee Sentinel wrote about Neymann’s speech, “Our Adversaries in the Woman Question”: Those among us who have escaped the fetters of European despotism and are now enjoying the great blessings of our Republican institutions, imperfect as they

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may be at the present time, cannot pay their debt of gratitude to the American Republic in a better way than by assisting their native-born citizens to build up the temple of liberty founded in 1776, until it shall cast the rays of a pure and lofty Republicanism into far-off lands, and show the downtrodden nations of the earth the path to freedom. The accomplished champion of human rights and progress, Mrs. Clara Neymann, will endeavour, by her eloquence, to stir up the Germans to more energetic efforts in this direction. (Quoted in Milwaukee 1873)

In that sense, German-Americans were also considered to be the bearers of a particular political culture, an important part of their self-identification, as I have shown also in other chapters of this book. In Neymann’s case, the particularity derived from the intersection of this self-conception with her gender identification. The German-American woman specifically united the political destiny with a female destiny to be the mediator and negotiator of sociopolitical reform.4 Clara Neymann represented this attribute of German womanhood in her role as intellectual mediator in the German-American community. Although the stereotypical ideal of German womanhood in the nineteenth century represented the woman as mother and housewife, other alternative constructions of gender relations also prevailed. The Freie Gemeinden, of which Neymann and Anneke were members, unequivocally grounded their efforts in gender equality and equality of all humans (Ortlepp 2004, 169; Paletschek 1990, 52). As such it evolved as another aspect of German-American identity that represented and made widely familiar a different ideal of femininity, one that was based on the condition of social and political equality. Despite this ideal of independent womanhood, Neymann had not been an aggressive public reformer at first. She felt insecure, a form of stage fright that vanished only gradually to be replaced by self-confidence and assurance. In October and November 1872 she reflected: “It is curious that it is so difficult for us women to let go completely of our inhibitions—although they have, of course, been instilled in us. But let us be patient. Maybe I will succeed. … I also still feel always a bit shy in the presence of men who have all which I am still lacking” (KH Papers, 24 November 1872). Consciousness of a subordinate position, along with female shyness and restraint, initially influenced her style. After having received applause, encouragement, and reassurance for her skills as lecturer, the authoress of the letters expressed herself differently, although still considering herself as an apprentice in the field. Furthermore, public appropriation gradually elevated her to a more authoritative position from which to speak from. My journey is a real training tour. Wherever I arrive I am cordially welcomed and the most gracious arrangements are made on my behalf! What a gratification! Although I have so far only delivered mediocrity in my speeches, they have

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contributed tremendously to the progress of the good cause. “The Adversaries in the Woman Question” have called forth a small revolution wherever I went. Women seek me out everywhere to show their gratitude and appreciation, and I may frankly say that my journey has been a complete success. (KH Papers, 5 April 1873)

It seems that the position of political reformer in the ethnic community of German-Americans was a necessary training for further activities in political contexts beyond the ethnic community. Her initial achievements made her fit and able to participate in the US-American women’s rights movement, upon which she also reflected in an interview she gave in 1888: “My first work in the cause was the translation of Mrs. Stanton’s address into German, which I personally distributed among my countrywomen in the city. Later, I consented to talk to them on those public questions which had come to be of such vital importance to me, and before I knew it, … I was actually before the public as a teacher and speaker” (The Woman’s Tribune 1888a). Thus, in Neymann’s case, ethnicity not only led to negative effects of discrimination, but it was also applied positively as a self-definition and a source of empowerment for the individual. It exceeds being “a sense of belonging” and becomes a mode of participation by containing a guarantee of achievements. Her ethnicity and hybrid position between political, cultural, and social systems enabled Neymann to participate beyond the boundaries of her ethnic community. The success of this participation furthermore required a mode of initiation into the dominant culture, the possession of communication skills, and a certain shared interest that transcended ethnic boundaries, that is, an interest in the emancipation of women based upon certain humanistic beliefs in equality and social justice. As a result of this first lecture tour, Neymann gained a reputation as an eloquent, intelligent, and interesting lecturer. Heinzen’s Pionier concluded: An essential service blazing a trail for the public influence of German women has lately been done by Frau Neymann, who has just returned to New York from her roundtrip. … Almost everywhere she was well received and gave most effective encouragement, not only because of her manner of appearance, but also because of the content of her lectures. [Neymann’s speeches] animated all minds and will have a lasting effect. Over the course of the summer, Frau Neymann intends to depart for Europe, where she hopes to spend a few years to prepare, by intensive study, for her future activities. Meanwhile we are hoping that her example will be followed by others for whom she has blazed a trail during her last tour. Apart from those already known we think there must be others not lacking in ability but in the courage to make themselves heard. Brave Frau Neymann has shown

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that the poet’s words, “Fortune smiles on the courageous” applies not only to men. (Pionier 1873c)

In the aftermath of this lecture tour Neymann became known beyond German-American circles. She was aware that this new publicity would also be conducive to a public career in the US-American women’s rights movement. In telling her fatherly friend Heinzen about her wish to be known in the women’s rights movement, she took an active part in coming into contact with female US-American reformers.5 First, she expressed her wish to be spoken of, to be introduced in the Boston WJ, which constituted the main platform for women’s reform efforts in the United States at that time. This paper was the only nationwide feminist publication in 1873. Second, after having been introduced to the movement’s community, she hoped to address it in person with a lecture at a convention in the future. She made use of her personal acquaintances in order to attain her career goal of becoming a public lecturer and further introduce her political ideas to a public beyond the German-American community. Indeed, the WJ published a short note about Neymann’s lecturing tour in the Midwest. “Mrs. Clara Neymann the young and eloquent German speaker has recently made a most successful tour through the West. … Every where the press has spoken in high terms of her efforts, which have broken ground in a hitherto almost untried field, the Germans having very few women speakers among them” (WJ 1873c, 345). This positive and commendatory note was soon followed by a longer article written by a “German-American citizen of Milwaukee,” in which Neymann was portrayed as the most successful of the German political lecturers for women’s rights (Milwaukee 1873). However, her first public appearance on the speakers’ platform had to wait. Between October 1873 and April 1877 Neymann lived in Zurich, Switzerland, to pursue academic studies (WJ 1873b). No sources remain from this period to illustrate the kind of studies she pursued, the development of her thoughts, or the contacts and personal networks in which she no doubt participated. A reference to Neymann can only be found in the reminiscences of German poet, educator, and women’s rights reformer Luise Büchner, who mentions a journey to Zurich in July 1875. Büchner did not mention Neymann’s name, but from the circumstances she described we can understand that the two women became dear friends in Zurich.6 During her journeys to Germany in the 1880s, Neymann again met up with Büchner, as well as with Luise’s brother Ludwig, in Darmstadt. After her return from Zurich in 1877 she began her successful career in the US-American women’s rights movement. She published articles in the WJ and made first speeches at local and regional women’s rights assemblies.7

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In the meantime she remained an active writer and speaker in the GermanAmerican critical community.8 Ultimately, her first appearance at a national women’s rights convention took place in Nebraska in 1882.

Women Suffrage and Temperance in Nebraska in 1882 On 7 November 1882, Nebraska’s men went to the polls to decide the fate of a women’s suff rage amendment in the state. For the purpose of agitation both AWSA and NWSA held their annual conventions in Omaha in September of that year, and afterward the activists traveled to all parts of Nebraska for six weeks to convince the voters of the necessity and righteousness of women’s suff rage (Stone 1882, Henry Blackwell 1882). Neymann was among the speakers of NWSA’s convention and also among the women who participated in the campaign that followed, and the campaign of 1882 illustrates two forms of Neymann’s participation in the movement: first, participation in the internal debate, and second, participation in public mobilization and campaign work for the movement’s cause. Neymann’s incentives for participating in NWSA’s convention at Omaha were highly idealistic. After she had attended several conventions as a listener and had learned about the movement’s agenda and principles, she self-confidently approached the US-American women’s rights movement in 1882 with an original speech in order to counter certain principles she considered wrong and to introduce rational thought to the movement. She wrote to the Milwaukee FD: Unfortunately, it cannot be denied that the leaders of women’s emancipation, men as well as women, have, both in the past and today, made some cardinal mistakes. And this is precisely why I wish to make use of this opportunity to participate in the struggles in Nebraska, since I will have the chance—one I have never had before—to represent my ideas, which are the ideas of all rational GermanAmericans. This will also allow me to touch on issues in my own camp, which our American women’s rights activists have misunderstood or not discussed at all. I will campaign against prohibition laws and against deceitful corruption and hypocrisy. (FD 1882d)

Apart from this idealistic goal of introducing new thought to the discussions in the movement, a strategic element is discernible. Her activity on the platform was designed to reach a particular German audience—im eigenen Lager—who opposed the movement for an assumed dependence of the movement’s members on the church and their supposed favoring of prohibition and temperance.

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From Falls City, Nebraska, she wrote a letter to the Freidenker in which she spoke about her observations and experiences among the Germans in this state: “The majority of the Germans here are only interested in their material prosperity.(…) Their lives circle around dollars and cents and not to forget about their beloved beer” (Neymann 1882a). Neymann’s effort was thus targeted at the women of the movement as well as at the opponents of the movement among German-Americans. In explicitly mentioning both aims, Neymann’s attempt demonstrated her interest in negotiating between and bringing together the two oppositional cultural groups. Moreover, the heated discussion that Neymann’s speeches ignited attests to the heterogeneous and conflicting positions and strategies represented by the women’s rights movement. At the convention, which was held from 27 September to 29 September 1882, different ideas and arguments were presented prior to Neymann’s. Matilda Hindman, a NWSA member from Pennsylvania, defended the righteousness of women suff rage in her speech and introduced the idea that women sought the ballot to support a certain cause and to vote unitedly as women (WJ 1882b). A position like Hindman’s—with its essentializing of femininity as universal—would have encouraged male voters to believe that women would seek suff rage to implement prohibition and other detested temperance measures exclusively. Other typical arguments included nativist prejudice. USAmerican women, as Harriet Stanton Blatch vividly explained in her letter read at the convention, were proud patriots who were struck with awe in the sight of their country. Her depiction of immigrants whom she had met on the ship crossing the Atlantic, the “poor and ignorant, [who] could speak no English, not one word of your language and mine,” who “looked so dull and brutal,” was juxtaposed against a revelation of her own patriotism and national pride: And now this ship, baffling the February storm, was sweeping nearer the land where the people reign. My heart beat high as I thought it was in my native country where women were free, more honored than in any nation in the world. As I stood on the deck, the strong sea-wind blowing wildly about me, and the ocean baring on its heart-wave mountains, visions of the grandeur of the nation lying off beyond the western horizon, rose before me. And it was a proud heart that cried—“My Country! … Does there in his heart [i.e., the immigrant’s] rise the prayer, Oh, God! make me true to the duties about to be laid upon me; make me worthy of being free? … I felt my enthusiasm for America wavering—love of country dead. My country!—I have no country. … Why should I not be a citizen of this republic?” (Quoted in Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 2, 248)9

The observation that immigrant men were entitled to vote although they might not have been naturalized revealed suff rage to be a privilege rather than

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a citizen’s right. Women’s rights activists took advantage of this shifted meaning of suff rage in so far as they stressed their qualification for such a privilege while at the same time disqualifying immigrants and African-Americans. Immigrants, Stanton Blatch wrote, lacked patriotic respect, the emotional tie to the land, and instead formed a brutal and ignorant mass. What then qualified these foreigners for the privilege of suff rage, suff ragists asked? And they found their answer in the Fourteenth Amendment, which introduced male gender as a feature of citizenship in 1868, completely neglecting female immigrants. Neymann’s speech, and a dispute in the aftermath of the campaign, responded to these thoughts and arguments in revealing a different position. Neymann’s ethnicity as a German-American woman enabled her to take up such a different position, as she had to adhere to both the movement and her ethnic community, which—as illustrated in the previous case study about Anneke—required solidarity among other “women of two countries.” Moreover, she could not repeat the nativist and racist rhetoric that dominated the movement’s leaders’ speeches, but instead had to replace it with some other sound discourse: republican ideals and the equality of human rights. Neymann’s speech on “Republicanism and Monarchism” was part of the final session of the convention. The WJ (1882a) published this speech and the German-language paper Omaha Post und Telegraph reported it. The juxtaposition of both sources leads to contradicting results: while the WJ cited Neymann’s speech and the arguments for political empowerment of women, the German-language paper highlighted Neymann’s attack on the temperance movement and did not represent any of her other arguments. Why this discrepancy? Why did the WJ not mention this part of Neymann’s speech, which according to the Omaha Post und Telegraph evoked opposition from Anthony and other speakers? The WJ would have been free not to publish Neymann’s speech, had the editors considered it unworthy or false. Indeed, the paper did not just publish any speech from the convention; and yet the reasons for the selection of this particular one remain unknown, as do the reasons for the way it was edited. Of all the speeches at the convention, Neymann’s was given the most space and hailed as a “fine speech,” all of which were signs of honor and respect for the German-American woman’s work. The only sound explanation for leaving out the part in which Neymann had attacked temperance and prohibition seems to be that the WJ censored the speech so as to be able to publish it without further aggravating an ongoing discussion between women’s suff rage and temperance workers. I will give an account and analysis of this discussion later in this chapter. The Omaha Post und Telegraph vividly described the response to Neymann’s speech as follows:

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Mrs. Susan Anthony’s face fell, and continued to do so, and, as if paralyzed, her emaciated hands, which on all other occasions had always led the audience in applause, rested idly in her lap. Meanwhile, her fellow sufferers looked appalled and exchanged whispered comments with each other, which would have been hardly flattering for Frau Neymann. Apparently, it had never happened to them that a women’s rights supporter openly advocated personal freedom and hit the principles of the association right in the face. (Quoted in FD 1882a)10

By contrast, the WJ did not take notice of this aff ront to the women’s platform among NWSA members. Instead, they reported Neymann’s opinion that women should apply their devotion and virtues not merely to family and home but more broadly to society at large, as “faithfulness and devotion are not merely amiable virtues beautiful to behold, they constitute the stability and continuity of social existence. Without devotion there would be no selfforgetfulness and without permanency there could be no trust, no reliability and no order” (WJ 1882a, 330).11 The danger was that if women indeed applied these virtues to public issues, even if they remained reasonable about it, they would become intolerable in society and would be punished for it with “loneliness, slander and malignity.” Neymann argued that the borders of gendered spheres be brought down and for people to aspire to gender equality. We can consider this argument primarily as an empowerment of the female women’s rights reformers, who indeed were ridiculed and disregarded for stepping outside of their prescribed female sphere in doing their reform work. This strong argument and opinion was indeed worthy of being represented in the WJ. In the course of her speech (that is, in the WJ version), Neymann compared the United States to Europe. She distinguished the different structures of government, one being a republic, the other representing traditional monarchies. Neymann argued that the republic and the United States in particular was in need of women’s political emancipation, because it was founded on the ideal of equality and self-government. Monarchies, on the contrary, rested on the ideal of obedience, which in her eyes was also characteristic for gender relations in Europe. This observation resulted in Neymann’s statement that “[t]he American woman has a higher mission to fulfil than our European sisters. Where men are unfree women are subordinates. The American and German woman must set the noble example, and show the world what a nation of free men and free women can accomplish.” It appears to me that this final demand of an alliance between US-American and German-American women served a mediating purpose, which was also appreciated in the women’s rights movement. This final appeal gained its significance as a signal for unity not just among women but among all, irrespective of national heritage, who cherished

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republican and humanistic principles of equality. As Neymann saw it, women in the United States should set an example of freedom and of effective strategies in the struggle for women’s rights for European women to follow, and thereby actively create a transatlantic space for women’s rights. Neymann further reminded Germans in the audience of their experience under the rule of an authoritarian government in their native country and the reasons for having moved to the United States. They had come here to find freedom in many ways and therefore had a responsibility to support the upholding of freedom at all times. Neymann, as a “woman of two countries,” presented a political ideal as a possible “third space” through which the opposing women’s rights movement and the ethnic community of German-Americans could pass in order to achieve the higher goal of gender equality and not dwell in ethnic stereotypes and prejudices. Neymann appealed to the women’s rights movement and the ethnic community to pass through this “third space.” Whereas other speakers on the convention platform in Omaha offered nativist prejudice to expose the conception of suff rage as a gender privilege, Neymann offered a nonexclusionary alternative political argument. She directly attempted to calm down the ethnic population, which most likely, as other examples demonstrated, felt deeply insulted by the US-American women’s nativist comments. Not for long, however, did Neymann’s antitemperance opinion remain unheard. During the campaign that followed NWSA’s convention, Neymann repeatedly spoke in front of German-American and US-American audiences in Nebraska and argued against an alliance between women’s suff rage and temperance, which other suff ragists in the campaign promoted and suggested in their public statements. Neymann wrote to the FD: “Tomorrow morning I will speak to the local Unitarians in English and on Tuesday night to the local Turner in German. My anti-prohibition perspectives resonate with Americans as well as Germans” (FD 1882b). A comment in the Omaha Post und Telegraph illustrated the presumed difficulty of Neymann’s task and also the GermanAmerican perception of the women’s rights movement as fanatic temperance ally in Nebraska. Frau Neymann may be a very liberal minded lady und may advocate a very different perspective in the women’s question, but even the “Freidenker” would not, of course, believe that she would be able to rid her American colleagues of their obsession with temperance. … It is easier to heft the earth from his axis than to cleanse Americans of their fanaticism and their prejudices. (Quoted in FD 1882f )

Anna L. Weinhagen, a German-American woman, concluded from this same observation that it would be “suicidal” for the significant minority of Germans

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in Nebraska to support the women’s rights movement and its demand for suff rage.12 In her article titled “A Lesson of Nebraska” published in the WJ, Neymann directly stated her opinion about temperance and its crucial role for the cause of women suff rage. She first considered the general reasons for the defeat of the amendment in Nebraska. Only 30 percent had voted for the amendment; 57 percent had voted against it, and 13 percent remained undecided (Cutler 1883). What had gone wrong, despite reformers having canvassed the state to mobilize the enfranchised masses? In Neymann’s view, the open sympathy some suff ragists had shown with temperance issues and prohibition was the core problem and was responsible for the campaign’s defeat: I hold that the prohibitionists did us more harm than good. … The foreigner was asked to vote for the amendment, but on the other hand he was told that women desire the suff rage to introduce prohibition. What an anomaly! To ask a man to vote against his own interest and conviction. Most foreigners hate prohibition and hate those who demand it. . . . Moderate drinking is a social custom among Europeans; if there is excess of it here we must find means and ways to cure the evil, but never will the enlightened portion of this nation sustain prohibitory measures. I encountered serious difficulties in some places where I attempted to speak in German, as the people had been told by the German press that woman suff rage meant prohibition. I told them that it was not so, but could not convince them as other speakers had openly identified themselves and expressed their sympathy with prohibition. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that the foreign element voted solidly against us. (Neymann 1882b)

As Neymann pointed out, prohibition would restrict the German-American population’s custom of “moderate drinking” and thus impinge on their social practices as a cultural community. Mingling prohibition with the issue of a women suff rage amendment in Nebraska had resulted in German-American voters’ rejection of the amendment and ultimately added to the defeat. In essence, the German-American woman’s evaluation of the campaign and its results was not intentionally an antiprohibitionist stance, but a critique of the movement’s communicative strategies, their insensitivity toward different audiences, the fact that the movement did not stick to advocating a single cause. A Mrs. A. F. Sibley of Lincoln, Nebraska, wrote the first reaction to Neymann’s “The Lesson of Nebraska” in the WJ and remarked: “[K]nowing the circumstances connected with our defeat much better than a non-resident possibly can, and also having a wide acquaintance with prohibition workers, I declare the assertion to be entirely a mistake” (Sibley 1883, 22). Sibley voiced

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her opposition to Neymann by discounting her authority and position as a speaker: Neymann had no authority to articulate this criticism due to her regional heritage and lack of knowledge Sibley attached to it. Although this out-of-state heritage was not specified as a non-American heritage, it raises the allusion to Neymann’s ethnicity as German-American woman, which cannot be overlooked. Neymann had positioned herself in her critique firmly as a German-American woman and a person with insider knowledge about German-American voters. Sibley’s response turned the controversy into a fight over whose identity was more powerful: that of the Nebraskan-American or that of the German-American. In the course of her argument, Sibley stated that prohibition interests already had a strong lobby in Nebraska and that women’s ballots would not have been necessary in realizing them. Prohibitionists, on the other hand, had always supported women’s suff rage because they were convinced of it. She argued that those suff rage speakers—Neymann in particular—who declared themselves opponents of prohibition were responsible for the loss of many votes from within the prohibitionists’ camp. If they had not brought up this issue, many more prohibitionists would have voted for the women’s suff rage amendment. Moreover, Sibley claimed that Neymann’s intervention had not gained any additional votes from antiprohibitionists, whom she had hoped to reach, but instead had weakened the campaign in general. Neymann’s opinion that “most foreigners hate prohibition and hate those who demand it,” and that “moderate drinking is a social custom among the Europeans,” was rejected by Sibley, who replied: “The real reason is that the German in his European home has always been accustomed to see woman in a menial position, often labouring in his field, while he sits in lordly indolence smoking, or drinking beer. After looking for ages upon woman as an inferior, and almost a beast of burden, it is difficult for him to accept her as a political equal” (Sibley 1883, 23). Neymann’s strong ethnic identification and the implication of a politically powerful German-American community were now turned against her. Sibley did not respond to the European tradition of enlightened thought and to a humanistic tradition Neymann had articulated in her speech during NWSA’s Omaha convention, but instead responded to the stereotypical image of the German-American community and an alleged antirepublican sentiment with regard to gender relations and women’s rights. Sibley suggested that one could either express solidarity with an ethnic community or with the reform movement. Solidarity with both was possible only from the basis of a shared “American” ethnicity. Another perspective in this discussion and a defense of Neymann’s opinion that “the prohibitionists did us more harm than good” was voiced by Matilda Hindman of Pennsylvania and published in the WJ as well. In her article she

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claimed that Sibley was wrong in reasoning that because of the “sympathy of some suff ragists with the liquor element” all prohibitionists refused to vote for the women’s suff rage amendment. In Hindman’s eyes defeat was a result of the combination of the antiprohibitionists’ and the prohibitionists’ refusal to vote for the amendment. She argued clearly that the outcome of the election was no longer representative of public sentiment on women suff rage because it had been overshadowed by the issue of prohibition. Prohibition had become the sole marker of whether one would vote for or against the amendment. Moreover, Hindman stressed that the influence of one campaign speaker out of fifty was highly overestimated by Sibley. She wrote: This one speaker made a speech one evening which was reported the next day, and so unfavourable was it to prohibition that individual prohibitionists and temperance organizations saw that “it was a bid for the whiskey vote,” and though some eight hundred speeches were made by the suff ragists during the campaign, this is the only one quoted to show that prohibition was not believed in by the speakers for the amendment. (Hindman 1883)

Hindman did not take a stand regarding the political power of the GermanAmerican voters in this situation. Instead, she affirmed the claim of distinguishing separate issues and of retaining a single-issue political campaign. The main problem in her eyes derived from the confusion of these two issues as two technically different issues: the issue of women’s suff rage was an issue on the level of citizens’ rights granted by the Constitution, whereas the issue of prohibition was an issue on the level of policies enacted by law. Hindman’s argument supported Neymann in reminding the women’s rights movement of political strategies it should adhere to. Hindman’s intervention served as a negotiation between Neymann and Sibley by diplomatically downplaying the ethnic conflict and by unraveling that conflict as a general policy problem. Hindman’s argument demonstrated that Neymann’s critique was justified and that it reflected not only the German-American critique of the US-American women’s rights movement, but a critique and problems others could observe as well. It was a critique aimed at movement policies instead of at US-American policies or German-American stereotypical perceptions. Also Laura Holtschneider of Kansas supported Hindman’s and Neymann’s view in her article “One at a Time” in the WJ of 24 February 1883, when she claimed that “to connect any other reform with woman suff rage is defeat for the suff ragists.” The example of Neymann’s participation in the Nebraska campaign of 1882 illustrates how immigrant women were affected by the nativism of the women’s rights movement and how they reacted to this nativism. In this example,

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Neymann’s hybridity and its potential to negotiate between such opposing elements becomes visible. In the shadow of nativist and essentialist arguments for the women’s suff rage amendment as privilege, Neymann represents a politico-philosophical assertion of women suff rage as a fundamental feature of a republic, which is based on universalist ideals of equality and self-government. Neither the general public nor the community of women’s rights activists understood her opposition to the mingling of women suff rage with prohibition and her reclaiming of the strategic principle of the single-cause reform as a feature of her politico-philosophical position. Rather, her opposition was perceived as an insult to and attack on those colleagues in the movement who sympathized with temperance as well. In this controversy, Neymann’s ethnic difference suddenly became paramount. Neymann utilized this difference to point out the effect of the “false” strategy in Nebraska by using the example of the German-American community, with whom the speaker had communicated intensively during the campaign and to whom she was supposedly closer than the other speakers, given, for instance, her ability to speak their native language. Women like Sibley concluded that the ethnic difference resulted in a lack of authority to judge and criticize. Ethnicity then served as a cipher to illustrate power relations among women in the women’s rights movement. Writers like Sibley worked to reinstate the supremacy of an US-American ethnicity at the cost of devaluing other hyphenated American ethnicities. On the level of political power, an article in the WJ suggested this relationship between German-American and US-American voters. According to the author—whose telling pseudonym of “Candor” alluded to “whiteness,” honesty, and justice—the GermanAmerican voice as a minority voice was irrelevant because it would always be outnumbered by the US-American voice. Candor stated: “Yet it is clear to me that the women of the West are, by all odds, strong for a prohibitory law. In this they may not be wise, but so it is. Who so attempts to win the German by assuring him that woman as a voter would not discourage his beer, will probably discover that the German is not won, and that the American is lost” (Candor 1883, 23). The stereotype of the German as traditionalist and opponent of reform prevailed.

Neymann’s Ethnicization at NWSA Washington Conventions Having stood so prominently at the center of the movement’s discussions in Nebraska, Neymann remained at this center during the 1880s. She participated in NWSA Washington conventions, which were a particular type among the assemblies then. These Washington conventions stood out among the various

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mass women’s rights conventions that frequently took place in various states and major cities. Between 1869 and 1890 the conventions held in the capital of the United States were annual events that could be distinguished from the celebratory conventions that NWSA also held every year in May. These May conventions in different cities of the United States were part of the May Anniversary Weeks, during which various liberal reform groups met to celebrate achievements, to discuss reform issues, and to plan and organize future actions.13 Washington conventions instead aimed directly at congressional action and a constitutional amendment to provide for women’s enfranchisement. Therefore, these conventions had to be held during winter time when Congress and the Supreme Court were in session. HWS further explained this choice of place and time of year as follows: Being the season for official receptions, where one meets foreign diplomats from every civilized nation, it is the time chosen by strangers to visit our beautiful capital. Washington is the modern Rome to which all roads lead, the bright cynosure of all eyes, and is alike the hope and fear of worn-out politicians and aspiring pilgrims. From this great center varied influences radiate to the vast circumference of our land. Supreme-court decisions, congressional debates, presidential messages and popular opinions on all questions of fashion, etiquette and reform are heralded far and near, awakening new thought in every State in our nation and, through their representatives, in the aristocracies of the old world. (Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 3, 150)

Washington was the central place of politics, the place that attracted most public attention and accordingly was the best place for the women’s rights movement to reach influential politicians and the general public. According to the records regarding Neymann’s participation in the women’s rights movement, the German-American reformer only spoke during Washington conventions. No records revealed participation in the May conventions.14 This might have been by chance. Yet, presuming intentionality behind the fact that Neymann spoke at Washington but not at the May conventions, I wish to propose that this is in fact significant with regard to Neymann’s position in the movement. Neymann, as we have seen so far, was convinced of the righteousness of the democratic ideal of equality and of equal human rights. She was also convinced of the righteousness of the ideals of the republican state. Because these were the motivating forces behind her reform efforts, her participation in Washington conventions and in congressional hearings to press for constitutional reforms are a direct expression of her political ideals. The political cause mattered to her most, and, apparently, the social aspects of the movement’s

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community, celebrated in May, mattered less. Moreover, the fact that Neymann repeatedly served as a speaker in Washington reinforces the prominence and status she had achieved in NWSA. Her speech in 1886 was marked as “one of the most intellectual and inspiring ever delivered on a woman-suff rage platform” and earned her the praise of Anthony, who compared her oratorical skills to those of Rose, who had been considered the “queen of the platform” during the 1850s (Neymann 1886a). In the following I will analyze two of Neymann’s Washington convention speeches because they are fine examples of Neymann’s intellectual strength and position in the movement’s core political community. The convention on 23–24 January 1883 was an opportunity for NWSA to further discuss the events and results of the Nebraska campaign. One of the resolutions, introduced by Lillie Devereux Blake of New York, stated: Whereas, The recent defeat in Nebraska of a constitutional amendment, giving the women of the State the right to vote, proves that failure is the natural result of an appeal to the masses on a question which is best understood and approved by the more intelligent citizens; therefore, Resolved, That we call upon this congress to pass, without delay, the sixteenth amendment to the federal constitution now pending in the Senate. (Quoted in Stanton, Gage, and Anthony 1889, vol. 3, 256, my emphasis)

This statement suggested that a reform cause such as the women’s rights reform could be successful only if Congress altered the Constitution. The “masses” were regarded as incapable of understanding the necessity of the political cause. Therefore, the women’s rights movement at Washington in January 1883 directed its efforts at the “more intelligent” citizens who were considered more competent in the art of informed political decision making. The resolution’s powerful judgment revealed the organized movement’s view of US-American society and how it viewed itself in relation to this society: the “masses” were regarded as inferior to the political elite of which the women’s rights activists were a part. Political rights—including women’s suff rage—were no longer understood as natural rights held by each citizen, but were considered privileges of an elite establishment that was better educated, socioeconomically well situated, and (paradoxically) representatives of a supposed egalitarian and just political system serving the well-being of the “masses.” Often, such elitist arguments were intertwined with nativist elements and a nationalist, Americanist bias. Neymann’s speech on “Republican Principles” was in line with Blake’s resolution because it was based on the distinction between the “ordinary mind” and the “specially gifted,” thus confirming the structural dichotomy between superior and inferior people. What was the function of this

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dichotomy in Neymann’s speech? How did she develop an argument based on this structure? In the first part of her speech, Neymann presented her opinion on the general successive structure of progressive reform: “Every great innovation has had to fight its way, before it was accepted by the masses. When a new idea appears it is met first by ridicule, then follow slander, antagonism, a well-meant opposition, and at last conviction” (Neymann 1883).15 Innovation and reform always destroyed an existing order and, therefore, individuals regarded them as threats. Hence, they upheld traditions instead, to safeguard “the natural order of the universe.” The structural division Neymann drew was that between the innovator and the people. Her choice of attributes was significant: “Great Innovations arise first in the minds of those who are specially gifted, and who possess the necessary courage to advocate them. … [They] originated in the minds of superiorly endowed individuals.” Accordingly, Neymann confirmed the dichotomy that had been invoked in Lilly Blake’s resolution. Yet, as subsequent parts of her speech demonstrate, she did not conclude that reforms had to be enforced from above in order to be successful. On the contrary, Neymann demanded continuous agitation as a device to attract people to the reform cause and guide them to greater self-awareness. “We shall capture the fortresses of prejudice and injustice by the force of our arguments; we will see shell after shell into these strong-holds until their defective reasoning gives way to victorious truth.” The question of whether to favor a reform from above and advocate the “national method” of women’s suff rage reform or to encourage the method of gaining support state by state was no longer at stake in Neymann’s speech. The issue had yielded to questions of the nature of the human being and of humans’ abilities to reason. Neymann’s argument reflected her belief in the rational capabilities of human beings and their ability to learn and change, which she had expressed early in her career. Although the speech bore rhetorical resemblances to the language of classification and hierarchization used in the resolution, it firmly rested on this view of enlightened humanity, which also determined her political position. Moreover, this view further resonated in the final part of her speech, in which she stressed the relevance and necessity of adhering to the principle of “universal suff rage” that had been relegated to the background of the movement. A reporter paraphrased what Neymann said: “The answer she made to those who believed in restricted suff rage was that a new evil would arise in the shape of classes or cliques of advocated, each of a separate restriction, and in this way Distinction of Class would form, entirely contrary to the principles of our Government” (Waite 1883). Again, Neymann represented the universal approach to women’s rights as human rights and disclosed her humanistic view as opposed to the hierarchiz-

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ing opinions that essentially resonated in the resolutions that other speeches and letters addressed to the convention. According to Neymann, the function of the established dichotomy of the “ordinary” and the “specially gifted” mind was manifest in the present social order, but it could be superseded by the effort of continuous agitation. Her speech introduced a strategic and philosophical thought that differed from that of the other speakers at the convention. Although I have not been able to locate direct responses to her speech, the selection of her speech as presented in HWS is telling. The chapter about this Washington convention originated in a report written by Jessie Waite of Chicago, from which I quoted Neymann’s speech. However, only a part of Neymann’s speech was reprinted, namely, the part in which the speaker pointed out the pacifist means of the women’s rights movement and the correlation between militarism and women’s subjection in society. She illustrated this with an example of Germany’s backwardness with regard to women’s freedom and equality. Neymann’s elaboration on “universal suff rage” as a republican principle, however, was not included in the selection. This is another instance of an exclusionary bias on the part of the editors of HWS, which I have mentioned previously in this study. Considering that the universal discourse of women’s rights as human rights successively vanished and was replaced by exclusionary discourses utilizing nativism, racism, and class consciousness to establish citizens’ rights as the privileges of an US-American elite, Neymann’s appearance and the subsequent representations of her appearance take on great importance. Her discourse on universal women’s rights was no longer “en vogue” and even counterstrategic to the dominant official strategy of NWSA, which was to force Congress to pass a sixteenth amendment and pull back from agitating at the level of the common people. The failure of the Nebraska campaign might be understood as the catalytic event in this dynamic, because it was taken as evidence of the cluelessness of the masses. This shift in procedure and this dismissal of the people as voters—and therefore as sources of political power—was of vital importance. Neymann represented a balancing force in this game. One may wonder why HWS printed her speech at all. Reporter Jessie Waite, who heaped praise on Neymann, provides a few reasons: Madame Clara Neyman, of New York City, was introduced and delivered, without question, one of the best addresses of the convention. Madame Neyman is a German lady, who has allied herself with the American suff ragists with great earnestness and enthusiasm. She spoke with a slightly German accent, which only served to enhance the interest of her address and to hold the attention of the audience. Her eloquence and argument could not fail to convince all of her earnest purpose. (Waite 1883)

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After citing her speech, Waite reported: “Madame Neyman’s address was received with great applause.” We learn that Neymann was popular, that she was an excellent speaker, and that her arguments were clear and convincing. Even the leaders of the women’s rights movement and the compilers of HWS (Stanton, Anthony, and Gage) could not easily neglect Neymann’s reputation and fame. Other reports about her appearances and speeches in the German-language press also prove her integration and good standing in the women’s rights movement and as a public representative of the movement. “To show to the American the best side of the German character and to the German the best side of the American character is Frau Neymann’s task. Hats off, gentlemen, to such a woman,” a writer named D. Fausel observed in the FD about Neymann’s lectures in the Boston area in May 1883 (Fausel, 1883b). The article evoked Neymann’s interstitial position and considered it as a source of her empowerment. Because she could easily shift between German-Americans and US-Americans, Neymann became a messenger between the two and represented—in the German-American opinion that I quoted—the best of either pole. Indeed, Neymann had the ability to be integrated into either one of these different ethnic and political communities. Neymann’s hybridity enabled her to achieve powerful positions in strategically twisting, selecting, and highlighting divergent cultural and political elements. See the following example, in which ethnic markers are used in the description of Neymann’s outer appearance: Madame Neyman is of German birth, in whose voice just enough of the Teutonic accent lingers to give piquancy to her thoughtful essay. Her light hair was frizzed up in front and gathered at the back of her head in a Grecian knot. A dress of black velvet, unrelieved save by a crimson rose upon her bosom and white lace at throat and neck, fitted neatly to a graceful form whose German fullness of outline, no less than the accent, suggested the Rhine and the Weser. (National Republican, 25 January 1883, quoted in ECS-SBA-Papers)

Neymann embodied German-ness: her “outline” resembled the rivers Rhine and Weser that in turn were metaphors for the Germanic people and their “nation.” Neymann’s language, moreover, bore a “Teutonic” accent. Germanness described a precivilized, considerably barbarous and belligerent people, although the tone in this representation of Neymann was generous and benevolent, in no way insulting. The allusions to Germanic traditions and the corresponding stereotype of the barbarous and uncivilized German, however, functioned as a transparent patina that colored her presence. Ethnicity seemed to be inscribed on Neymann’s body and seemed to be inescapably present.

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Due to such inescapability of ethnic ascriptions, Neymann’s hybrid position was limited in its effectiveness and did not necessarily result in the creation of a “third space” (Bhabha 1994). Neymann’s interstitial position as an ethnic women’s rights reformer emerged as a collage of ethnic and political elements. She was able to shift between those elements constituting her hybrid position, and thus was able to gain a powerful speaking position. At the same time, her position only emerged as one in relation to others. In ascribing an ethnic identity to her, descriptions such as the one in the National Republican also set her apart from the dominant position, which gained its power from its invisibility as an ethnic, racialized, political, and class standard. Due to its status as the “normal,” this standard needed not to be named, justified, or questioned. Only the inferiorized position needed explanation as the “other.” Such figures of thought can be found in recent studies about race and ethnicity, which understand processes of racializing and ethnicization as mechanisms that in turn confirm the speakers’ dominant position, a position of “white supremacy.” The “critical whiteness” approach seeks to demonstrate that “whiteness” in colonial settings emerged as a category of power only in relation to other non“white” and presumably inferior categories. US-American sociologist Ruth Frankenberg, in her 1993 book The Social Construction of Whiteness, focused on “whiteness” not as a culture, but rather as practice, not as an entity, but as a process. The interviews she conducted revealed that “whiteness” for the white women she had interviewed often was invisible, and that racial others represented rich cultures. This invisibility of “whiteness” reflected its hegemony as the “normal.” African-American feminists and activists bell hooks (1981) and Angela Davis (1981) criticized the feminist movement for universalizing the white, middle-class woman’s experience and for claiming it as the standard female experience. bell hooks and Davis strongly opposed the “whiteness” of the movement and demanded the inclusion of black, working-class, and other women into the movement’s personnel and agenda. What appears commonly accepted to us as feminists and readers of such demands was still contested and unknown in 1883 when Neymann appeared at a Washington convention. The whiteness of the movement was mostly unquestioned and set the standard for claiming a universal female experience. It is certainly true that AfricanAmerican women—such as Sojourner Truth in 1852—were already demanding their share in the movement. However, they never advanced to the front row of the movement; the white leaders’ racism and nativism demonstrated that “white supremacy” was volitional and maintained. In paralleling racism and nativism I do not argue that African-American women and European immigrant women experienced the same exclusion

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from the women’s rights movement or from society in general. Yet, as examples throughout my study demonstrate, both groups were attacked with a similar rhetoric, that is, the rhetoric of classification and scaling according to bodily appearances and cultural habits: skin tone, bodily proportions and shape, facial expressions, language and accent, all determined position within a social order. All women were scaled and measured against men, but as women they were also scaled and measured against the ideal of the white US-American woman. That this “whiteness” was not merely a description of a particular skin tone becomes obvious in the ethnicization of immigrant women who— considered different—did not succeed in fulfilling the standard ideal of the white US-American woman. Their ethnic markers were language and accent, but also stature, which “suggested the Rhine and the Weser,” for instance. Slavery, violence, and lynching, of course, do constitute a major dissimilarity between African-American and European immigrant women. I am not suggesting that we should relativize violence, nor that the women’s experiences were the same, but rather that the rhetoric that they met in the women’s rights movement was similar. The effect was therefore a deviation from the universal ideal of the white US-American woman for both groups—however differently this deviation was expressed. A second example taken from Neymann’s speeches shall now highlight additional and ambivalent aspects of the interstitial position’s abilities and functions. In February 1886 Neymann participated in NWSA’s Washington convention with a speech entitled “German and American Independence Contrasted.” She took her departure from a description of German women, but quickly turned to analyzing the condition of US-American women and ended her speech by identifying with the United States and their women: The examples of Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, Lucy Stone, Mrs. Howe and others have created broader in their sympathies, grander in their aspirations, nobler in their deeds than the most heroic women of antiquity. That such women have to come before the public, before the Legislatures, and pray for such rights as are freely given to every uninstructed and unenlightened foreigner, is a burning shame and reflects badly upon the intelligence, the righteousness of our Legislatures and our people. (Neymann 1886a)

Note in this final statement the “nativist” argument for women’s suff rage: US-American women should vote and govern themselves instead of being governed by “uninstructed and unenlightened foreigner[s].” How are we to understand this argument from the mouth of the immigrant Neymann? This adoption of a nativist argument reveals an inherent ambivalence of immigrant

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women’s position and illustrates that ethnicization as a mode of identification depended on contexts and power relations. Ethnic positions such as “German,” “American,” or “German-American” were ultimately instable. Furthermore, here Neymann must also be seen in the shadow of her class consciousness. After all, she was a member of an elite class of women representing humanistic ideals of education and politics and who considered themselves bearers of these ideals. Government should ideally represent the best educated—because this was understood as a precondition for a good and selfless politics—instead of the least educated and simplest of all. Those, generally, were subsumed in the category of “ignorant foreigners.” At this stage, Neymann integrated this imagery into her argument at a national convention in the capital of the United States. This context differs in many respects from the context of, for instance, the suff rage campaign in Nebraska in 1882, where national politics did not determine the scene but rather ethnic pride, cultural stereotypes, and individual fears. Different contexts, therefore, required different positions: Washington was more suited to an intellectual position, whereas Nebraska required an emotional, compassionate position from which one could reach out to the people.16 Moreover, the situation in Nebraksa necessitated that Neymann negotiate between ethnic positions. This was not her task in Washington, where she could speak from the position of a prominent member of NWSA, who had already represented US-American reform ideas and strategies in Germany and thereby added to her “Americanization,” as I will demonstrate below. In Washington, Neymann was part of the House Judiciary Committee Hearing, which took place on 20 February 1886.17 She was the last person scheduled to speak, and “[t]he committee w[as] so interested in the address of Madame Neymann that the time of the hearing was extended in order that she might finish it” (Anthony and Harper 1902, 81). Her short address was less “scholarly” and instead pointedly directed at the foundation and essence of the US-American identity: freedom. Why Americans, so keen in their sense of what is right and just, should be so dull on this question of giving woman her due share of independence, I can not comprehend. Is not this the land where foreigners flock because they have heard the bugle call of freedom? Why then is it that your own children, the patriotic daughters of America, who have been reared and nurtured in free homes, brought up under the guidance and amidst the blessings of freedom—why is it that you hold them unworthy of the honor of being enrolled as citizens and voters? England, Canada and even Ireland have gone ahead of us, and was not America destined by its tradition to be first and foremost in this important movement

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of making women the equal, the true partner of man? … The citizen’s liberty instead of being sacrificed by society has to be defended by society. Who defends woman’s individuality in our modern State? Universal suff rage is the only guarantee against despotism. Every man who believes in the subjection of woman will play the despot whenever you give him an opportunity. We have no right to ask if it is expedient to grant suff rage to women. We recognize that the principle is just and justice must be done though the heavens fall. (Quoted in Anthony and Harper 1902, 82)

With these words Neymann regained a critical outsider’s position as an immigrant woman. She distanced herself from “Americans” in speaking about “them.” However, in the same argument she again shifted to the collective “us” in differentiating between the United States and Europe. This part of her address reveals the interrelatedness of her gender and ethnic positions: when criticizing “Americans” Neymann criticized US-American men as those who were politically in power, thus speaking from a gendered position. At the same time, when she criticized “Americans” for being unfaithful to their republican principles and the premise of freedom upon which they had founded their nation and which attracted immigrants to the United States, she spoke from a predominantly ethnicized position. Neymann’s role in the Washington convention of 1886 was blurry with regard to an ethnic identification as “German” or “American.” It was clear, however, regarding her reform political statement: women’s rights were human rights and therefore had to be identical to others’ rights, namely, men’s rights. As an egalitarian principle the vote became the backbone of the democratic republic and a guarantee for the freedom of the individual. This discourse, which was often overshadowed by excluding discourses seeking to maintain white, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, was strongly and passionately represented by Neymann at the convention. The fact that her speech during the Judiciary Committee hearing was the final one and was requested to be heard despite the late hour is a signal for the significance and importance of Neymann’s position. However, the irritation of Neymann’s repetition of a nativist argument for the enfranchisement of women at the end of her first speech remains. It reflected Neymann’s continuing process of ethnicization that intersected with her identification as an educated woman of New York’s middle class. It was not only her German-ness—as US-American descriptions of her often made believe—that determined her position, but also a multitude of other identifications. Highlighting her class identification with a notion of condescension against foreigners—such as herself—allied her to US-American leaders of the movement and most likely aided her acceptance. This same class conscious-

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ness, as shown before, also served as the strong bond between Anneke and the women’s rights movement. During the Washington convention of 1886 prepared speeches were heard, and collective positions in the form of resolutions were discussed. Neymann took part in these latter discussions during the executive committee sessions (Woman’s Tribune 1886a), yet appeared to have been hesitant in introducing ideas or innovative proposals herself. In discussions about resolutions Neymann agreed with the statements of other people, instead of expressing her own, original opinion. The resolutions at stake dealt with the association’s relationship to religion and the churches as well as the policy of demanding a national suff rage amendment instead of individual state amendments. Neymann’s hesitation and passivity can be explained by her position as an ethnic woman in the movement. This position was also an outsider position with regard to citizenship. It is clear that Neymann had acquired US-American citizenship already by 1870; thus, she was legally as qualified to vote as any other woman in the women’s rights movement.18 But despite this legal equality Neymann was not a “native-born American” citizen. The nationalistic bias of women’s rights reformers resonated in the 1886 Washington convention, not only temporarily—however awkwardly—in Neymann’s speech, but also in other women’s speeches, resolutions, and discussions. In her “impressive address”—as the authors of HWS rated it in their introduction of the speech—Mary Eastman of Massachusetts said: “Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as the ‘we, the people’ should mean women as well as men?” (Anthony and Harper 1902, 72) In addition to this difference, Neymann was continually introduced as the “German,” despite her US-American nationality. The Woman’s Tribune wrote about Neymann on this occasion: “[Her address] was written with care and delivered with the impressive force and passion that characterized the addresses of our German friend, and the peculiar charm of which is heightened by the foreign accent. This occasion is the first appearance of Madame Neyman on the National platform since the death of her husband and her subsequent sojourn in Germany” (1886b). The combination of her ethnicization as German and the nativism that underlay the women suff rage arguments furthered Neymann’s hesitant position in the movement’s discussions about matters that strictly pertained to the rights of citizens. Although she was a citizen, Neymann lacked the birthright on which her native-born American colleagues based their claims to political power. Citizens’ rights, accordingly, were not solely based on legal status

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but were based on an idea of natural kinship. What did the continuous ethnicization as the “German” mean for Neymann’s role in the women’s rights movement? Neymann’s standpoint derived from her hybrid position as immigrant woman and as an ethnic outsider in the movement. Her inclusive universal argument for human rights and for universal suff rage was a necessity because another, more exclusive position was not available to her. However, it was her deliberate choice to counter the elitism and Americanist nativism in the movement. The process of ethnicization also was a relevant—yet ambivalent—source of her power in the women’s rights movement. During her career she was ascribed an ethnicized position that consequently required a particular speaking position, that is, that of the transethnic inclusive universal standpoint. At other times, the ascriptions were also inscriptions and as such essentialized and inescapable for Neymann. From her speech at the Washington convention of 1886 we learn that Neymann was able to shift between ethnic positions. She repeated the exclusionary nativist argument in applying the offensive phrase “ignorant foreigners” to her argument for the quasi-nobility of US-American women. This demonstrated that her idealism was not impartial and that she was indeed also interested in a certain status within the movement and represented a certain class position as well. Despite the fact that ethnicization was not a deliberately chosen process for the individual, but instead a forceful and inescapable process of ascribing and inscribing characteristics to a person, Neymann’s example also demonstrated the ambiguities of ethnicization: ethnic positions evolved as a system of power relations and thus were endowed with different opportunities to live and realize these powers. The individual situated between steady and inescapable ethnic positions, like Neymann, was able to shift between those positions by identifying with either of them or refusing to confirm them. Denying the coerciveness of ethnicity, Neymann’s role in the women’s rights movement’s conventions still remained that of the outsider who critically observed the movement’s strategies, while simultaneously taking up a strategic position as the “German” or the “American” bonding with the mainstream of the movement in identification with a particular socioeconomic class that was in itself ethnicized.

Neymann as Messenger in Germany Although Neymann had left her home country at the age of sixteen already, she always remained a transatlantic messenger of women’s rights and reform.

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Her journeys across the Atlantic Ocean were not only motivated by private, personal interests but also by professional ones as she mentioned in one of her letters from Germany: The life, the ambitions, the culture, of the Germans in America and the Germans at home are so very different that no one can have a true idea and knowledge of Germans and Germany who has not seen them at home. I left my own country when a girl sixteen years old, and I have to come back occasionally to appreciate fully the advantages which Germany possesses. (Neymann 1884d, 378)

She traveled to Germany to gain a “true” idea of the Germans and convey this image to her US-American friends in the women’s rights movement and in the freethought community of German-Americans. She sent reports of her journeys during the 1880s, which lasted from a few months to about one year, to the Boston WJ and the Milwaukee FD. These public letters are among the very few autobiographical documents that I was able to find about Neymann. They are valuable because they contain reflections on personal acquaintances, landscapes, and people, as well as comparisons between the two countries she belonged to and lived in. However, the fact that these documents were intended for publication has to be kept in mind while reading them. They represent self-conceptions and images of experiences deemed appropriate for her audience. After all, these were not private documents but carefully composed essays that informed readers as to what she was doing. The fact that her activities were deemed interesting in the first place illustrates Neymann’s celebrity status in the women’s rights movement and freethinker communities. During her trips to Germany, Neymann visited her family in Karlsruhe and vacationed in the spa towns Badenweiler and Kissingen. The places of her professional activities and studies between 1884 and 1890 were Frankfurt, Kassel, Berlin, Dresden, and Stuttgart.19 She lectured to female audiences on “Characteristics of American Women,” met with German women reformers such as Luise Büchner and Marie Calm,20 and made the acquaintance of members of the German freethinker community in the spring and summer of 1885. One of these acquaintances, Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi, visited the United States to engage in a lecture tour from 1887 to 1889 under the auspices of the German-American Freethinkers’ Association, and it is suggested in the sources I have consulted that Wilhelmi’s and Neymann’s contact in Germany was the reason for this later visit. The travel reports convey Neymann’s perception of Germans and the political system in Germany and of US-Americans and their politics in turn. The perception of the one always reflected Neymann’s image of the other and her

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individual position between these two poles or at one of the assumed poles. Personal interest and the audience of her speaking and writing guided and influenced Neymann’s momentary position. As we will see, in the German context Neymann presented herself as the “American” who represented the US-American women’s rights movement, and was received as the “American” herself, whereas in the national contexts of the US-American women’s rights movement, as I demonstrated, she was continuously ethnicized as the German. The fact that Neymann was able to shift between the positions reflects the possibilities and opportunities connected to a particular subject and speaking position. Moreover, in Neymann’s alternating positioning between and in the antagonistic positions, a force appears that challenged the assumed stability of the “German” and “American” positions. Her refusal to comply with the one or the other position while instead remaining between (or beyond) this binary logic destabilized the entire logic and proved its constructedness and discursiveness. As shown in the previous section, Neymann was able to transcend the ethnic antagonism by representing the concept of universal human rights.21 Thus, we can also understand her interstitial position between the political systems of Germany and the United States. She was a staunch republican and rejected monarchism. Yet, in her eyes, both political systems—republican and monarchical—had valuable elements that were conducive to the principle of guaranteeing human rights. This ambivalent position appeared in her description of the Kur system in Germany as an opportunity for the “restoration of mind and body” financially backed by the state. She reasoned that these “simple health and pleasure resorts” were much needed in the United States as well, where the fast pace of city life wore people out. This led her to inquire: “How long will it be before our republican government will combine the blessings of freedom with the advantages of a systematic, well-regulated, aristocratic government?” (Neymann 1884c, 279). A second example illustrates that the comparative evaluation of the German and US-American political systems served as a vehicle of Neymann’s interstitial position. She believed the scandalous US-American presidential campaign of 1884 pointed out the deficiencies of US-American republicanism.22 Voters lacked the capacity and “moral force” to make good political decisions; instead, they based their decisions on party machines and the personal lives of the candidates. This resulted in their political ignorance. An absolute political leader like Bismarck or a Kaiser, Neymann argued, would not only oppress his people but also in a fatherly fashion be concerned with the people’s well-being. Accordingly, the inability of German voters in Germany to make informed political decisions differed entirely from that of US-Americans, as Germans had never learned to think for themselves. Their

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leaders had always decided for them. But these decisions, she reasoned, were not always worse than the ones being made by clueless and uninformed free voters of the United States (Neymann 1884a, 1). Another difference Neymann discerned between Germans and US-Americans was the Germans’ lack of vitality and energy. Although considering the attractions of beautiful landscapes and the richness of culture in a spa town such as Badenweiler as “soothing,” she also affirmed that “after a while it loses its attractions if there is no vitality, no energy, no life and spontaneity behind it” (Neymann 1884c). In contrast, Neymann longed for “the free air, the independence, the sweet faces, the intelligent bright eyes, of my American friends.” The lack of energy and vitality on the one hand and the spontaneity and brightness on the other hand played into Neymann’s image of Germans as “the intellectual country, par excellence, [where] the application in practical life will soon follow” (Neymann 1884c). The passivity of the Germans influenced Neymann’s image of German women, whom she accused of intellectual passivity and lacking awareness of the injustices which they suffered from as women: “The German women are very active in a certain way. They are, with a few exceptions home-workers, good mothers, and devoted wives; but of the higher dignity and humanity of our sex they do not yet feel or speak. They are not dissatisfied with their dependence; they do not feel their chains; they know not that there is a higher, nobler, purer life to live on earth” (Neymann 1884d, 378). The “certain way” of activity was limited either to the domestic sphere or to support of their husband’s businesses. In the domestic sphere, German women excelled and outplayed US-American women. We see this also in the way Neymann advocated the ideal of the home as a sacred place and as the center of all virtue. “No nation can prosper for any length of time where the sacredness of the home does not come first and foremost” (Neymann 1886b, 338). Despite her critique of German women’s contentment with their public roles and the status quo, Neymann recognized a characteristic devotion to and excellence of their work in their homes and with their families. She valued this work highly, because a prosperous home was the guarantee for a prosperous nation. As businesswomen, German middleclass women demonstrated expertise in another area of activity, the family business. In contrast, independent, unmarried women seldom developed the confidence to work for themselves. Only occasionally would one see a widow working independently, carrying on her deceased husband’s enterprise. “But they would never have undertaken it had it not fallen upon them accidentally,” Neymann concluded. This motif of German middle-class working women is remarkable in the light of other descriptions by German-American women of this group. It cor-

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relates in an awkward way with the image German women had established about US-American women. Marie Zakrzewska, a German-born physician from Boston, reported from her journey in Germany and England to the WJ in 1875 and described the same proactive attitude of women when it came to the family’s business and home and the lack of initiative when it came to intellectual and political challenges. She interviewed a woman in Cologne who ran a wholesale glass business with her daughters. This woman claimed that it was the rule that wives did the work while their husbands spent their time elsewhere. As Zakrzewska explained: Almost all the women are hoping and wishing for relief from this bondage; but none of them are aware that it is within their own power to rise above the condition of slaves, because slaves they are, in spite of their managing the business which brings in the money; for this money is freely appropriated by the man, while the woman feels that she must be satisfied with what may remain. … She [i.e., the German wife] is indignant and tells you, “I don’t want to be like one of those stupid, lazy American women, who don’t know how to purchase a dinner or a cord of wood, but sit all day long in a rocking-chair reading novels, with their unwashed, crying babies around them. No, I don’t want to be ‘emancipated,’ talk ‘blue-stocking’ stuff, and dabble in Latin, and so on.” (Zakrzewska 1875)

The idea that the woman she interviewed expressed regarding US-American women was that of the unpractical and unmotherly female. Women’s reform work and academic education were considered a pastime that prevented women from fulfilling their tasks as mothers, wives, and organizers of a household.23 Such stereotypes of German and US-American women also served the strategic purpose of legitimizing the US-American women’s rights movement. It was the women’s suff rage movement’s duty to secure public sentiment for women’s emancipation in the United States, from where it would then spread to Europe and the rest of the world (Zakrzewska 1875). Examples of women’s cluelessness regarding their subordination showed that there were women out there who needed the assistance of those already sensitized to their situation and willing to rise up against it. Such intellectual distinctions between women were veiled in the idea of “universal sisterhood.” It suggested that women worldwide were bound to each other and shared similar experiences of subordination. In the reciprocal images of German and US-American women the dynamics of sisterhood appeared as the dynamics of age and experience. If one woman takes the role of the older sister, another one is the younger and dependent sibling. Sisters are never equals and are always in a state of vying for their parents’ recognition and love, competing

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for success. These dynamics often go unmentioned, but they are the very dynamics that become part of “sisterhood” beyond the “natural” bond between women who are part of the same family. The metaphor of “sisterhood” that women employed to describe their mutual solidarity was proven inconsistent in the light of ethnic and national differences they established, and in the light of the imbalance of power between women from different national, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Often, depicted differences between women in the United States and Germany were challenged by women like Neymann, who claimed to convey a “true” image to counter the “false” stereotypes and prejudices. In early December 1884, at a meeting of the Frauen Bildungsverein in Frankfurt, Neymann presented a lecture on “Characteristics of American Women.” She intended to set an example of the progress that women in the United States had made and that could inspire her German audience: “This will, I hope, do good among my German sisters, who are so capable, but so badly situated that their capability and worth can find no public expression or recognition. Encouraged by the noble example of our American workers, I hope to bring a little inspiration and comfort to our German sisters,” Neymann explained in one of her letters (Neymann 1884d, 378, my emphasis). Her usage of possessive pronouns was remarkably inconsistent and reflected Neymann’s hybrid and ambivalent position. She shifted from “my German sisters” to “our German sisters,” thus indicating her identification with German women versus the American women who were the audience of the letter. When she subsequently shifts to “our,” this indicates a stronger identification with American women, even though the rhetoric of “sisterhood” would suggest solidarity of the women beyond the borders of their countries. Neymann analyzed four types of American women in her Frankfurt lecture. First, women of the working classes, who lacked the education to aim for social equality with men or to develop an interest in political matters; second, women of the rich classes, who, in addition to their ignorance, dwelled in superfluous luxuries, thus adding to social inequalities. Women of intellect were the third category in Neymann’s typology. They were educated women in the professions who were pioneers in their fields and opened the paths for other women to follow. Then came the fourth and crowning type, the best; this represented those women who, in spite of their numbers, are so little known abroad, those who by a combination of all domestic virtues with often rare intellectual attainment are able to develop their best possibilities. … Their keen interest in public questions, their wide reading, their intellectual companionship with their male friends, make them really able to “serve two masters.” (White 1884, 418)

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At this point Neymann’s journey exceeded the mission of personal study and interest in the lives of German women. The journey turned into a mission of transporting US-American ideals of women’s rights and womanhood to Germany, where the social order apparently differed in so many respects. In declaring a type of US-American women to be a “crowning type” because they combined intellectuality and learning with virtue and public action Neymann was condescending to her audience. Conversely, the US-American women present at this occasion in Frankfurt were said to have “felt that we had listened to some one very much in earnest, and left the hall filled with a pardonable national pride” (White 1884, 418). White noted her concern that “whether Mrs. Neymann would speak from the US-American or German standpoint, frankly or guardedly, was an interesting question.” Neymann’s typology added to the imbalance between German and US-American women because it established one type of US-American women as the “crowning type,” setting a higher standard and ideal.German author Amely Bölte criticized the selfconsciously Americanized position Neymann held during her time in Germany. Bölte had regularly been sending correspondence from Germany to the WJ since the early 1870s,24 and in a letter of 1885 she commented on Neymann’s and Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky’s opinions and rejected their evaluation of German women’s conditions. Although Bölte agreed that German women were indifferent to their rights on the whole, she disagreed with Neymann’s and Wischnewetzky’s socialist notions.25 She argued: “Strangers, like these ladies, are not fair judges of our social condition. They will be struck by small things, and will not see beyond the surface” (Bölte 1885, 192). Bölte herself discarded the political argument on which she and the other two women differed and instead stressed the fact that Neymann and Kelley Wischnewetzky were “strangers.” Their outsider position derived from their nationality as US-Americans and their not belonging to the social and political community they were judging, Bölte suggested. Ascribing the outsider “American” position to Neymann played into the process of ethnicization that was constantly at work. Such incidents of her German encounters prove that her position always depended on context and therefore was always judged in relation to the contexts. Being “American” in Germany was a twofold position for Neymann: as a self-conception it allowed her to assume a superior position in relation to her German audience. In terms of how she was perceived by others, such as Bölte, her authority appeared compromised and in fact inferior to that of German women. Depending on who viewed her, Neymann could appear as an outsider and insider in the same place. Before continuing with Neymann’s contacts in Germany and the different political and social contexts she participated in, I will offer a brief summary. Neymann’s descriptions of German and US-American women reflected her

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ethnic position and were part of the ethnicization process. This process mirrored her political position as a political ideal, which combined the freedom of US-American republicanism with the supposed benevolence and moral power of German monarchism and resulted in the political premise of guaranteeing human rights. The fact that a person could alter her or his ethnic position, depending on the different contexts in which they were valued, demonstrated the instability and constructedness of those positions in general. “German” and “American” alike were constructed as antagonistic positions legitimized by the naturalizing concepts of origin and kinship. US-American nativism functioned on the grounds of such a naturalizing concept of birthright. These concepts were highly effective, as the example of Neymann suggested. But she contrasted the stereotypical images of Germans and US-Americans in her work as a reformer in the United States and represented ideals countering nativism. She simultaneously operated within a matrix of oppositional positions. In order to gain speaking power, she at times had to assume one or the other position, depending on the context. Subverting this matrix altogether appears not to have been an option for Neymann, who sought success on an economic, social, and political level.26 Her critical and highly idealistic (we might say utopian) vision of an egalitarian society, based on the condition of observing human rights, brought her in contact with women’s rights reformers, freethinkers, and intellectuals in Germany. These networks were formed from and resulted in friendships that added to the formation of a transatlantic network of reformers. The already mentioned lecture tour in the United States by Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi serves as an example of the realization of this network and of the value of immigrant women in mediating beyond borders and facilitating communication. The invitation to lecture in Frankfurt in 1884 was extended to Neymann by a friend, Prof. Büchner, in return for her having previously invited him to lecture in Karlsruhe.27 Büchner introduced Neymann to a group of women in Frankfurt who were in the process of establishing a women’s association. Who those women were remains unknown, and only the aforementioned lecture at the Frauen Bildungsverein in Frankfurt is documented.28 From Frankfurt Neymann then traveled to Kassel, where she met Marie Calm for the first time. Neymann wrote about her: “Miss Calm is a literary woman and a practical worker, honored and respected even by those who cannot understand her higher aims. Miss Calm gave me a clear insight into the woman’s movement in Germany” (Neymann 1885e, 24). The friendship with Calm appears to have been quite deep. Neymann returned to Kassel during her travels in 1886 (Neymann 1886c) and wrote an emotional and affectionate obituary for Calm upon her death in 1887.29 Apart from the friendships with Büch-

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ner and Calm, Neymann wrote about lectures she presented in Berlin, Kassel, and Dresden. The organ of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein, Neue Bahnen (1885), once mentioned Neymann as a lecturer as well in regard to a talk given in Berlin on 30 March 1885, where Neymann appeared to have repeated her presentation on types of US-American women. Neymann spoke as a replacement for the ill Professor Cassel at the Zweigverein des deutschen Kulturbundes. In the audience sat the Prussian crown princess, Victoria, and her entourage, a circumstance Neymann commented upon in her letter to the WJ: “The crown princess sent me word that they in Germany would try to aspire toward the achievements of American women. I was told that the lecture was a complete success, and I know at least that I have done my part to impress the Germans with a truer picture of American women than they had before” (Neymann 1885d, 138).30 In addition to contacts with the women’s rights movement in Germany, Neymann also visited the freethinker community in Stuttgart in July and August 1885 (Neymann 1885c). Here she was introduced to Hedwig HenrichWilhelmi. She wrote admiringly of this acquaintance and praised HenrichWilhelmi as one of those characters “who advocate their convictions nobly, with dignity and firmness, a woman, whose every word and deed reveal humanism and love of humanity” (Neymann 1885b, 8). This exuberant introduction of Henrich-Wilhelmi to the German-American readers of the FD was the first mention of this woman in the United States before her lecture tour in 1887 to 1889. Neymann appeared as the connecting link between HenrichWilhelmi and the United States and was truly a messenger in the transatlantic space of women’s rights. Unlike Anneke, Neymann was able to shift more freely in this transatlantic space and utilize opportunities of ethnicization to her ends of speaking on behalf of human rights and individual liberty. She was truly “multilingual” in both a linguistic as well as a cultural sense. She lived in the German-American community, in the US-American community of New York, in the intellectual university town of Zurich, and in the freethought and feminist circles in Germany. Different languages, as well as different customs, habits, and sociopolitical perspectives, added to the distinction of these different places, all of which Neymann excelled in. She was able to excel because of her multilingualism, and Mary Louise Pratt wrote in an essay on the boundaries of translation that “the multilingual person is not someone who translates constantly from one language or cultural system into another, though translation is something multilingual subjects are able to do if needed. To be multilingual is above all to live in more than one language, to be one for whom translation is unnecessary. The image for multi-

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lingualism is not translation, perhaps, but … a multiplying of the self ” (2002, 35). The multiplying of the self was evident in Neymann’s experience. It became a central mode in her processes of ethnicization and as such provided her with powerful speaking positions, which she took up in different contexts. Her hybrid position did not always stimulate “newness” and an alternative discourse in a transcendent “third space.” At times, she did seem to adhere to a stable ethnic, gender, or class position in order to gain a voice and audience. The fact that, as a multilingual and hybrid subject, Neymann could alter her voice and audience reveals the imaginative and fantastical nature of these ethnic, gender, and class positions. The power of these images and fantasies, however, is overwhelming, and as such leaves the impression of them as primordial and stable categories. This is the ambivalence Neymann, as a “woman of two countries,” had to deal with constantly: refusing the essentialist understanding of ethnicity, while simultaneously having to affirm an ethnic identity in order to be heard. The concept of ethnicization reveals this ambiguity and enables us to grasp the inconsistencies of Neymann’s ethnic position in the women’s rights movement and beyond. Neymann disappeared from the women’s rights movement’s scene following her collaboration in The Woman’s Bible project. Apparently, however, she continued public work in the German-American community. The last public record of her appeared in the FD in 1913.31 Remarkably, the special relationship of German-Americans to the US-American women’s reform issues had remained essentially unchanged. Neymann still appeared as the mediator between the opposing elements and sought to convince German-Americans of the righteousness of women’s rights and women’s suff rage. She appealed to Germans’ ethnic pride and to the heritage of the Forty-Eighters, the pioneers of the “humanizing” (Humanisierung) of society. Her demand for equal rights was an integral part of this effort. Neymann reminded her readers of Anneke, the German who had bravely stepped in for the liberation of woman (die Befreiung des Weibes). She offset her praise of German culture—sciences, philosophy, sociology, and Staatslehre—with observations on the decline of US-American society, which was in need of just these cultural virtues, because archaic ideology, corrupt ward politicians, saloon keepers, and other criminal gangs afraid of the moral influence of women had taken the lead (K. Neymann 1913a). Although we saw how Neymann predominantly took up the position of an US-American in the 1880s, this last evidence of her thinking presents her as being more embedded in the German-American community and as identifying more with all the positive characteristics she ascribed to German-ness than before. The altered spelling of her first name further indicated this “Germanization.” Klara Neymann closed her appeal to her

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German-American opponents in June 1913 with strong and poetic plea to persist in the fight for gender equality: As Germans, let’s join this great movement; … more educational work is necessary, to convince those standing apart, our German opponents, that their negative behavior plays into the hands of the dark forces which further injustice and vice. To the Germans … we therefore extend a reminder to assist women in their quest for victory, so that the spark of truth will blaze into a bright flame and illuminate the heights. (K. Neymann, 1913a, 4)

Notes 1. The NAWSA annual reports include lists of members and contributors. In 1896 Neymann donated $2, in 1898 and 1899 $30 each year. See Proceedings of the 28th [30th, 31st] Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1896 [1898, 1899]). 2. Neymann’s essays were commentaries on stories from the Book of Judges. She wrote about the prophetess Deborah, Delilah, or Samson’s mother, selecting examples that could demonstrate women’s strength and courage, their considered natural talents as mothers, or Biblical laws of inheritance. The latter was a particularly clever example, because in claiming the derivation of American law from Biblical law, a particular incident in the Bible could serve as precedent in the American legal system: Zelophehad’s daughters were his only heirs. They claimed their father’s estate after his death, which was disputed. Moses ruled that the daughters were right in demanding their father’s bequest and that in any future case in which a family had only female offspring, the property should pass on the them and not to any other unrelated tribe member (Stanton 1972, vol. 2). 3. Emil H. Neymann (parents: Martin and Harriet Neymann), who was born in Berlin and worked as a merchant, married Clara Loew (parents: Leopold and Theresa Loew) in Milwaukee on 10 July 1858 (Milwaukee County [Wisc.] Register of Deeds 1858). We know very little about Emil Neymann. He came to the United States at age sixteen on 5 October 1848 accompanied by his parents and siblings, Adolph (seventeen years old) and Mathilde (twenty years old). The WJ published an obituary written by L. D. B. (Lillie Devereux Blake) in which the authoress wrote about his upbringing: “Mr. Neymann was born in Berlin, and later removed to Mannheim, where in the year 1848, he drew in the love of liberty. In his young manhood he sympathized, heart and soul, with the struggles of his fatherland for political freedom” (Blake 1884). The obituary in the FD unveils the following about Emil Neymann: “Herr Neymann was devoted wholeheartedly to the cause of radicalism and freedom of thought and always ready to further both by sacrificing his time and significant amounts of money. … Despite being absorbed by many business and social obligations in New York—for example, Herr Neymann was many years a member of the board of the ‘Liederkranz’ of New York—he never forgot the city in which he had married his wife and where his two children were born” (1884). 4. Ortlepp revealed that in the German-American community of Milwaukee femininity comprised the idea of woman as the natural bearer of the German culture in the United States. German women shared this idea and fulfilled their communities’ claims to take up this role (2004, 262).

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5. Neymann wrote to Heinzen on 6 March 1873: “I would like to know when the Boston women will hold their convention here and, if possible, would like to give a short speech, in English, on ‘Women’s influence in voting,’ during one of the evenings. I will use parts of my speech, i.e. translate the best parts of my speech ‘Our Adversaries in the Woman Question;’ and add more to it. It would be very useful to me if Dr. Z. could bring herself to visit Lucy Stone and could inquire about this. Also, I think, the Woman’s Journal may want to write something about my lecturing tour; I consider it after all necessary because this will spread my name in American circles and I do have the intention to speak in English later” (KH Papers). 6. “Right from my first day on in Zurich a young American woman of German origin became my lovely cicerone. She had already resided in Zurich for a longer period of time, with her son and one daughter. The three of them were here for the purpose of studying—the daughter at an institute, the son at a high school [Gymnasium] and the lady herself at the University. She attended natural scientific and philosophical study groups, with the express goal of giving public lectures later about such matters, which seemed to promote the advancement of general education” (Büchner 1878, 223). Neymann ended the obituary she wrote in memory of Luise Büchner after her death in 1887: “Her death … will ever leave a pang of deep sadness in the heart of her friend Clara Neymann” (1887), revealing the friendship the two women shared. 7. Clara Neymann published the comment “Mr. Canfield’s Address,” a critical discussion of an academic lecture against women suff rage (Neymann 1877). She spoke at the New York State Woman Suff rage Convention in New York on 25 May 1877 about the progress of the women’s rights movement in Germany and Switzerland (National Citizen and Ballot Box 1877) and a year later on 24 May 1878 as well (Blake 1878). At an anniversary meeting of the Free Religious Association in Waterloo New York, Neymann made a “forcible Woman Suff rage address,” according to a short article in the WJ of 8 June 1878 (on the same event New York Times 1878). In 1880 she attended the annual convention of the “Association for the Advancement of Woman” in Boston and reported at length about this event for the German readers of the FD (Neymann 1880). 8. The articles that were published in the FD give evidence of her political activities in the German Radical Club and the Liberal Leagues (Neymann 1878a, 1878b 1878c; FD 1877a, 1878). In 1879 she traveled to Buffalo, New York (FD 1879a, 1879b), where she spoke in German and English about freethought in talks with titles such as “The redeeming feature in the new faith” (FD 1879c) 9. To understand her cry for American citizenship one should keep in mind that Harriet Stanton had married an English man and thereby lost her American citizenship in 1882. American women who married a foreigner were expatriated between 1855 and 1922, while an American man could turn a foreign woman into an American citizen by marrying her (Cott 1998, 1441). 10. German original: “Das Gesicht der Frau Susan Anthony wurde länger und länger und wie gelähmt blieben ihre hageren Hände im Schooße liegen, welche doch sonst immer das Zeichen zum Beifall gaben, während ihre Leidensgefährten ganz entsetzt drein schauten und sich gegenseitig Bemerkungen zutuschelten welche für Frau Neymann wohl nicht sehr schmeichelhaft waren. Das war ihnen wohl noch nicht vorgekommen, daß eine Frauenstimmrechtlerin offen für die persönliche Freiheit eintrat und den Principien der Gesellschaft in’s Gesicht schlug.” 11. All subsequent quotations of Neymann’s speech in this section are cited from this source. 12. German original: “[D]agegen kenne ich eine Menge amerikanischer Frauen, die in Prohibition, Religionszwang und Entrechtung der Fremdgeborenen die höchste Stufe der Glückseligkeit erblicken und einzig und allein darum das Stimmrecht verlangen. Es wäre daher bei der

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bedeutenden Minorität der Deutschen in Nebraska gleichbedeutend mit Selbstmord, wenn wir Deutsche auf die Seite der Frauenstimmrechtler treten wollten” (Weinhagen 1882, 5). 13. This distinction between May conventions and Washington conventions rests on my reading and analysis of convention reports and proceedings of the years 1869–90. Dating back to the 1840s, May conventions had their tradition in annual antislavery and temperance conventions; during the 1850s women’s rights conventions were also held. The “Mob Convention” of 1853 took place in New York during the convention week, for example. The NWSA continued to hold May conventions in New York. These assemblies can be characterized as organizational meetings where education of the members in lectures and discussions took place and the community celebrated their joint efforts. Notwithstanding, May conventions were not less effective or less important than Washington conventions, because they were also used to plan and prepare future steps and to nominate delegates to the various committees. 14. This exclusion only applies to participation in NWSA conventions on the national level. Neymann was a member of the New York City as well as of the New York State Woman Suffrage Associations. She was an active member in both associations; however, apart from short notes and mention of her name, no sources contained more information pertaining to content and reception of her speeches. 15. All subsequent quotations of Neymann’s speech in this section are taken from this source. 16. The intellectual atmosphere of the Washington convention was also reflected in the label “scholarly paper” for Neymann’s speech “German and American Independence Contrasted” (Anthony and Harper 1902, vol. 4, 73). 17. In 1886 no Senate committee hearings were held because a report favorable to women suff rage was pending in the Senate. It was voted down, however. 18. Clara Neyman was listed as a passenger on the Hansa, which arrived in New York from Bremen on 19 December 1870. In the category “nationality” she was classified as “American” (“Passenger lists of vessels arriving at New York, 1820–1897,”) 19. The last letters from Germany to journals in the US are dated 1889 and 1890 (Neymann 1889, 1890a, 1890b). 20. Born in 1832, Calm belonged to the same generation as Neymann and Luise Büchner, another close friend in the German women’s rights movement. Calm was a teacher, founder of a girls’ school in Kassel, author of poetry, novels, and novellas, and member of the Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein founded in 1865. Together with Auguste Schmidt, she established the Verein deutscher Lehrerinnen, which served as a retirement welfare organization and an evening school for female teachers. She never advocated women suff rage, as she did not believe Germany was ready for such political emancipation. Instead, she represented an ideal of woman as mother and educator of future citizens and understood this as women’s duty as citizens (Bousset 1893, 28–55). 21. The concept of human rights deriving from the idea that all humans shared certain natural rights societies must guarantee is in itself, of course, a Western and Euro-American concept. Only in this discourse does it gain this universal meaning. 22. Both presidential candidates in the election campaign of 1884 were involved in public (moral) scandals. The campaign is described as one of the dirtiest and sleaziest of presidential election campaigns in US history (Lammersdorf 2002, 230). James G. Blaine, nominee of the Republican Party, was questioned about his honesty and dubious financial affairs. He was presented by his political enemies as the product of a corrupt party machine. Grover Cleveland, Democratic candidate and winner of the election, faced a scandal in which it was revealed that he had fathered his ten-year-old son out of wedlock. Cleveland had taken on responsibility for

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the child soon after that boy’s birth and, when the mother became ill, paid for the boy’s upbringing in an orphanage in California. As this information came to light early in the race, it did not decisively impact on the election outcome (Gould 2004, 241–42; Lammersdorf 2002, 230–31). 23. See also my interpretation of Amalie Struve’s and Mathilde Wendt’s image of the USAmerican woman, whom they described as entirely occupied with beauty and fashion, in Chapter 2 of this study. This Putzsucht featured prominently in German women’s stereotypes of US-American women and also featured prominently among women in Germany, as this example demonstrates. 24. Amalie Charlotte Elise Marianne Bölte, known as Amely Bölte (1811–91), was a German poet and philanthropist. Under the influence of her aunt, Fanny Tarnow, a well-known writer herself, she became interested in writing. At age fifteen Bölte was engaged but ended the relationship two years later because she feared misery in marriage. She took on the position as educator in a noble family. Referred by Varnhagen von Ense, Bölte went to England in 1839 to study the English language. She used these language skills to translate literary works from English to German and vice versa. Apart from her literary work, she was a regular correspondent for Cotta’s Morgenblatt and other German magazines. In 1851 she returned to Germany, where she settled in Dresden. In 1879 she moved to Wiesbaden and was active in benevolent work for the relief of working and single women. She cooperated with an association against the consumption of liquor and for Volkskaffeehaeuser (public coffee houses) (Historische Commission 1879, vol. 47, 92–95.) 25. It is unclear in how far Neymann participated in the socialist movement in the United States and internationally. Further research needs to be done. 26. Neymann, as quoted above, sought to sustain a living from what she earned as a public lecturer. From her journey to Germany she reported that she was not free to speak wherever she wanted because she could not afford a hall and travel expenses on her own. Therefore, she had to rely on clubs or individuals to invite and organize the lecture for her. “If I had been able to pay my own way, as well as pay for halls and announcements and then offer free admission, I could have easily attracted a large audience of ladies and gentlemen” (Neymann 1884a, 1). 27. It is unclear who this Prof. Buechner was. I assume it was Ludwig Büchner, although he did not hold the title of professor like his brother Alexander. As the founder of the German Freethinkers’ Association in 1881, Ludwig Büchner appears to have moved in the same intellectual circles as Neymann. 28. The annual reports of the Frauen Bildungsverein in Frankfurt did not mention the lecture. Only the anniversary report of 1901 listed her as a speaker during the year 1883: “Frau Clara Neymann aus New-York: Amerikanische Frauencharaktere” is the entry in the report (Frankfurter Frauenbildungsvereins 1901). 29. Neymann wrote of Marie Calm: “Miss Marie Calm, authoress, reformer, organizer, lecturer, a sweet woman possessing unusual strength of character, will power, and executive ability, died on February 22, 1887, in Cassel, in her fifty-fifth year. … Miss Calm, when younger, spent several years in England. She possessed in a great degree the power of adaptation, and acquired and retained some of the strong traits of the superior English woman’s character. With it she combined a thorough, methodical, German education, wise culture and reading, the simplicity of a true German heart, genuine in its attachments and constant in its love. Her life has been as rich and varied as her soul-life. … That such a woman had to go in the prime of life, in the vigor of her womanhood, in the midst of usefulness, to that bourne from which no traveller returns, is, indeed, sad and bitter. It fills our hearts with grief, and our soul with a yearning to solve the mystery of fate which takes from us those we can so ill spare, and leaves behind hundreds whose loss would never have caused a ripple on the sea of life” (1887, 101).

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30. A letter about the same events in Germany was sent by Neymann in German to the FD as well (1885a). 31. In German she published three articles in the FD (Neymann 1913a, 1913b, 1913c). I would like to thank Anke Ortlepp for directing me to these sources.

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Used with permission from The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Chapter 4

The Transatlantic Space of “Women of Two Countries”

≥ “Above the Senior Wrangler” reads the caption of an illustration printed on the reverse of the twenty-third NAWSA convention program of 1891.1 This image depicted the condescending look of an educated woman, a “Senior Wrangler,” directed at a farmer carrying out his field work by abusing the strength of a woman in the same way that he makes use of the strength of his ox. Apart from its more common usage for a man working as herder, the name “wrangler” also has particular meaning in the British university system. There, it is a term used for students who have completed year three of their college education. This finely educated young woman stands figuratively—and literally—above the abusive scene in which a man’s attitude toward a woman is compared to his attitude toward an animal: women could be “tamed” and used in the same way as, say, an ox. Similar to the way in which Stanton used the image in her speeches, this illustration metaphorically represents the contemporary gender order and—because it was so commonly used—reveals the power this strong “image in their heads” had in the discourse of women’s rights in the nineteenth century. However, this illustration depicts more than just the hierarchical nineteenth-century gender order. I wish to focus on the perspective of the “senior wrangler” vis-à-vis the field workers and interpret this relationship as the relationship between the US-American women’s rights movement and ethnic communities. This field work image, after all, was specifically applied in the women’s rights movement to describe the gender order among Germans, as Stanton’s speeches have shown. The educated woman in the image represented the US-American reformer who spoke and wrote from an elevated position, just as Stanton did in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1869 and in her reminiscences from her lecture tours published in her memoir Eighty Years and More. Ultimately, I consider the illustration to be a metaphor expressing the limitations of a discourse of universal sisterhood, because it depicts and makes visible nativism and elitism in the US-American women’s rights movement. The supremacy of education

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and—considering the repeated ethnicization of the image—of US-American ethnicity is confirmed. The superiority of US-American women, as the following analyses of the International Council of Women in 1888 will show, was also paradigmatic for the transatlantic arena inhabited by the women’s rights movement. Speaking for the women of the world, as Stanton claimed to do in her speech at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, translated into the condescending look illustrated in the illustration shown. The historical subject of nativism in the US-American women’s rights movement and its negotiation in the GermanAmerican community has further implications for a transatlantic feminist network. The previously analyzed national dynamics of ethnic relations among women that supported US-American (white) supremacy had an effect on the relationships among women in the transatlantic space as well. The positive effects of ethnicization provided opportunities to undermine this dynamic, while ultimately revealing ethnicity and nationality as inessential and imagined. Neymann’s selective use of ethnic positions illustrated this effect. Likewise, universal sisterhood was a feminist fantasy, not a practiced reality in the US-American women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century, especially if we understand it as an inclusive ideology in which all women, based on their gender, are assumed to be the agents and subjects of feminist politics.2 Women of two countries, as the case studies have shown, were not only marginalized victims in this dynamic of nativism, US-American supremacy, and the fantasy of universal sisterhood. Rather, they evolved as active and powerful voices in the women’s rights movement. Nativism and a nationalist Americanist bias, rather than universal sisterhood, defined the transatlantic space of women’s rights in the United States and on the international stage, assigning to “women of two countries” particular positions: they became critics and opponents who could balance a hostile and one-sided discourse; they became translators and interpreters of the women’s rights cause; and they became transatlantic messengers with the power to shift between cultural groups to advance the transatlantic—even universal—space of women’s rights. Nativism, as studies about the period after 1890 have shown, prevailed after all and covered up the stories of Wendt, Anneke, and Neymann, which now need to be recreated in studies like the present one. The results of my case studies shall be discussed in this chapter, focusing on the quality of the transatlantic space of women’s rights. How did nativism hinder, yet at the same time, paradoxically, become the reason for immigrant women’s achievements in the movement? First, however, an analysis of the inclusive and exclusionary practices on the international level of the women’s rights movement will follow in order to further illustrate the perceived superiority of US-American feminists. The founding convention of the International

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Council of Women in the year 1888 can be seen as the first instance of institutionalizing a transatlantic women’s rights movement. The power division among women of different countries and ethnicities, as was established in this instance, is crucial for an understanding of the power division among women in the transatlantic space. This, I argue, was a relevant background against which German-American women in the nineteenth-century US-American women’s rights movement created their roles as well.

The Ascendance of the US-American Avant-Garde In June 1887, NWSA issued a call for a week-long women’s rights convention in Washington DC in March 1888 that would lead to the first organized international network of women, the International Council of Women. It proudly proclaimed the unity of the female gender: “Much is said of universal brotherhood, but, for weal or for woe, more subtle and more binding is universal sisterhood” (Report of the ICW 1888, 10). As Stanton said, this sisterhood of women derived from the “universal sense of injustice, that forms a common bond of union between them” (Report of the ICW 1888, 33). While the unity of the female sex was central to the rhetoric of the movement’s leaders from its very beginning, the ICW can be understood as the manifestation of the idea of “universal sisterhood.” How was this bond between women realized? What role did different ethnicities and nationalities play in this context? Were they transcended by the idea of “universal sisterhood,” or were they reaffirmed as self-nominations one took pride in or in ascriptions and as features of distinction? I deem it helpful to look at elements that instilled the attendees with a sense of “universal sisterhood,” of belonging to a community. Rituals of praying and of singing together counted among such community-building elements. Conventions, after all, were not only occasions for exchanging ideas and setting a political agenda. Rather, they were social and cultural occasions of “performative, staged and theatrical quality” (Isenberg 1998, 16). Music, in particular, served an important function at women’s reform conventions. In the description of the atmosphere during the opening of the ICW convention, we are informed that the music itself was universal and transnational, and that it could harmonize a group: “The vast auditorium, perfect in its proportions and arrangements, was richly decorated with the flags of all nations and of every State in the Union. The platform was fragrant with evergreens and flowers, brilliant with rich furniture, crowded with distinguished women, while soft music, with its universal language, attuned all hearts to harmony” (Report of the ICW 1888, 30). Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, who composed the hymn “The Promised Land” specifically for the occasion of the convention,

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also appealed to the unifying power of music and of singing together when she invited the assembled women: “Will you join with us, carrying with the reading your thought, in order that you may unite in singing the twelfth hymn, entitled ‘The Promised Land’” (Report of the ICW 1888, 31). The importance of music for the creation of a collective identity and for the community building of a social movement has been studied by Swedish scholars Eyerman and Jamison, who proposed: “Through its ritualized performance and through the memories it invokes, the music of social movements transcends the boundaries of the self and binds the individual to a collective consciousness” (Eyerman and Jamison 1998, 163). Accordingly, in collective singing, a ritual’s participants can cognitively visualize and emotionally experience their sense of belonging to a community. The division between a passive audience and an active speaker on the stage is replaced by collective, joint activity, which enables the individual to experience her or his belonging to the group. Musical performance becomes a “ritual in which is acted out the mythology of a social group” through the integration of traditions of struggle, national identity, or political ideals (Small 1987, 67). This myth and traditional character of a movement’s music, Eyerman and Jamison claim, “links [it] back to the past rather than envisioning a not-yet-existent future. But collective singing rituals can also capture, in a brief, transient moment, a glimpse of and a feeling for, a spiritual bonding which is both rational and emotive at one and the same time” (1998, 35–36). Given these considerations about the function of music and singing in a social movement community, I have studied the songs and hymns sung at the ICW convention—both lyrics and music—in order to understand the traditional and envisioned future collective identity of the present community of feminists in 1888.3 Music and singing occurred at different moments during the ICW convention and served various functions. The convention program was divided into seven days, from Monday to Sunday, and each day was divided into morning and evening sessions, with each session devoted to a particular topic: Education, Philanthropies, Temperance, Industries, Professions, Organization, Legal Conditions, Social Purity, Political Conditions, and Religion. Monday morning saw the official opening of the council, with the greeting and welcome of all present delegates; on Saturday morning a “Conference of the Pioneers” took place, and on Sunday evening the council was closed. Each morning session was opened with an “invocation” by one of the female ministers and a hymn that was sung together. Morning sessions were also always closed by a collectively sung hymn. The evening sessions were opened with music presented by an orchestra and an “invocation” by a female minister as well. However, the evening sessions were never adjourned with a piece of music,

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except in the case of the Temperance session, when the Council sang “Home, Sweet Home” at the end. Once, when Anthony introduced Julia Ward Howe, the convention sang spontaneously: “As Mrs. Howe took her seat the audience spontaneously joined in singing two stanzas of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ written by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe” (The Woman’s Tribune 1888b, 7). These patterns described above suggest that the conventions were indeed of a staged and theatrical character, and that all elements were intentionally selected and placed by its organizers to create particular effects. Songs and hymns selected for the ICW were mainly sung to popular USAmerican tunes, but with the lyrics rewritten for the occasion of the women’s rights cause and the ICW. This alteration of popular song tunes was a common practice among songwriters in the nineteenth century and, as Francie Wolf explained, made it easy for people to “easily join in on the singing because they already knew the melody” (Wolf 1998, 5). Still, they had to know the melody. I argue that the selection of popular tunes prevented many international delegates at the ICW convention from participating in the collective action of singing. The songs were entirely adapted from religious hymns and patriotic US-American anthems and thus represented a specifically US-American and Protestant culture, which an international community did not necessarily share.4 Not only might this have hindered individuals from singing along and participating in the community ritual, but the national cultural knowledge was also always present in the performance of these songs. Prominent female religious leaders like Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Phebe Hanaford were among the leaders of NWSA and other US-American organizations. The usage of religious songs, therefore, was certainly convenient for them. Additionally, the fact that prayers were spoken prior to the start of each session further supports the notion of an overall Protestant constituency. Apart from religious hymns, national patriotic anthems served as music for the movement’s songs. “Columbia,” “Gem of the Ocean,” “America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hold the Fort,” and “John Brown” were songs that provided the basis for the new feminist versions. In all cases the original military context was maintained not merely in the music, but also in the lyrics, as suggested by the songs’ titles: “The New Columbia,” “The New America,” and “The Equal-Rights Banner.” Most of these patriotic songs, which appeal to the unity of Americans, originated in military or war experience. The lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” were composed by Francis Scott Key in 1814 after having witnessed the failure of the British attempt to conquer Baltimore during the War of 1812 (Browne 1960, 43–60). “Hold the Fort” refers to the Civil War battle of Allatoona, Georgia, in 1864. Before his arrival at the battlefield, General Sherman is said to have sent the message “Hold the fort, for we are coming!” to General Corse, who was defending Fort Allatoona against

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Confederate troops (Bliss 1898, 2). The camp meeting song “John Brown,” which was composed in 1856, became a popular song among Union soldiers during the Civil War. In 1861 it became famous to those outside the military as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by the temperance activist, poet, and—it seems particularly important to mention this here—pacifist Julia Ward Howe (Browne 1960, 165–91). Songs sung at the ICW convention shared this militaristic character and appealed to an “US-American sisterhood” instead of a “universal sisterhood,” which the ICW ostensibly wanted to foster. I have introduced this aspect of music as collective action in women’s conventions to sharpen our awareness of the fact that it was not only intellectual or political statements in a speech or a discussion of a resolution that indicated the position of an individual such as Neymann within a convention. Such gatherings consisted not only of political debates but were a social occasion to meet friends and colleagues and to join together in collective action. They served the important function of giving women a sense of confidence, which was denied to them in a male-dominated society. Furthermore, they provided female reformers, who, in the public sphere, faced ridicule for their actions and ideas, with earnest respect and sympathy for their causes. This sympathy with and respect for each other—their identification with one another—served as the basis for integration into the women’s rights movement’s community. It is difficult—if not impossible—to grasp the emotional level inherent in the conventions, or to determine how individuals perceived the atmosphere and its success in instilling them with a sense of community. My argument about music and how it builds a sense of community is one possible way of approaching this emotional level and understanding how these songs sounded in the ears of different people of different national and religious backgrounds. The divide between the US-American and international “sisterhood” also stemmed from the fact that the ICW sought to assemble and represent an international community of women, while at the same time proudly celebrating the US-American women’s rights movement’s fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. The report in The Woman’s Tribune on the ICW convention began with an account of the history of the Seneca Falls convention and, on the second page, acknowledged the cause of assembling an international women’s community (The Woman’s Tribune 1888b, 1–2). The report of the Seneca Falls convention followed this account. In addition, Anthony and Stanton launched into their opening addresses with references to 1848, which in their words “started the greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand for freedom to one-half the entire race” (Report of the ICW 1888, 31–32). From its conception as the anniversary celebration of the first women’s rights convention in the United States,

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the US-American position was established as privileged and avant-garde compared to all other national women’s reform movements. Stanton further proclaimed the superiority of the United States in her address of welcome: This gathering is significant, too, in being held in the greatest republic on which the sun ever shone—a nation superior to every other on the globe in all that goes to make up a free and mighty people. … [S]o we bid our distinguished guests welcome, thrice welcome, to our triumphant democracy. I hope they will be able to stay long enough to take a bird’s-eye view of our vast possessions, to see what can be done in a moral as well as material point of view in a government of the people. In the Old World they have governments and people; here we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people—that is, we soon shall have when that important half, called women, are enfranchised, and the laboring masses know how to use the power they possess. And you will see here, for the first time in the history of nations, a church without a pope, a state without a king, and a family without a divinely ordained head, for our laws are rapidly making fathers and mothers equal in the marriage relation. (Report of the ICW 1888, 35)

Indeed, participants from other countries saw the US-American movement as an example and tried to learn from it.5 Letters sent to the convention from England and France indicate that European women’s rights reformers accepted and admired US-American women’s leadership role. “The United States of America will establish the united rights of the human race by causing to triumph, for the two sexes, equality before the law,” wrote Hubertine Auclert from Paris (Report of the ICW 1888, 39). The Women’s Liberal Association of Bristol sent the following greetings: “Dear Sisters: … your zealous labours in America strengthen and encourage our work … we are one with you in the conviction that women must stand by women” (Report of the ICW 1888, 40). The English delegate to the ICW, Alice Scatchered, said in her words of welcome: “We have come, hoping to learn much from the ladies of this country. I have long been convinced that whatever step American women take in advance brings the women of England a step farther. Some people pretend to be afraid of what American women will do; I can only say: ‘Go on, ladies,’ because when you go far in advance we shortly follow. We have come to learn” (Report of the ICW 1888, 45). There was no mistaking the line dividing US-American reformers from their international guests at this convention. It resulted in an imbalance between representatives from the various countries as givers and takers, as mentors and learners, as old guard and new guard, and as avant-garde and followers. The handling of language at the convention further illustrates this imbalance. During the session on Philanthropies, “Madame Bogelot, delegate of

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the prison work of the Liberated of St. Lazare, Paris, delivered her address in French.” As the chair of this session, Harriet R. Shattuck, said: “Many of us probably are not able to understand French, but I know we are able to feel the beauty and the grace of the French tongue” (Report of the ICW 1888, 90). Bogelot herself did not speak English. She said, “[m]y ears, to which your language is unfamiliar, can yet frequently comprehend, thanks to the clearness of your discourses. You have deeply moved my heart by your delicacy and consideration for me” (Report of the ICW 1888, 90).6 There were no interpreters at the convention, and the written report included only the English translations. When Madame Bogelot spoke, not everybody in the audience could understand the content of her speech; they could only hope to hear the foreign language and emotionally connect to the speaker.7 These circumstances add to the conveners’ idea that women everywhere were connected in “universal sisterhood.” They did not have to cognitively and rationally define sources for this natural bond. Despite this mutual feeling among the women present, the sense of US-American supremacy in this international gathering remains. The English language set the standard, while an address in a language such as French served the function of harmonizing and emotionally touching the audience. Therefore, Bogelot’s address served a function that was primarily decorative, just like the flags and flowers and “the soft music, with its universal language, attuned all hearts to harmony” (Report of the ICW 1888, 30). Yet, as Bogelot claimed: “Conferences, congresses bring together and unite; they stimulate the desire to do better; they instruct by exchange of ideas; they throw light on points hitherto obscure and ignored” (Report of the ICW 1888, 91). The exchange of ideas and instruction in reporting one’s reform efforts were still central to the women’s movement because in doing so women were offered experiences to identify with, which ultimately would lead to the formation of a group able to articulate specific political demands. At the close of the council Bogelot spoke a few simple words of farewell in English. She unequivocally assured her audience that “[t]o speak English is to be of your family” (Report of the ICW 1888, 425). In addition to the international participants, US-Americans who engaged in a variety of women’s activities were invited to attend the council as well. The call was sent to “representative organizations in every department of woman’s work. Literary Clubs, Art and Temperance Unions, Labor Leagues, Missionary, Peace, and Moral Purity Societies, Charitable, Professional, Educational, and Industrial Associations will thus be offered equal opportunity with Suffrage Societies to be represented in what should be the ablest and most imposing body of women ever assembled” (Report of the ICW 1888, 11). Thirty different associations from the United States, twelve from England, two from both France and Denmark, and one from each of Finland, Norway, Scotland,

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Ireland, Canada, and India represented these different branches of the reform movement at the convention. An imbalance was visible among the various branches of women’s activities as well: the pioneers, that is, those who had participated in the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and who were celebrating their fortieth anniversary, were the convention leaders. They were given their separate “conference of the pioneers” and represented the most radical branch of the feminist movement: the suff rage movement.8 As demonstrated, the ICW ambiguously realized the ideal of “universal sisterhood,” which they appealed to in their call. Stanton urged the assembly: “Above all things that women need to-day in their reform work is thorough organization, and to this end we must cultivate some esprit de corps of sex, a generous trust in each other” (Report of the ICW 1888, 37).9 The collective rituals of singing together, the imbalance between national and international guests, the lack of translation, and the tension between the two causes of the convention all added to the supremacy of the US-American movement, subordinating the transnational elements that “universal sisterhood” represented. This context of a proud US-American community of women’s rights reformers facilitated Neymann’s address, which was devoted to the topic of “Sentimentalism in Politics.” What position between nationalism and universalism did she adopt? Sick on the scheduled day of her speech, Neymann addressed the convention on 31 March, the final day of the convention. This session on “Political Conditions” assembled speakers from the United States (Helen Gardener), England (Mrs. Dilke and Zadel B. Gustafson), Finland (Alexandra Gripenberg), and Denmark (Kirstine Frederiksen). Then, there was Neymann—from “New York.” Her German heritage and German-American ethnicity seemed to have disappeared and been substituted by an American position. Presenting Neymann in this way, as a regular member of the US-American movement, can be understood as a signal of her successful “acculturation” in the US. Neymann managed to be included and integrated into the dominant ethnic group of US-Americans. Even the German-language paper the New Yorker Volkszeitung commented on Neymann’s appearance at the ICW: “Only Germany has remained unrepresented, since Frau Clara Neymann of New York, who is considered a representative of ‘German women’ at the convention can—as a good American citizen—hardly be seen as representative of German womanhood” (1888). Yet, it would be too simple to merely interpret these ascriptions as signs of “acculturation.” In light of other representations of Neymann as German or German-American during the same time period, before and after this occasion, I urge that we contextualize these ascriptions and the functions they served. I acknowledge that Neymann had become an established member of the women’s rights movement, one that at times could be absorbed by the domi-

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nant US-American community and become one of a collective “we.” Neymann in turn did not initially position herself as either US-American or German. Instead, she put herself forward as a representative of reason. “Reason” was the foundation of the republic and contrasted with “sentimentality,” which she defined as “partial, while reason and justice are universal, and apply to all and each alike.” Referencing Walt Whitman, she exclaimed at the end of her address: “Thou, America, for this scheme’s culmination, for this thou hast been created” (Report of the ICW 1888, 389–390). This reference to Whitman’s poem “Song of the Universal” is remarkable, for it placed Neymann in an “all-American” politico-philosophical tradition. The democratic ideals Whitman represented in his poetry mirrored and corresponded with Neymann’s political demands for radical democracy and people’s solidarity. By way of the Whitman quotation, Neymann, as in her address to the ICW, linked herself to a uniquely US-American tradition, that is, the tradition of the ideal of the purely democratic model society that was to be realized in the United States. Although the position of reason Neymann initially adopted was able to transcend ethnic and national differences by establishing human reason as the standard, the direct references to Whitman’s “Song of the Universal” suggested a position within an US-American tradition of democratic idealism. Whereas Anneke had referred to the tradition of German-speaking thinkers, poets, and philosophers just a decade earlier, Neymann could refer to distinctly US-American thinkers and poets. The different generations to which the two women belonged become visible here as well. Perhaps it was easier for Neymann to “Americanize” herself because great US-American thinkers of democracy and equality had arisen with whom she could identify. It was not only her merging with original US-American thought that overshadowed Neymann’s German heritage. The distinct context of the ICW that I have revealed here added to the dynamics of Neymann’s deliberate ethnicization. Neymann belonged to the US-American women in this international surrounding. She represented NWSA, as she had also done during her travels in Germany. As a firm believer in the ideal democratic society, Neymann represented “the best of America,” that is, freedom and equality as they were proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and later in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. The concept of democracy and self-sovereignty presented in these historical documents essentially built the myth of USAmerican democracy, which lured many immigrants in the nineteenth century and inspired the women’s rights reformers to push for its full realization. In theory, this led to Neymann’s recognition in the US-American women’s rights movement and her integration into NWSA’s establishment. In the dynamics of a convention organized and carried out to provide a proud example of US-American women’s rights reformers’ progressivism, the integration of

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Neymann, who represented the ideal of egalitarian democracy as the mythical beacon of US-American society, was only logical and fitting in view of USAmerican leaders’ ambitions. Germany was only represented in a letter to the convention sent by women who lived in Germany.10 The ICW convention did not strive to bring various ethnic groups in the United States together in order to win votes from immigrant men for women’s rights; rather, it aimed at uniting women from different countries—from Europe and the United States—in a transatlantic space. Similarly, political legislation or the planning of future actions and campaigns were not the central aims of the convention. The convention leaders considered it important to tune women in to a strong sense of community so they would be able to form a strong political female interest group. With regard to the power division between the US-American hosts of the convention and their European guests, I have demonstrated that an “American” sense dominated the ICW. An US-American avant-garde had ascended in the transatlantic space of women’s rights. Ethnic and foreign women hence became followers, learners, and helpmates. The roles of “women of two countries” between 1848 and 1890 further confirmed this dynamic: they were translators and messengers of a predominantly “American” cause.

The Paradox of Nativism My previous analysis of the ICW in 1888 has shown how US-American women presented themselves as pioneers in a transatlantic women’s movement and how, in turn, the international attendees considered US-American women to be their examples and to embody the feminist avant-garde. Although they referred to “universal sisterhood” in the transatlantic space of women’s rights as well as in the confined space of the US-American women’s rights movement, US-American reformers harbored nativist prejudices, embarked on ethnic stereotyping, and embraced the notion of American superiority, all of which effectively destroyed this fantasy of universal sisterhood. This discrepancy between an ideal of “universal sisterhood” and the practice of an ethnic exclusivity has been the vantage point for this study of women of two countries. The US-American women’s rights reformers’ nativism was of a particular kind and represented a gendered form of nativism in the nineteenth-century United States. Its content was specific in so far as it always included gender relations. “Ignorant foreigners” represented traditional and hierarchical gender orders in which women were subordinated and “yoked to the plow.” Such generalizing assumptions were characteristic of women’s nativism, whereby “igno-

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rant foreigners” were represented as threats to women’s rights reform interests in general. Accordingly, women’s nativism was effective on two levels: first, it helped women’s rights reformers to overcome gender inequality and form an alliance with US-American-born men; second, it solidified the avant-garde status of the US-American women’s rights movement in a transatlantic feminist movement, because it presumably lifted the US-American gender order above those of other ethnicities and nationalities. Thereby, US-American reformers proved the effectiveness of their movement’s strategies, claimed their leading role in the transatlantic space of women’s rights, and replaced universal sisterhood with nativism, hierarchies, and boundaries between women and ethnicized social groups. That these hierarchies and boundaries were significantly real and not merely excusable political tactics can best be seen in the reactions of those who were the objects of nativism: the immigrant communities. I have considered the interstitial position of the immigrant women’s rights reformer—who was both in and out of the women’s rights movement and in and out of the ethnic community—as that position in which both nativism and antifeminism in the ethnic community met and were negotiated. In focusing on their roles—both in the ethnic communities and in the women’s rights movement—the paradox of nativism, the ambivalent effects of ethnicization, and the complexity of hybrid subject positions could be shown. German-American women’s public activities on behalf of women’s rights show that nativism did not only serve as a rhetorical force that insulted ethnic and national groups in order to promote the standing and privileges of a native-born elite. Rather, nativism became the reason that Wendt, Anneke, and Neymann spoke out and were heard publicly. Because nativism forged a deep cleft between the US-American women’s rights movement and the German-American community, those brave German-American feminists were urged—from both sides—to step in for the feminist cause as well as the ethnic cause. Often these demands collided with each other and required strategies to bypass and avoid the topic of dispute in order to find other ways to translate, negotiate, and explain. As the cases of Anneke and of Wendt in the New York-based German women’s rights movement showed, had nativism not emerged and become a valid argument in the US-American women’s rights movement, German-American women would not have been able to become as prominent and sometimes even powerful and integrated agents in the women’s rights movement as they were. This is the paradox of nativism, as I see it, in the women’s rights movement: the exclusion of large groups of nonnative people and the impulse for immigrant women to publicly oppose this exclusion.

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Stereotyping had always existed among the US-American reformers, as well as in the German-American community. These stereotypes became visible in the example of the fictional convention at Roxbury in 1868. Considering the strong opposition in Karl Heinzen’s fictional convention, the reality of German women’s rights reformers’ activities in and beyond the US-American women’s rights movement differed. In these different strategic roles the actual ambivalences of nativism are made visible. Instead of rejecting and negating US-American women’s activities, Wendt, Neymann, and Anneke followed alternative paths by assuming speaking positions as women’s rights reformers in the United States. These women and their activities are of particular interest, as each of them held public positions in the German community in the United States and from there reached out to the US-American women’s rights movement’s community. I assessed these positions of “women of two countries” with reference to Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, exemplifying as they do hybrid positions occurring in that interstitial space between the cultural poles of “German” and “American”—in a transatlantic space. And indeed, the case studies showed that Neymann, and Anneke in particular, saw themselves in this space. With their efforts in translation and mediation they sought to realize the productive potential of bringing “newness to the world” (Bhabha 1994), that is, to intervene into hostile and antagonistic cultural oppositions. Anneke, Neymann, and Wendt, each in their own way, acted as translators, negotiators, and messengers in order to gain a powerful base of support for the reform cause in the German-American and wider US-American society. Even the formation of the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein and the publication of the NZ—both addressing an exclusively German audience—did not reveal the strong opposition against the US-American reformers that Heinzen fantasized about and that existed among German opponents of women’s rights. The German-American reformers considered their discussion of women’s rights in the context of the New York movement of the 1870s as an addition to and a support of the US-American women’s struggle for women’s rights. The distinct elements setting them apart from their US-American colleagues were their socialist inclinations and the rejection of religion in propagating freethought. Members of this community idealistically believed in the strength of their ideas and hoped that freethought and socialist reform would ultimately transform society and the world. To achieve their reform goals they supported the US-American women’s cause of female emancipation because they considered it to be an essential element of their (utopian) vision of intellectual freedom and equal socioeconomic opportunities for all. My analysis showed that the relationship between German-Americans and the women’s rights movement was of a specific kind and that the conceptions they formed

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of each other were powerful “images in people’s heads” that could not easily be altered, although they could be “bypassed” by strengthening more universal reform goals. Wendt differed from Anneke and Neymann in so far as she never rose to prominence in the US-American women’s rights movement. She attended conventions and was a member of the AWSA and the New York City Woman’s Suff rage Association. However, she never actively engaged in the movement’s discussions by giving a speech or introducing and advocating resolutions. Apart from her personality, which could have been responsible for her relative isolation (though this is difficult to determine in absence of more detailed sources), Wendt’s one structural difference was her lack of authority in the German-American community. This is suggested by the situation in 1871/72 that she described in her letters to Heinzen. She felt misunderstood and marginalized in moments when her credentials as a feminist editor were thrown into question by her coeditor Labsap. As she hardly appeared in other German-American groups beyond the Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein of New York, I conclude that she did not hold an influential public position in the German-American political community. An influential public position in the ethnic community was ultimately the main reason for Anneke’s and Neymann’s clout in the US-American women’s rights movement. Thanks to their “power among the Germans,” both of the latter were considered important strategic players in the women’s rights movement. Wendt could not have filled such a strategic role, just as Ernestine Rose could not. The hybrid position of women of two countries was complex because of the multiple affiliations they maintained. Given the intersectional constitution of subject positions, this is generally true for any of them and in particular for the hybrid place of ethnic women’s rights reformers. In their struggles, ethnic, gender, religious, and political identifications intersected. The analysis of their productivity thus cannot merely follow the logic of scrutinizing how newness is brought to the world, as Bhabha (1994) suggests, that is, in the logic of failure or success, but has to more carefully adhere to the logic of scrutinizing the restrictive elements of this complex position. According to Bronfen and Marius, the subject evolves at a point of intersection of languages, orders, discourses, and cultural systems, as well as perceptions, desires, emotions, and cognitive processes that permeate the subject (1997a, 4). As I have argued throughout this study, the hybrid position does not exist in a vacuum but is tied to all of the other positions that influenced it. Therefore, any evaluation cannot be a simple decision between success and failure, because the hybrid position is much more complex. Financial opportunities and resources were among the restrictive elements. Anneke’s financial desperation required that she maintain good relationships

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with the leaders of NWSA, as they could provide her with the means for traveling to and lodging at conventions. Another restrictive element meant that she had to simultaneously juggle the demands of solidarity by two opposing ethnic communities. The example of Anneke’s ambivalent intervention on behalf of the offended German audience in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1869 best illustrates this complicated situation. Considering the private letters sent to her husband Fritz, in which she disclosed her disagreement with, and disapproval of, Stanton’s nativism, her public letter to Mr. Tillmann appears as a document of the discrepancies between public image and private thought. What she could say in a private letter she apparently could not say in public. I argue that Anneke had to be mindful of her position in the women’s rights movement as well—as I wrote above—and therefore could not freely express her criticism of Stanton’s nativism. In Neymann’s case the question of place and audience could also be identified as a limitation of her free speech. Although she argued critically against nativism and religiousness in the women’s rights movement during the campaign in Nebraska in 1882, she refrained from such critique in the NWSA Washington conventions. This shows that the more integrated into the American women’s rights movement Neymann became the more she deviated from her hybrid position and from her roots in the German community. Washington conventions assembled the leaders of the women’s rights movement and served as the forum for planning strategies of future action and for addressing the legislature. Participation in these conventions, and the executive sessions and congressional hearings in particular, were a signal of Neymann’s integration into the group of leaders of the movement. Accordingly, the communities that Neymann and Anneke addressed were significant in terms of real opportunities for action and speech. Hybridity also determined the scope of Neymann’s and Anneke’s feminist positions in the women’s rights movement. Neymann in particular guaranteed the continuation of a discourse of egalitarian human rights in the women’s rights movement at times when nativism, racism, and elitism produced a feminist position that considered women’s rights as privileges rather than rights. Neymann did not join in the rhetoric of the elective franchise as a citizens’ privilege because she was convinced of its falsity, but she also refrained from doing so because her position did not allow it. Belonging to more than one ethnic community always also meant belonging to neither community exclusively. Being here and there indeed translated into being neither here nor there. Thus, references to supposedly steady ethnic positions, as they were implied in US-American women’s nativism and in Heinzen’s fictional supremacy of the German element in the United States, were hardly available to women like Neymann, who sought a powerful speaking position in the women’s rights movement. Instead, she offered the universal ideal of human-

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ity, not of any particular ethnic group, as the foundation for her arguments. In so doing, immigrant women’s rights reformers—similar to interventions by black women—guaranteed the visibility of the discourse of “universal sisterhood” in the US-American women’s rights movement, a discourse that might otherwise have vanished. Despite this universalism of thought and the “bypassing” of ethnic identifications, ethnicity was the most crucial element in the constitution of Neymann’s and Anneke’s roles in the women’s rights movement. The case of Neymann revealed that it was of strategic importance as to whether she stepped into the “German” or “American” position. As a multilingual person she was able to do either. Her multilingualism in addition to her hybrid position became the foundation of a productive and powerful speaking position. Neymann’s ability to shift between ethnic categories and identify with both of them not only provided her with a powerful speaking position but also revealed ethnic categories to be inherently instable and inessential. Therefore, ethnicity always has to be conceived as a process of ethnicization rather than as a fixed entity. It always only appears as a distinct feature of identity when in a context of ethnic relations that are understood as power relations. In the context of an international women’s rights movement, in which US-American women reformers were established as the avant-garde of the feminist reform cause, the ethnic position of “American” was endowed with superior powers vis-à-vis any other ethnic position. To take up this American-ness in Germany instilled Neymann with a powerful voice in her contact with German women. Anneke was less able to shift between ethnic positions. She remained the “German” woman, even though she was called upon as a “woman of two countries” in the US-American women’s rights movement. In realizing the potential for intervention that she gained from her interstitial position she did, however, maintain an ethnic standing that was marked as “German.” It is precisely this maintenance of a distinct non-American position that lent powerful support to her activities on behalf of women’s rights in her respective communities. In times of increasing ethnic conflict between the women’s rights movement and the German community in the United States, Anneke was valuable as a transactor on behalf of the political cause of the women’s rights movement. Her ethnic identification as “German” became the source of her powerful position in the women’s rights movement. Ethnicization was thus an ambivalent process: it allowed for the devaluation of a position and the relegation of certain discourses upon an ethnicized position. Simultaneously, it allowed women, as a mode of self-nomination, ascendance as powerful speakers. The roles of German-American women in the hybrid positions between the women’s rights movement and their ethnic community were affected by a special relationship between these antagonistic groups, which evolved from nativ-

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ism and reciprocal stereotyping. My focus on selected women of two countries sheds a different light on nativism in the women’s rights movement between 1848 and 1890. Nativism was not a political tactic, but, despite its paradoxical effects, had real effects on social and ethnic orders. It allowed immigrant women to gain influential speaking positions while simultaneously weakening the women’s rights movement by arousing opposition among German-American voters. The example from the Nebraska campaign in 1882 showed this. Moreover, the fact that only a few German-American women were apparently willing or able to enter this complicated situation of an immigrant women’s rights reformer is another effect of women’s nativism. Possibly, it was neither a lack of interest in feminist politics nor a general denial of women’s emancipation that was responsible for the reluctance of German-American women to engage politically. My analysis of the women who actively engaged revealed the continuous struggle of these women to belong both here and there, as well as the problem of solidarity and the inescapability of ethnicization. Despite the empowerment that came along with their positions, the complexity of the restrictions that affected their lives remained strong and real. Gender, as the category of identity of the women’s rights movement that resonated in the ideology of universal sisterhood, was overshadowed by the nativism and ethnicization of immigrant women’s rights reformers. Women were not “naturally” bound to each other; instead, they were scaled and ranked by nativist arguments. Ultimately, the inclusive ideology of sisterhood was eclipsed by nativism. Even in the transatlantic space of women’s rights, USAmerican feminists dominated and shaped that space as the avant-garde group. But this ideological dominance did not remain uncontested: GermanAmerican women like Wendt, Anneke, and Neymann significantly contributed to the reconsideration of inclusive practices in transatlantic spaces in the United States by forging, negotiating, and adding their ideas to the women’s rights movement.

Notes 1. The artist and origin of this sketch could not be further identified. Below the image, Sarah Taylor Adams is mentioned as the artist, and further down on the sheet, the source is given as: “From The Woman’s Calendar, 1891, of the Woman’s Literary Club, Dunkirk, N.A. Peter Paul & Bro., Pub.” It appeared on the backside of the convention program of the NAWSA convention assembled from 26 February to 1 March 1891 in Washington DC, and is collected in the Matilda Joslyn Gage Papers at the Schlesinger Library. Included in a convention program, this image was widely circulated among members of the women’s rights movement, thus demonstrating the prominent and powerful character of this image of a woman being yoked to a plow and driven by a man, which Stanton also used in her 1869 speech, discussed in Chapter 2.

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2. Baritono advocates the link between the exclusionary idea of nationalism and the inclusive idea of sisterhood in her 2008 article. In doing so she comes to identify the ideology of sisterhood as a constitutive element in “crossing national frontiers, creating new alliances and a new imagined community” (187). My exposure of the limitations of universal sisterhood takes off from a deconstruction of the intersectionality of subject positions rather than from the tension between national and international feminist interests, which Baritono chooses to do and does. 3. The songs of the women’s rights movement’s conventions have not yet been subject to in-depth academic research. The ideas, however, can be found in similar fashion in studies of the nineteenth-century Social Democratic party in Germany. In their studies on these political conventions, Bettina Hitzer (2001) and Thomas Welskopp (2000) demonstrated that the singing of songs was indeed a sensual experience of community. Another detectable parallel is in the black convention movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights’ League of 1865, a set of songs can be found that resemble the hymns of the women’s rights conventions in structure: popular and well-known tunes were the base of new lyrics reflecting the identity of the community (Foner and Walker 1986, 166–71). One exception is a publication of suff rage songs by Francie Wolf. It includes a short essay on the history of the songs but does not contribute to the discussion about the history of the women’s rights movement. Instead, it focuses on the publication of “these songs and their music together under one cover” (Wolf 1998, xv), and enables one to “hear what they must have sounded like, sung in chorus. All this will make it easier for us henceforth to conjure up the settings in which these suff rage songs first were sung” (Wolf 1998, xii). 4. Protestant hymns and psalms became popularized after the American Revolution by Lowell Mason, who published The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music in 1822. He later propagated congregational singing in churches (Crawford 2001, 91–100). Protestant hymns, therefore, were well known to nineteenth-century US-American Protestants who attended church services regularly. 5. The US-American women’s rights movement’s status as the avant-garde of all women’s reform movements lasted a long time. It was not challenged until 1913, when Alice Paul introduced strategies taken from British suff ragettes to the US-American movement, including militancy in picketing and hunger strikes (Flexner 1974, 265–70). 6. French original not available. Mathilde Franziska Anneke referred to the “language of the heart” while struggling with the English language during her address to the convention in New York in 1853. Emotionality allowed foreign women to connect to US-American women, as they considered their mutual emotional experiences as women to be universal. 7. Ute Gerhard, in her examination of letters between women from Europe and the United States within the context of the ICW, showed that this international network was multilingual. Participants wrote letters in their mother tongue (English, French, and German), and the addressees responded in their mother tongue. It follows from this observation that the network comprised educated and privileged members (Gerhard 1994, 36). This development was already visible at the founding convention in Washington DC in 1888: only those participants trained in foreign languages followed the proceedings. A close look at the documented report of the ICW in 1888, however, reveals that English was established as the premier language, and other languages held a lower status. 8. Rupp shows in her interpretations of different international women’s rights organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that the ICW was, from its very beginning, conceived as the most conservative of all international associations of women (Rupp 1997, 15–21). The fact that Anthony and US-American suff ragists initiated and led this first congress and the

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founding of the ICW should not be seen as an indication of the association’s progressive and revolutionary feminist character. 9. The phrase esprit de corps was used by Frances Willard in her speech about “Woman in Temperance” as well: “I believe that we are going out into this work, being schooled and inspired for greater things than we have dreamed and that the esprit de corps of women will prove the grandest sisterhood the world has ever known” (Report of the ICW 1888, 113). Also, Mary Livermore demanded in her address, “Industrial Gains of Women During the Last Half-Century”: “Above all, at the present time, should women cultivate what they grievously lack, a fine esprit de corps. They should stand together in a solidarity that can not be shaken by difference of opinion, nor weakened by jealousy, nor determined by the cruel gossip and scandal of the world” (Report of the ICW 1888, 137). 10. The letter by Louise Otto Peters, Auguste Schmidt, Aloise Wintor, Henriette Goldschmidt, and J. Freiderici [sic] explained why German women did not send delegates to Washington: “The season of the year, as well as the condition of our society, prevent us from sending a delegate, but we will, nevertheless, be with you in thought and sympathy.” In an enclosed report of the “Woman Movement in Germany 1848–1888” the German women declare: “[B]ut in Germany we have to work with great tact, and by conservative methods. … The difference between our position and that of our American sisters is largely due to the fact that you live in a republic, we in a monarchy—you in a young country where everything is new, we in a land centuries old, where the ideas and habits of thought are, so to speak, encrusted in the people” (Report of the ICW 1888, 219–20). Gerhard explains the Germans’ hesitation to participate in the international movement during this era of imperialist expansion of the German Empire as having been based on the understanding of internationalism as antinationalism. This, Gerhard shows, was conceived to be destructive to the nationalist project that the bourgeois women’s movement in Germany increasingly became (1994, 37).

Bibliography

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Manuscript Collections Andreas Etges Research Collection. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. Blackwell Family Papers. Library of Congress, Washington DC. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers. Library of Congress, Washington DC. Fritz and Mathilde Franziska Anneke Papers. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. Karl Heinzen Papers 1797–1905. Labadie Collection. University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, MI. Maria Wagner Research Collection. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. Matilda Joslyn Gage Papers. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. NAWSA Collection. Library of Congress, Washington DC. Susan B. Anthony Collection. Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Primary Sources A. 1872. Korrespondenz-Mittheilung aus New-York, 21. März 1872. Pionier, 1 April: 3. A Member. 1885. New York City Society. Woman’s Journal, 14 November: 364. Agitator. 1869. Note. In New York. 1 May: 4. Anneke, Mathilde Franziska. 1848. Kirche und Staat. Frauen-Zeitung, 27 September: n.p. ———. 1869. Offener Brief an Herrn F. Tillmann in La Crosse. Milwaukee 5. Dez. 1869. La Crosse Nord-Stern, 17 December: n.p. ———. 1873a. Adresse an die Frauenconvention in New York. Pionier, 14 May: 4. ———. 1873b. Eine Reform gegen die Natur. Freidenker, 21 September: 4. ———. 1874. Die Frauenrechts-Bewegung. Adresse der radikalen Demokratie von Wisconsin an die national Frauenstimmrechts-Convention in Wahington, D.C. Banner und Volksfreund, 16 January: n.p. Anthony, Susan B., and Ida Husted Harper, eds. 1902. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 4. NAWSA. Blackwell, Alice Stone. 1882. From Nebraska. Woman’s Journal, 7 October: 316. Blackwell, Henry B. 1870. Political Organization. Woman’s Journal, 8 January: 1. ———. 1882. The Canvass in Nebraska. Woman’s Journal, 21 October: 332. ———. 1884. Mrs. Neymann in Europe. Woman’s Journal, 14 June: 192. Blake, Lillie Devereux. 1878. Woman Suff rage in New York. Woman’s Journal, 15 June: 284. ———. 1884. In Memoriam. Emil H. Neymann. Woman’s Journal, 23 February: 65.

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Index

≥ abolitionism, 3, 5–6, 16, 43–44, 66n23, 72, 75–78, 79, 106 Adams, Sarah Taylor, 171n1 Allen, Nancy Hall, 3 Allport, Gordon, 27 American Equal Rights Association (AERA), 3, 12, 79, 83, 107n11 American Woman Suff rage Association (AWSA), 3–4, 50, 51, 56 convention in Omaha NE, 1882, 120 founding of, 3, 51–53 Anneke, Fritz, 52, 66n21, 68, 70, 71, 103, 106n2, 107n4, 169 Anneke, Mathilde Franziska, 1–2, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 32n13, 58–59, 63n7, 66n21, 68–106, 107n5, 107n7, 108n15, 108–9nn17–19, 110n29, 111, 116, 117, 147, 148, 164, 172n6 and AWSA, 52–53 Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen, 104 Deutsche Frauenzeitung, 1852, 64n9, 70 Die Sclaven-Auction, 76–78 ethnicity, 69, 104–5, 168, 170 expression of solidarity with S.B. Anthony, 1872, 93–95 Frauen-Zeitung, 1848, 103 hybrid position, 48, 68–69, 71, 83, 84, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 105, 169–70 immigration to the US, 19–20, 105–6 letter to NWSA convention, 1873, 92 Memoiren einer Frau aus den badischen Feldzügen, 68 Neue Kölnische Zeitung, 103

open letter to F. Tillmann, 1869, 81, 83–87, 168–69 protest at centennial celebration in Philadelphia, 1876, 95–98 as translator, 68, 75, 79, 80–91, 106, 115, 167 Uhland in Texas, 77 at women’s rights convention in New York, 1853, 72–74 Anthony, Susan B., 2–3, 4, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59, 64n10, 67n26, 70, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 96–97, 99, 101, 102, 108n18, 122–23, 130, 135, 150n10, 160 nativist arguments, 3–4, 94 trial for illegal voting, 1873, 59, 93, 95 Aston, Louise, 104 Auclert, Hubertine, 161 Beecher, Henry Ward, 52 Bentley, Mary Wiley, 1 Bhabha, Homi K., 28–30, 105, 167–68 Billington, Ray Allen, 8 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 3, 99, 101, 102, 110nn25–26, 159 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 72 Blackwell, Henry, 3 Blake, Lillie Devereux, 21, 58, 63n6, 112, 130–31, 149n3 Blatch, Harriet Stanton, 4, 121–22 Bloede, Gustav, 37 Bogelot, Madame, 161–62 Bölte, Amely, 145, 152n24 Booth, Mary, 71, 107n3 Booth, Sherman, 71, 107n3 Büchner, Luise, 119, 140, 150n6, 151n20 Buhle, Mari Jo, 54, 67n28 Butler, Judith, 10, 31n6

Index Calm, Marie, 140, 146–47, 151n20, 152n29 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 34–35 Chapin, Augusta, 79 Child, Lydia Maria, 75 citizen female, 6, 49, 59, 67n26, 121–22 US, 3–4, 7, 13, 44, 55, 97, 130, 136–37 citizenship, 7, 12–13, 49, 64n8, 67n26, 99, 122, 138, 150n9 Neymann’s acquisition of, 138 Rose’s acquisition of, 102 Colby, Clara Bewick, 109n18, 112 Conzen, Kathleen, 14–15, 25–26, 39 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 9, 26 critical whiteness, 134–5 Dale, Caroline Heally, 72 Davis, Angela, 134 Davis, Paulina Wright, 1, 3, 51, 70, 72, 104 Declaration of Sentiments, 5–6, 73, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 108n13 Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, 21, 22, 33, 44, 49, 54–61, 62, 106n1, 111, 112, 167–68 Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth, 51 discourse, 23, 24 Doerflinger, Carl, 91 Douai, Dr. Adolph, 55, 66n23 Droste-Huelshoff, Annette von, 104 DuBois, Ellen Carol, 30n3, 30n5, 67n26, 76 Dyer, Richard, 27 Eastman, Mary, 138 ethnicity, 9, 19, 21–22, 23, 24–25, 26, 39, 82, 98–106, 118, 122, 128, 133–34, 139, 148, 156, 169–70 ethnicization, 23, 25–26, 29, 52, 55, 69, 111, 128–29, 145–48, 156, 164, 166, 170–71 Foucault, Michel, 24, 26, 67n24 Franke, Astrid, 27 Frankenberg, Ruth, 134 freethought, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,

189

31n11, 33, 55, 58, 63n4, 66n23, 98, 100, 103, 105, 140, 147, 150n8, 167 Freie Gemeinde, 16, 17, 19, 91, 117 Gage, Francis Dana, 109n24 Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 4, 58, 95–97, 104, 112 Geertz, Clifford, 24 gender relations, 2, 5, 8, 30, 32n12, 40–41, 48, 76–77, 80, 82–83, 94, 123–24, 166 gender, 5, 9–10, 26–27, 31n6, 36, 43, 61, 81, 99, 105, 137, 148, 168, 171 Gerhard, Ute, 172n7, 173n10 German-Americans, 1, 4, 14–23, 28, 45, 70, 80, 88, 91–98, 112, 115 and cultural superiority, 49–50, 55, 61, 62 and Forty-Eighters, 15–16, 20, 21, 33, 35, 64n10, 66n21, 148 gender order, 18, 19, 44, 46, 47–49, 80, 82–85, 86–87, 114, 117, 126, 155–56 and nativism, 9, 13, 34–35, 81–82, 88–90 in New York City, 54–61, 106n1 women’s role, 18, 19, 22, 32n12, 108n12, 117 Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 44, 65n16 Ginzberg, Lori D., 4 Gordon, Ann D., 12–13, 31n8 Hall, Stuart, 23 Hanaford, Phebe, 159 Harbert, Elizabeth Boynton, 157–8 Harzig, Christiane, 18–19, 32n12 Heinzen, Karl, 16, 21, 32–n15, 46 friendship with Clara Neymann, 113–16, 119, 150n5 immigration to the US, 32n15 Konvention teutscher Frauen in Roxbury, 1869, 36–44, 53, 60, 65n16, 167, 169 “No President” agitation, 16, 59–60 Pionier, 51, 54, 64n9, 65nn19–20, 66n23 Henrich-Wilhelmi, Hedwig, 31n11, 140, 146, 147

190 Higham, John, 8 Hindman, Matilda, 121, 126–7 History of Woman Suffrage (HWS), 4–5, 34, 75, 92, 107n5, 108n18, 129, 132–33 Holtschneider, Laura, 127 Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 74–75, 96 hooks, bell, 134 Houton, Marion C., 72 Howe, Julia Ward, 3, 52, 135, 159, 160 Hunt, Helen K., 72 hybridity, 23, 28–29, 30, 48, 55, 68, 71, 83–84, 105–6, 112, 118, 128, 133–34, 139, 144, 148, 166, 167, 169–171 immigration, 25, 49 from Germany, 14–16, 69–72, 82, 83 of women, 32n12, 33, 105, 116 International Council of Women (ICW), 34, 63n7, 157–165, 172n8 intersectionality, 9–10, 168, 172n2 Jonas, Alexander, 57, 69–70, 106n1 Jones, Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock, 102, 110n25 Kern, Kathi, 112 Kinkel, Gottfried, 79 Kocka, Jürgen, 15 Kolmerten, Carol, 100, 102 Kraditor, Aileen, 10–11, 94 Labsap, F., 45, 65nn18–19, 168 Lebsock, Suzanne, 12 Lilienthal, Auguste, 54, 55–57, 66n22 Lippmann, Walter, 27 Livermore, Mary, 1, 2, 3, 22, 52, 58, 173n9 Marilley, Suzanne, 6, 10, 11–12, 31n8, 108n15 marriage, 3 concept of, 42, 49, 57, 103–4, 110n26 reform of, 42, 57 McFadden, Margaret, 78 Miller, Elizabeth Smith, 79–80

Index Minor, Virginia, 62n26 Mitchell, Michele, 13–14 Mott, Lucretia, 3, 51, 58, 59, 70, 72, 92 Nadel, Stanley, 26, 30 National American Woman Suff rage Association (NAWSA), 11, 30n4, 34, 112, 149n1, 155, 171n1 National Woman Suff rage Association (NWSA), 21–22, 34, 50, 51–52, 56, 67n26, 92, 95, 97, 130, 132, 135, 157, 159, 164 convention in Omaha NE, 1882, 120–124, 126 founding of, 3–4 May conventions, 129, 151n13 Washington conventions, 128–9, 151n13 nativism gendered, 2, 5–8, 31n7, 33, 81, 89, 146, 155–56, 165 in the US, 8, 26, 30n2, 134–35 of women’s rights reformers, 2, 4, 5–14, 21, 22–23, 34–35, 43, 48, 59, 80–91, 93–94, 99, 102, 108n15, 121–22, 124, 127–28, 132, 134, 135–37, 138–39, 146, 156, 171 Neymann, Clara, 2, 14, 16, 17, 20–22, 23, 31n11, 33, 60, 63n2, 64n14, 111–149, 156, 160, 167–68, 169 “A Lesson of Nebraska” 125–28 address at Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, 1872, 55, 57, 112–3 “Characteristics of American Women”, 144 ethnicization, 118, 122, 128–139, 141, 145, 146–48, 170–71 friendship with Karl Heinzen, 113–16, 119 “German and American Independence Contrasted”, 135–6 at House Judiciary Committee Hearing, 1886, 136–7 immigration to the US, 113 “Marriage in the Light of Woman’s Freedom”, 112

Index at NWSA Washington convention, 1883, 130–34 at NWSA Washington convention, 1886, 135–36 “Our Adversaries in the Woman Question”, 116–7, 118, 150n5 “Republicanism and Monarchism”, 122–4 “Republican Principles”, 130–133 “Sentimentalism in Politics”, 163–4 and Woman’s Bible, 112, 148, 149n2 Neymann, Emil H., 33, 113, 149n3 Opfermann, Susanne, 64n11 Ortlepp, Anke, 17–19, 108n12, 149n4, 153n31 Owen, Robert, 99–100, 102, 103, 109n21 Painter, Nell Irvin, 109n24 Paul, Alice, 172n5 Peckham, Lillie, 79 Phillips, Wendell, 74, 99 Piepke, Susan, 81, 91 Pratt, Mary Louise, 147–8 prohibition, 16, 35, 64n12, 120, 121, 122, 124–28 racism, 10, 11, 12, 13, 102, 105, 108n15, 109n24, 122, 132, 134, 169 Radical-Club, 16, 17, 91–98, 108n18 Rose, Ernestine, 3, 50, 69, 70, 72, 98–106, 130, 168 Ross, Laura, 79 Rupp, Leila, 172n8 Scatchered, Alice, 161 Schurz, Carl, 37, 63n7 Seneca Falls convention, 2, 5, 92, 156, 160, 163 Shattuck, Harriet, 162 Shuler, Nettie, 34–35 Sibley, A.F., 125–6, 127, 128 slavery, 15, 75–78, 101, 107n7, 116, 135 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 70, 79 Smith, Gerrit, 7, 72, 76–78, 79, 88 Sollors, Werner, 24–25 Spelman, Elizabeth, 10

191

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 2–3, 4, 12–13, 50, 51, 52, 58, 70, 79–80, 92, 95–97, 101, 104, 108n14, 110n26, 118, 135 address at International Council of Women, 1888, 157, 160–61, 163 address at Seneca Falls convention, 1848, 5–7, 10 lecture at La Crosse, 1869, 80–89, 107n11 nativist arguments, 80–91, 155–56, 169, 171n1 Woman’s Bible, 112 stereotype, 7, 13, 18, 22, 23, 27–28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 55, 68, 82, 84, 86, 90, 93, 124, 137, 138, 136, 144, 167 stereotyping, 27, 28, 29, 30, 48, 111, 165, 167, 171 Stone, Lucy, 3, 4, 22, 51, 52, 72, 99, 101, 102, 108n14, 110n25, 135, 150n5 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 78 Struve, Amalie, 48, 66n21, 152n23 Taylor, Bayard, 88 temperance, 2, 3, 4, 15, 16, 22, 30n4, 39–40, 52, 60, 61, 64n12, 80, 120–128, 158, 159, 160 Thomas Paine Society, 100 Tillmann, F., 81–83, 90, 107n10, 169 transatlantic space, 2, 21, 23, 30,62, 112, 124, 146, 147, 156–57, 165, 166, 167, 171 translation linguistic, 75, 105, 106, 118, 147, 161–2, 163 as mediation, 28–29, 68, 75, 84–91, 105–6, 147, 167 Truth, Sojourner, 101, 109n24, 134 universal sisterhood, 2, 5–8, 10, 48, 72, 76, 78–79, 106, 143–44, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 165, 170–71, 172n2, 173n9 Wagner, Maria, 78, 110n28 Waite, Jessie, 132–3 Weil, Mathilde C., 57–58 Weinhagen, Anna L., 124–25 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 5, 75

192 Wellenreuther, Hermann, 64n13 Wellman, Judith, 5 Wendt, Charles, 33, 63n3 Wendt, Mathilde, 2, 14, 19, 22–23, 33– 34, 62n2, 63nn4–5, 93, 103, 152n23, 166–67, 168, 171 and AWSA, 51–53, 56, 168 Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, 22, 54–61, 61–62 editor of Die Neue Zeit, 22, 44–54, 61–62, 64n9, 65nn19–20 “Die Frauenfrage”, 47–49 “Die Frauenrechtsbewegung”, 47, 49–51 immigration to the US, 22 “Kurze geschichtliche Uebersicht der Frauenrechtsbewegung, in Europa und den ver Staaten von Nordamerika”, 47, 53

Index letter to the International Council of Women, 1888, 34, 63n7 Willard, Frances, 173n9 Wischnewetzky, Florence Kelley, 145 Wisconsin Woman Suff rage Association, 22, 79, 97 Wittke, Carl, 37, 64nn9–10, 65n20, 73 Wolf, Francie, 159 women’s suff rage, 80, 120–21, 135–36, 130, 135, 138 women’s vote, 7, 9, 11, 93–94 Wright, Fanny, 70 Wright, Francis, 50 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 75 Zakrzewska, Marie, 143