Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights, and Nativism, 1848–1890 by Michaela Bank, and: Von republikanischen Deutschen zu deutsch-amerikanischen Republikanern. Ein Beitrag zum Identitätswandel der deutschen Achtundvierziger in den Vereinigten Staaten 1850–1861 by Daniel Nagel, and: German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era by Alison Clark Efford (review)

The three monographs under consideration here are examples of a new direction in American studies that has become known as the “transnational turn.” Its objective, in the words of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, is to understand the United States by “looking beyond and across national borders”; and scholars are increasingly “interrogating borders both within and outside the nation and focusing on the multiple intersections and exchanges that flow across those borders” (Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 [2009]: 1). The three authors—Michaela Bank, Daniel Nagel, and Alison Clark Efford—are young historians whose specific areas of interest contribute to our comprehension of political, social, and cultural ideas brought to America or developed in America by German immigrants, thus influencing their new homeland, their old homeland, and also the immigrants themselves. They insist on the interrelationship between events and developments on the two sides of the Atlantic in this period of transnational cross-fertilization; and they are all working in the field of what we call German-American studies, bringing a new perspective to the discipline.

Michaela Bank (Ph.D. in American Studies from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, 2009), focuses on three women, Mathilde Wendt, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, and Clara Neymann, and the roles they played within the American women’s rights movement. These German-American women had a unique and difficult position: they were both insiders and outsiders, who met with resistance not only within the German-American community, but also among Anglo-American women’s rights activists and defenders. After all, most German Americans routinely equated the women’s movement with nativism—i.e., the anti-immigration and anti-immigrant crusade of this era that led to the rise of the Know-Nothing party, as well as to prejudice and discrimination of all kinds—and viewed its advocates as supporters of prohibition and various other kinds of anti-immigrant legislation, while their Anglo-American counterparts were suspicious of immigrants associated with the movement. It was, in fact, extremely difficult to be a member of the women’s rights movement and also the German-American community. As Bank shows, all three of them used their platforms increasingly not only to argue for women’s rights, but also to push back against nativism, thus becoming translators between different constituencies within this country—the Americans and the Germans—as well as between those in Europe and those in the United States.

Bank provides no more than a “general biographical narrative” (62) for Mathilde (Neymann) Wendt, as even basic information—including her birth and death dates—is not available. She immigrated together with her family in 1848 at the age of 20 and lived first in Milwaukee, where she married Charles Wendt, also an immigrant from German lands. At some point the couple moved to New York, where Mathilde Wendt owned and edited a German-language newspaper entitled Die Neue Zeit (1869–1872) and became first president of the so-called Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsverein, founded in 1872. Bank presents her as being “at the center of a German-American oppositional women’s rights movement in New York City in the 1870s,” there representing “a critical voice against the US-American women’s rights movement” (33). However, the document she discusses at greatest length to prove...