Radical Relationships

An extraordinary collection of letters that documents the trans-Atlantic friendship and partnership of two astonishing women, one American, one German, who traversed two continents consumed in political turmoil which served as the background to their intertwined personal and political lives. As champions of women’s rights, abolition, and socialism, Mathilde Franziska Anneke and Mary Booth struggled to balance family life—including separations, marital frustrations, loss of children, illness—with political activism. The volume deepens our understanding of complex, loving same-sex relationships that buoyed the women emotionally and fulfilled them in ways their husbands did and could not. The entries also uncover the common ground shared by European radicals and American reformers and permit a glimpse at the American Civil War through the eyes of Europeans. Alison Clark Efford and Viktorija Bilic, the editors of this unique volume, are to be commended for making these important letters accessible to English-speaking audiences.

-- Diane Miller Sommerville * author of Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South *

Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s extraordinary life as a revolutionary, feminist, abolitionist, and journalist in the mid-nineteenth century has long deserved wider recognition. Radical Relationships immerses readers in Anneke’s exciting world and helps readers grasp, better than any book before, the passions that motivated this extraordinary woman.

-- Tyler Anbinder * author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York *

Radical Relationships puts the spotlight on a remarkable nineteenth-century woman whose life has all the ingredients for a historical blockbuster. Skillfully translated by Viktorija Bilic and ably contextualized by Alison Efford, the letters from Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s inner circle tell a poignant transatlantic tale of love and war, politics and passion, betrayal and friendship. Readers will encounter a web of relationships that are as relevant today as they were radical in the past.

-- Mischa Honeck * author of We Are the Revolutionists *

Radical Relationships is a very welcome contribution to the fields of German American history, migration history, gender/women’s history, and Civil War history. . . . Efford and Bilic are an ideal team of editors.

-- Anke Ortlepp * author of Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange *

As they pivot from the mundane to the momentous, the letters in this engrossing collection capture the fraught connections between personal and general welfare in a precarious age.

-- Bonnie Carr O'Neill * American Literary Histo