Konikow, Antoinette Bucholz

KONIKOW, ANTOINETTE BUCHOLZ (1869–1946). Physician, Socialist orator, and educator (in several languages), Antoinette Konikow fought for the rights of women, including the control of reproduction. Born in Central Russia and educated in Switzerland, she immigrated to the United States in 1893. She settled in Boston, joined the Massachusetts Socialist Labor Party and Boston Workman’s Circle and threw herself into unemployed organizing. Already fluent in at least five languages, she learned Yiddish to work among immigrants.

Married and a mother of two children, Konikow graduated with honors from Tufts University in 1902 and established a medical practice in a working-class neighborhood. Affiliated by this time with the Debsian Socialist party, she organized lectures for women on sex hygiene and the “physiology of sex.” Arrested for exhibiting contraceptives, Konikow nevertheless pushed American Socialists to consider “Die Sexualfrage,” which was common among their peers in Germany. She presented them evidence from the writings of Marx and Engels to illustrate the “wonderful interdependence of the manifold factors of human life, especially the factor of sex relations with the basic ones of economics.” Konikow combatted the reticence of many Socialists who preferred to put off the question until “after the revolution.” She insisted on activism, warning that otherwise Socialists would be merely “trotting in the tracks left by more daring investigators.” Despite some favorable responses, the Socialist Party never endorsed such a campaign.

Konikow served the Socialist Party in several capacities, as a delegate to national conventions and as a member of the National Woman’s Committee. In 1919, she attended the founding convention of the Communist Party of America. After its reorganization as the Workers Party of America, she served as a convention delegate and candidate for the US Senate from Massachusetts. Party activism, she believed, complemented her life-long dedication to women’s reproductive rights.

In 1923 Konikow published a handbook for women, Voluntary Motherhood, which in its first three editions sold more than 10,000 copies. Working with her son-in-law at the time, she also pursued the development of an inexpensive spermicidal jelly for birth control. Particularly concerned about educating physicians about their responsibility to women, Konikow published her Physicians’ Manual of Birth Control in 1931. Konikow also polemicized against population-control arguments, asserting that the right of women to control their bodies must be the basis for building a movement.

Konikow maintained her medical practice through the 1930s. In 1938, at the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, she was named an honorary member of its national committee. In the same year, the fifth edition of her landmark book, Voluntary Motherhood, appeared.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1981

Feeley, Diane. “Antoinette Konikow: Marxist and Feminist.” International Socialist Review 33 (January 1972).

Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Antoinette Konikow Archive. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/konikow/index.htm