Antoinette Konikow was born
Antoinette Bucholz in Orenburg, Russia, on the Volga River, near
Kazakhstan, of ethnic Jewish parents, both of whom were socialists.
She went to secondary school in Odessa. At 19, she went to university
in Zurich, Switzerland, and studied medicine. She joined George
Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor Group, the first Russian Marxist
group and the predecessor of the organization that later split into
the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. Bryan Palmer, in his book James
Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928,
mentions that Konikow abruptly left Zurich after an incident
involving explosives at a boarding house that she was staying at with
fellow radicals. Konikow immigrated to the U.S. with her husband in
1893 and completed her medical education at Tufts University, then
Tufts College, near Boston, graduating with honors.
In the U.S., Konikow remained
involved in the socialist movement. The same year she emigrated to
America she became an organizer with unemployed immigrant workers and
then joined the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party. She was very active
in the Workers Circle, a Jewish mutual aid society, and learned
Yiddish (which she did not speak in Russia) to aid in her work with
immigrants. Konikow left the SLP in 1897 over its bureaucratism and
dogmatism. She worked with Eugene Debs and Victor Berger and was
active in several short-lived socialist groups they organized. At one
point, she worked with a dissident group that split from the SLP and
attempted to convince them to join Debs’ and Berger’s
organization. She then became a founding member of the Socialist
Party of America and was a delegate to their first convention in
1901. She worked with Eugene Debs and became a leader of the
Socialist Sunday School movement, a socialist youth education project
designed as an alternative to Sunday religious instruction for young
people. Under her influence, this movement was renamed the “Socialist
Schools of Science.” Konikow also served on the Socialist Party’s
five-person Women’s Commission. She became known as a passionate
speaker and was a tireless advocate for women’s rights in a
repressive era.
Antoinette Konikow had two
children. She divorced her husband, Moses Konikow, in 1910, at a time
when divorce was difficult. Her divorce was reported in the New York
Times, which called her a “prominent Socialist orator.” A year
later, Konikow spoke out in defense of Meta Fuller, who had been
widely criticized after divorcing the socialist novelist Upton
Sinclair. The New York Times again mentioned her, quoting her letter
of solidarity to Fuller, which said, “Many thousands are throwing
mud at you and speaking with bitterness for the simple reason that
they all envy your display of courage, open-heartedness, and your
love for truthfulness.”
After the First World War began in
Europe in 1914, Konikow toured the U.S., speaking against the war.
She was inspired by the German socialist Karl Liebknecht, who, at
much risk to himself, spoke out against social patriotism in Germany.
Konikow was a big supporter of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1919, when the Socialist Party’s
left wings split in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Konikow
joined the radical immigrant-dominated Communist Party of America,
one of the two main Communist factions to split from the SP in that
year. After the factions unified, she became active in the Workers’
Party, the above-ground branch of the then-partly-underground
Communist Party of America.
She served as chair of the New
England division of the Communist Party’s National Defense
Committee, a CP organization dedicated to raising money to cover the
party’s legal defense needs. In 1924, she was the Workers’ Party
candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.
As a doctor,Konikow served
working-class and immigrant women at her clinic in the Boston area
for many years. The late 19th and early 20th century was a sexually
very repressive era in the U.S.. From the mid-19th century onwards,
women’s reproductive choices had been increasingly medicalized and
taken out of their hands. The 1873 Comstock Law banned the sale of
contraceptives and the dissemination of abortion and birth control
information though the U.S. mail. By 1900, some form of abortion was
a felony in every U.S. state. In challenging this, Konikow became one
of the pioneers of the U.S. birth control movement. Konikow
frequently performed abortions and provided contraceptive information
to her patients, often writing her medical notes in code to protect
both herself and her clients from the police raids she had been
subject to. In 1923, she published Voluntary Motherhood, the first
birth control manual by an American doctor, primarily oriented
towards immigrant women. In 1928, she was arrested for teaching
contraceptive use at a private home during a meeting of the Birth
Control Society of Massachusetts. This organization worked to defend
her, and she was acquitted. In 1931, she wrote the Physician’s
Manual of Birth Control to fight the ignorance of this issue within
the medical profession.
In 1926, Konikow visited the Soviet
Union with her son-in-law John Vanzler (who sometimes used the name
John Wright), also a socialist, a chemist, and later a translator of
Trotsky, to demonstrate a cheap spermicidal jelly they had jointly
developed. Her visit to the USSR solidified her growing
disillusionment with the direction the Soviet Union was taking, and
she developed sympathies with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. By
this time, the U.S. Communist Party, long beset by feuding factions,
had come increasingly under the influence of Stalin. The Soviet-led
Comintern had placed the unpopular and authoritarian Jay Lovestone as
CP leader. In 1928, a group of U.S. sympathizers of Trotsky and the
Left Opposition, James Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern, were
expelled from the Party. After Konikow expressed sympathies for
Trotsky, Lovestone abruptly summoned her to New York to appear before
the Party’s Political Committee to account for her views, placing
her in a difficult situation. Konikow’s reply to Lovestone revealed
Lovestone’s underhanded bureaucratic maneuvers and the degeneration
of the CP:
“You know well that going to New
York from Boston means quite an expense and that leaving my medical
practice for several days involves a big financial lost. Why can’t
a local committee consider my case?... According to the latest
decision of the Comintern we should have full inner party democracy.
Why does this not apply to the Trotsky Opposition?”
In reaction to Konikow’s letter,
Lovestone reportedly said, “It is obvious from her letter that she
is the worst kind of a Trotskyite biologically as well as
politically. The sooner we throw her out the better for the party.”
Konikow was expelled shortly thereafter. Interestingly, six months
after he expelled the Trotskyists, Lovestone himself was expelled
from the Party. He politically drifted to the right, and by the early
1960s, he was working with the CIA in Latin America, collaborating
with the Kennedy Administration to overthrow governments in Latin
America.
After her expulsion Konikow formed
a small Trotskyist organization in Boston, the Independent Communist
League, which merged with James Cannon’s Communist League, the
predecessor of the Socialist Workers’ Party, in 1929. In 1938, she
was made an honorary member of the then Trotskyist SWP’s governing
National Committee at its founding convention. Konikow provided an
important socialist feminist voice in the early U.S. American
Trotskyist movement, and in her 1941 article “Birth Control Is No
Panecea But It Deserves Labor’s Aid Against Reaction,” published
in the SWP’s The Militant, eloquently argued for the fight for
women’s reproductive freedom.
In November of 1938, the SWP held a
commemoration of Konikow’s 50 years as a revolutionary socialist.
Trotsky wrote to her for the occasion, saying, “We are proud, my
dear Antoinette, to have you in our ranks. You are a beautiful
example of energy and devotion for our youth. I embrace you with the
wish: Long live Antoinette Konikow.” Konikow said to the young
people who had come to the commemoration, “We place in your hands a
banner unsoiled. Many times it was dragged into the mud. We lifted it
up and lovingly cleansed it to give it to you. Under the red banner
of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, you will conquer”.
Antoinette Konikow passed away in
1946 in Boston while writing her memoirs.
>> The article above was written by Kate Frey, and is reprinted from Left Voice.
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