Antoinette Konikow: Pioneer of socialism and feminism

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16 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1987 Day, March 8, we are printing the following article about one of the pioneers of the socialist and feminist movements in the United States: Antoinette BucholzKonikow.

March 8 was chosen in commemoration of the women garment workers' strike of 1908. On that date, women swept through the Lower East Side of New York City demanding the vote and an end to sweatshop conditions.

Dr. Antoinette Bucholz-Konikow was a founder of the American Trotskyist move -ment and a participant in all of the major American revolutionary parties of her time. She was also a pioneer of feminism and women's health.

Born in central Russia in 1869, Antoinette Bucholz grew up in Germany and attended medical school in Switzerland. In medical school she was exposed to socialist ideas. At age 17 she joined Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labor Group, Russia's first Marxist organization.

She married a fellow medical student, William Konikow. They moved together to Boston in 1893 and were deeply involved in the unemployed movement and with other Russian Marxists and intellectuals.

After some time as a member of the Socialist Labor Party, Konikow joined a group of socialists led by Eugene V. Debs-which founded the Socialist Party (SP).

In 1908 Konikow was one of the first members of the SP's newly formed Women's National Committee. Through this committee, she helped direct efforts to organize women into trade unions and the women's suffrage movement.

After graduating from Tufts College, Konikow resumed her medical practice in the Boston area. She fought against puritanism and ignorance that led to women's sexual repression. She believed that sex was a normal, healthy activity.

Konikow wrote several handbooks on women's health, including Voluntary Motherhood, which sold more than 10,000 copies in its first three editions. She wrote: "A woman can never obtain real independence unless her function of procreation is under her own control."

Konikow carried on an international discussion with birth-control advocates and doctors and even developed an inexpensive spermicidal jelly. Her weekly-illustrated lectures on women's health, reproduction, and contraception eventually led to her arrest for exhibiting contraceptives in public.

Although the SP formally opposed World War I, the right-wing leadership went along with President Wilson's war policies. Konikow was part of the left wing, which actively opposed the imperialist war.

She toured the United States, speaking to immigrant workers—often in German-as a symbol of international solidarity. This was at a time when German was eliminated from school curriculums, and other antiwar socialists, such as Kate O'Hare and Eugene V. Debs, were sentenced to long prison terms.

At the height of the government's anticommunist repression, in 1920, Konikow participated in the founding of the American Communist Party.

International events such as the failure of the Second International to oppose the First World War and the success of the Russian Revolution had convinced her of the need for a new International and new revolutionary parties based on the Bolshevik model.

Defended Trotsky In 1928, the Boston membership of the Communist Party was given a lecture demanding the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Comintern. Although Konikow was unaware of Trotsky's criticisms of the Stalinist bureaucracy, she was the only member who spoke out from the floor of the meeting to defend Trotsky.

Konikow argued that the local branch could not vote to endorse Trotsky's expulsion without seeing his political program. A few days later, she was sent word of her expulsion from the party.

Konikow started to organize a group of ex-members and prepare a bulletin. But before the first bulletin went to press, the group saw a statement by James P. Cannon and other expelled national committee members.

They, too, had been expelled for defending Trotsky. Cannon's group supported Trotsky's call for an International Left Opposition to oppose the undemo -Antoinette Koniko cratic Stalinist bureaucracy and its counter -revolutionary foreign policy.

Konikow was able to read Trotsky's document, and her group soon joined with Cannon's. Konikow was an active builder of the Boston branch of this new organization-eventually to become the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), to which Socialist Action traces its origin.

Throughout the 1930s and '40s, she oppression and especially focusing on the right of women to control their bodies.

After World War II, Konikow chaired the American Committee for Workers Relief, which sent food, clothing, and medicine to anti-fascist workers who had been in prisons and concentration camps during the war. She was an honorary member of the SWP national committee when she died in 1946 at the age of 77.

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wrote articles for the SWP's newspaper, The Militant, explaining women's specific