Dr. Antoinette F. Konikow was a leading national force in the early birth control and sex education movement. Here, in an article on organizing working class women home-workers, The Boston Mothers League, she points out both the importance of those issues for working class women, and–contrary to the attitude of the Party–the value of organizing on their basis. Konikow was a Russian-born Jewish revolutionary and women’s physician who joined Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor group in 1891 while in Switzerland. Emigrating to the U.S. she was a voice on the far left of the socialist movement for the next 50 years. She became a member of the Boston Socialist Labor Party in 1893; left because of De Leon; was a founding member of Debs’ Social Democracy of American in 1897; was at the formation of Socialist Party in 1901; helped form the Socialist Party’s Women Commission in 1908 and inaugurate Women’s Day in 1909; worked with S.J. Rutgers and Louis Fraina in the Socialist Propaganda League of America and Left Wing; supported the Zimmerwald Left; was a charter member of the Communist Party of America in 1919; an original Left Oppositionist in the U.S. supporting Trotsky’s position several years before Cannon. She remained a leader in the Socialist Workers Party until her 1946 death.

‘Massachusetts Mothers League Shows Way for Organization of Working Class Women’ by Dr. Antoinette F. Konikow from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 96. July 10, 1924.

BOSTON, Mass., July 9. To organize women working in shops does not present the difficulties we meet in trying to reach the woman at home, the housekeeper and mother.

The working woman in shop and factory is surrounded by almost the same conditions as her men-comrades. She feels the exploitation of her boss directly, can be urged to join her trade union organization, and is more in touch with the educational work done by the average worker. It is true, nevertheless, that the organization of working women is more difficult than that of working men. Women of the proletariat still have the outlook upon their work as one of temporary duration, and it takes some, time before they realize the benefits in unionism.

Organize Housekeepers.

We meet these same women later, after marriage, in the homes, and it is important to organize them as housekeepers and mothers, altho this occupation has not generally been recognized as a trade. Such an organization of housewives and mothers is indeed directed not against the so-called “boss” of the home, the husband, but against the exploiting system. For women realize that husband and wife are both exploited by the capitalist system.

The housewife and mother must organize in order to learn how to fight her class battle shoulder to shoulder with her husband. The organization of women collectively, as a class unit, is of utmost importance. Backward women are always the element supporting all reactionary movements, capitalistic, monarchistic, even fantastic, and their influence should not be underestimated. The question therefore arises how to approach the mother and housekeeper. Clearly, by finding out what particular problems interest them and confront them.

Mothers’ League.

The Mothers’ league of Massachusetts, which has been in existence for many years, has had quite a little experience. In this line, and, as a result, has a fine membership of class conscious women. It has organized women housekeepers to fight against the exploitation of landlords by means of tenement leagues; against high prices of foodstuffs by organizing meat strikes and parades of protest.

The prices of food, bread and meat and high rents were life problems which actually confronted them, and women were deeply Interested in them, and rallied around their more energetic sisters. As a result of meat strikes and bread strikes, co-operative movements were started. Women gave their full support to co-operative bakeries, like the one at Brockton; to co-operative meat markets, like the one existing for a time in Malden. The Mothers’ league of Massachusetts also enlisted the support of women for strikers in distress. The Malden branch arranged for a daily lunch for strikers of a shoe factory near Malden, and kept it up during the many weeks of this strike. The Brockton branch did its utmost to help the striking shoe workers in their long and desperate struggle.

Communist Program.

The Mothers’ league of Massachusetts has branches in Roxbury, West End, Dorchester, Chelsea, Malden, Lynn, Brockton and in Springfield. Its platform is straight Communist, and the members often find themselves in conflict with other women’s organizations whose conception of the class struggle. If not nil, is somewhat hazy.

Women are only too easily carried away by offices of charity, and the Mothers’ league has done especially good work in exposing the basic inefficiency of charity as a means of solving workers’ problems. The movement which began among rich ladies to Americanize the foreigners has met at its hands with the contempt it justly deserves. It does one’s heart good to listen to Mrs. Eva Hoffman, the organizer of the league, exposing these grand ladies come to teach the poor foreigners how to make a relishing meal out of a 2-cent bone, or a cake without eggs—ladles who condescend actually to play the piano for these poor, ignorant women and to dance with them. Surely these working women can have no reason to complain of hardships. If they receive so much attention at the hands of their rich sisters, who give them free tea, cakes and fine music.

How happy must these charitable ladies feel when they return in their limousines to their rich homes, where the bones they advise for use in the slums are fed to the dogs perhaps. They think they have solved the social problem and are free to devote themselves to less arduous pursuits. It is small wonder that Mrs. Hoffman finds strong response among the women housekeepers who have Joined the league.

Birth Control Interests Mothers.

Another subject which arouses a great deal of attention among women workers is the question of sex hygiene and birth control. At this some of our comrades will perhaps lift their eyebrows. Why should we Communists have anything to do with that fad? Birth control may be a fad to a rich woman, it may be exploited by antiquated Malthusians, but the fact that wrong kinds of people are interested in the problem does not make it less vital to the working woman, who has no far fetched theories connected with it—only the every day common sense interest in relieving herself from the overburdening load of a large family. Married women can obtain more leisure, health and some economic relief thru birth control. It does not mean that birth control is the cure for all ills, as some followers of it claim. It is one of the most important, practical, every day problems in the life of every woman, particularly of a working woman. This we Communists, who want to understand actual life worries of women, have to consider.

It is not mere chance that a lecture on birth control always draws a large crowd of women, working women even more than women of the upper classes.

Tell Union Women, Too.

I have proved that to a manager of the lectures for a large union consisting of women. I advised him to organize lectures on sex hygiene, and, behold! They were better attended than any other lectures given before. In my own experience I have found that among women in unions, women of the working class, of different nationalities, interest in sex hygiene lectures is great, and the lectures—to which women go looking for information on birth control—are always crowded. Our comrades have grounds for prejudice against this topic, because it is and has been exploited by people who try to concentrate all energy upon that subject, and think birth control a panacea for poverty and war.

Many prominent leaders of birth control, however, have given up such an attitude. Mrs. Mary Dennet of the Voluntary Parenthood league raps the fallacies of Malthus, and the same has been done by Dr. Marie Stopes of England, founder of the first birth control clinic there.

As long as birth control is an important part of the woman worker’s life, it is our duty to give her the correct viewpoint, seeing how falsely the idea had been exploited. Otherwise one might as well ignore trade unionism because Gompers & Co. think to achieve the worker’s emancipation by it alone.

The experience of the Mothers’ League of Massachusetts clearly points out the way to reach women—wives and housekeepers—and organize them into a class conscious group responding to their economic interests and aiding them in their solution, be that problem of rent, food or birth control.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n095-jul-10-1924-DW-LOC.pdf