From collection Candidates
Dr. Antoinette F. Konikow was a physician in Boston, Massachusetts and a Socialist party candidate for the Boston School Committee in 1901, 1902, 1904, and again in 1905. She was a socialist activist from the 1890s onward. Konikow was also an early and ardent advocate of birth control, and in the early 1920s developed, with her son-in-law, an anti spermicidal jelly. She published a pamphlet "Voluntary Motherhood," in 1923, tying the independence of women to control over their reproductive health. In 1931 Konikow published The Physician’s Manual of Birth Control. By the 1920s Konikow identified as a Communist, and she traveled to the Soviet Union in 1926 as an expert on birth control methods. She was one of the founders of the Communist Party in the U.S. Disenchanted with party rivalries she was one of the founders of a Trotskyist group in Boston, the Independent Communist League, which was dedicated to opposing Stalin. In 1924 Konikow was a Worker's Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. She was one of the first Jewish women candidates for elected office.
