Anna Kuliscioff

Born Anna Rosenstein near Simferopol, Crimea, to a wealthy merchant family, Anna Kuliscioff studied at the University of Zurich before moving to France in 1877. While in France, she adopted the pseudonym Kuliscioff. Deported the following year on charges related to her political activities, she moved to Italy along with her partner, Andrea Costa. Following a series of more arrests and deportations, Kuliscioff eventually settled in Milan, where she was among the first women in Italy to receive a doctorate in medicine. She went on to work as editor of the socialist periodical Critica Sociale, and in 1892 she established the Italian Socialist Party with her companion Filippo Turati. Her intellect made a strong impression in socialist circles, which were hardly immune to sexism: in a letter to Friedrich Engels in 1893, Antonio Labriola, another Italian Marxist philosopher and theoretician, wrote, “In Milan there is only one man, who, in reality, is a woman, Anna Kuliscioff.” Kuliscioff herself addressed questions of gender discrimination and male domination directly, as evident in “The Monopoly of Man.”