Alix Dobkin was born in New York City on August 16, 1940. Her parents, William (Bill) Dobkin and Martha (Kunstlich) Dobkin, named their daughter after Martha’s older brother Alex Cecil Kunstlich (1908–1938), a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War who was executed by a Nationalist firing squad. The Dobkin family was not observant, but Dobkin became aware of antisemitism at an early age, from a neighbor girl whose antisemitic mother who would not let Dobkin into their apartment and from another early childhood acquaintance who called Dobkin a “dirty Jew.” Upon hearing this, Dobkin bit the other girl on the hand. 

Politics and music filled the Dobkin home. Bill and Martha were committed members of the American Communist Party, and Martha played records and sang along. Dobkin grew up listening to the socially and politically progressive music popular in many left-wing households in the 1940s and 1950s. Her early musical influences included the Red Army Chorus, Tubby the Tuba, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly, The Almanac Singers, and many others. Dobkin’s mother enrolled her in piano and music theory lessons at the Metropolitan School of Music in 1947. Dobkin did not actually learn to read music, though she did later learn the guitar.

The Dobkin family moved several times, to Philadelphia, to Kansas City, and back to Philadelphia. In 1953, Dobkin began to attend Camp Kinderland, a progressive Jewish summer camp that emphasized Yiddish culture and leftist politics. Much of her sense of Jewish identity came from singing Yiddish folksongs at Camp Kinderland. The camp also reinforced the politics that Dobkin had learned from her parents. She became a Communist at sixteen, the year after her parents officially left the Party Her parents had left after years of growing irritation with FBI surveillance, and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelation of Stalin’s list of brutal crimes gave them the final inspiration to quit. They were not pleased that Dobkin was making what they saw as their own mistake. Her father attempted to forbid her from becoming a Communist, but at sixteen, Dobkin was determined and independent and would not obey a direct command. The family did not speak about this decision again.

Dobkin attended Temple University, where she majored in fine art. While at Temple, she learned an extensive repertoire of world folk music and became part of the burgeoning urban folk music scene. At the same time, a friend introduced her to Philadelphia’s lesbian community. Although she spent several months in a romantic relationship with a female classmate, Dobkin did not yet identify as a lesbian, as she did not wish to identify herself with the low social status and the personal life crises she witnessed in the lesbian community in Philadelphia. In her memoir, she later acknowledged this refusal to use the word “lesbian” at this moment in her life as her “psychic shield.” 

In 1961, Dobkin met Herb Gart, a promoter and artist manager who played a key role in shaping the careers of popular musicians. Gart arranged gigs for her at folk clubs and bars in New York City. Upon graduating from Temple in 1962, Dobkin moved to Manhattan and embarked on a career as a singer in folk clubs. Gart arranged work for her at the Gaslight Café, a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village managed by Clarence “Papa” Hood, the father-in-law of the owner, John Moyant. The Gaslight Café became a hub for Beat poets and folk musicians and an important gig for performers building reputations in the Manhattan folk scene. Dobkin also worked at several other venues, including Gerde’s Folk City, an even more influential folk music club in Manhattan that showcased a variety of popular music genres, including folk, rock, punk, and blues, and launched the careers of many music stars including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Possibly because of local ordinances, Gerde’s required that all its performers be union members in order to keep its liquor license. Dobkin was delighted to become a member of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. 

During this period, Dobkin took performance lessons, expanded her repertoire of global folk songs, and even experimented with songwriting. She became friends with many other folksingers, including Bob Dylan, who offered her the opportunity to sing his “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Dobkin turned the song down, feeling that it did not fit her growing sense of her own personal musical style. She also drifted away from the Communist Party, as she lost touch with her college Party friends and focused on her musical career. By 1963, she was no longer an active member. She quit officially in 1964, though the FBI continued to take an interest in her until around 1970.

During her career in New York, Dobkin became close to Hood’s son Sam, and they married in 1965. They moved to Florida and opened a branch of the Gaslight Café, called the Gaslight South, in Coconut Grove, a neighborhood of Miami. However, the Miami area was not as welcoming to a mixed-race club as New York, and the Gaslight South closed in 1968. Dobkin and Sam moved back to New York. Their marriage began to falter, due in part to Sam’s growing alcoholism and Dobkin’s sense of rootlessness as an unemployed singer.

Dobkin became pregnant in 1970, partly in an effort to fill the void of a life without performances or a recording contract, and gave birth to her and Sam’s daughter Adrian Hood in late October of that year. Around this time, friends introduced Dobkin to all-women consciousness-raising groups, and Dobkin became a feminist. In 1971, she met Liza Cowan, the host of the feminist radio program “Electra Rewired,” and appeared on the show in December 1971. Dobkin and Cowan fell in love, and Dobkin began to investigate lesbian culture and the politics of lesbian feminism. She came out in 1972 as Cowan’s partner.

In the early 1970s, Dobkin formed the band Lavender Jane with Kay Gardner and Pat Moschetta, known as Patches Attom. She also founded a record label called Women’s Wax Works, employing only women. Through Women’s Wax Works, Dobkin and Lavender Jane produced their first album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, in 1973. Although Maxine Feldman’s 1972 single “Angry Atthis” was the first commercially released lesbian feminist song, Lavender Jane Loves Women established “women’s music” as a genre. In a 1994 interview, Dobkin clarified that women’s music “is music which is by, for, and about women. It’s not a sound. It’s not any particular style. It’s all styles.” In 1975, she released a follow-up album entitled Living With Lesbians.

Lavender Jane Loves Women and Living With Lesbians showcase Dobkin’s folk-pop style. Dobkin sings and plays acoustic guitar, accompanied by Gardner on flute and Attom on bass. The first track on Lavender Jane Loves Women, “The Woman In Your Life,” became such an iconic signifier of the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s that cartoonist Alison Bechdel included both an image of the Lavender Jane Loves Women album cover and a snippet of the lyrics to “The Woman In Your Life” in a 1992 cartoon panel illustrating her own college years. The albums also included songs such as “Lesbian Code” and “Amazon ABC,” a parody of the 1948 hit “A–You’re Adorable.” Dobkin’s lyrics captured both the humor and the subversive code of lesbian life in the 1970s. Her musical influence and visibility in the growing women’s music community earned her the nickname “Head Lesbian,” a phrase that appeared in many of her obituaries.

Dobkin released four albums between 1973 and 1990 and toured extensively. At her live performances, she always made sure to include at least one song in Yiddish. That song was often “Ot Azoy Nayt A Shnayder” (This is how a tailor sews), a nineteenth-century folksong about overworked tailors that spoke to Dobkin’s interest in labor rights. Music festival archivist Bonnie Morris observes that Dobkin frequently introduced this song with the words “Jews, like lesbians, were never meant to survive, and it was harder for me to come out as a Jew than as a lesbian” (Lilith, 2025). Dobkin was one of only a few artists in the women’s music scene who openly and proudly identified as Jewish.

Dobkin was an outspoken second-wave feminist. She spent the summer of 1971 on a farm in Vermont with her sister-in-law Lynn Hood and their children and found that she enjoyed the experience of living in the company of women only. This experience inspired her song “Caledonia County.” Dobkin came out during the rise of the lesbian separatist movement. As her own gender politics evolved, she advocated for liberation along strictly gendered lines, upholding the right of women to be free from men’s presence and domination. Dobkin frequently argued for “women-only” spaces and events. Her separatist politics included the belief that trans women were men using what she called “experimental surgery” to appropriate female identity and invade separatist spaces. She did not consider trans women to be women and opposed their presence and participation in what the second-wave feminist movement sometimes called “womyn-born womyn” events.

Dobkin performed frequently at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Michfest). From its inception, Michfest was a female-only space. Only women and girls were allowed on the festival grounds in Oceana County, with the only exception being for boys under the age of five who were present with their mothers. In the late 1970s, Lisa Vogel, the owner of Michfest, published an open letter to the women’s music collective Olivia Records condemning Olivia for employing a trans woman as a recording engineer and sound technician. Dobkin co-signed the letter. In 1991, Michfest expelled trans performer Nancy Burkholder, prompting trans activists to campaign in favor of trans inclusion at Michfest in 1992. Dobkin responded by hosting anti-trans workshops at Michfest, suggesting that trans performers should establish their own separate music festival.

In her later years, Dobkin served as co-director of the political activist group Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC) and as an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press. She published a memoir in 2009 entitled My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement.

Dobkin spent her later years living in Woodstock, New York. She died in her sleep on May 19, 2021, of a brain aneurysm and a stroke.