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.

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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.