[1]: 134 Her family worked as contract laborers in Louisiana and later settled in Connecticut, where they found employment in manufacturing.
Antolini began working as a factory laborer at the age of fourteen and only received one year of elementary school.
[2]: 53 Antolini joined the anarchist movement in 1916 after having prior exposure to the newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva through her brother Alberto,[3][2]: 53, 70 the same year she married her husband August Segata, a member of Italian rebel organization Gruppo I Liberi.
[4]: 110 In 1918 Antolini was arrested for transporting dynamite to Chicago and spent six months in a prison in Jefferson City, Missouri alongside Emma Goldman and Kate Richards O'Hare, who were imprisoned in the same facility.
[4]: 121 Following her release, Antolini moved to Detroit, where she met and married a Sicilian man named Jerome Pomilia.