17 Facts About Clarissa Dixon

Clara "Clarissa" Belnap Dixon was an American anarchist philosopher, labor activist, feminist and writer who lived at various times in the Great Plains and California.

Clarissa Dixon dedicated much of her life for writing articles advocating for socialism, personal memoirs, and incidental poetry.

Clarissa Dixon was the mother of avant-garde composer Henry Cowell.

Clara Belnap Dixon was born on November 30,1851, in Hennepin, Illinois, a small town on the Illinois River about forty miles north of Bloomington, to woodworker Samuel Asenath Dixon and Bethshua Dixon.

Clarissa Dixon was the second of five children born to Samuel and Bethshua.

Clarissa Dixon was raised in a strict fundamentalist Christian household.

Clarissa Dixon later became one of the six teachers in all of Eddyville, working for around eight years largely in small, one-room country schools.

Clarissa Dixon was being solicited by papers and magazines from the nation's largest cities, though her popularity mainly rest among the more impoverished communities of the northern Midwest.

Clarissa Dixon became a semi-regular contributor to The Beacon while still living in distant Kirkville, Iowa.

Clarissa Dixon used this opportunity to provide a more unfiltered and strong-willed disposition.

Clarissa Dixon opposed the revolutionary philosophy of socialism, calling for a more "evolutionary" than "revolutionary" transformation, reinforcing education and cultivation of individual freedom over insurrection, achieving utopia via gradual reform.

Clarissa Dixon lost most of her possessions in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Clarissa Dixon would flee the state and settle with her mother's family in the American Plains and Midwest, later settling briefly in New York City.

Clarissa Dixon released her only published book in February 1909, the sapphic feminist novel Janet and Her Dear Phebe, which The New York Times characterized at the time as, "a very intense sort of a love story in which the lovers are two little girls who are devoted to each other with that fervency known only to feminine childhood".

Clarissa Dixon's second child, Henry Clarissa Dixon Cowell, was born in 1897, at which point she was forty-six years old.

In 1914, Clarissa Dixon began a typed manuscript of biographical details of her son Henry's early life, which she completed before her death from breast cancer in 1916, at age 64.

Clarissa Dixon additionally set sixteen of his mother's poems to music.