Clarissa Dixon
Portrait of Dixonc. 1910
Born	(1851-11-30)November 30, 1851 Hennepin, Illinois, U.S.
Died	May 15, 1916(1916-05-15) (aged 64) Menlo Park, California, U.S.
Occupation	Author activist poet teacher
Notable works	Janet and Her Dear Phebe (1909)
Spouse	George Davidson ​ ​ (m. 1869; div. 1890)​ Harry Cowell ​ ​ (m. 1893; div. 1903)​
Children	2 (includingHenry Cowell)

Clara "Clarissa" Belnap Dixon^[a][b] (November 30, 1851 – May 15, 1916) was an Americananarchist philosopher, labor activist,feminist and writer who lived at various times in theGreat Plains and California. She dedicated much of her life for writing articles advocating forsocialism, personal memoirs, and incidentalpoetry. She was the mother ofavant-garde composerHenry Cowell.

Clara Belnap Dixon was born on November 30, 1851, inHennepin, Illinois, a small town on theIllinois River about forty miles north ofBloomington, towoodworker Samuel Asenath Dixon and Bethshua Dixon (née Nash).^[1] The family's ancestry was of mostlyScotch and Irish descent, but Samuel's lineage was partially English and had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomerJeremiah Dixon, one of the surveyors behind the AmericanMason–Dixon line.^[2]

Clarissa was the second of five children born to Samuel and Bethshua. The family moved at some point, to let all the children to attend free public school and church in the small village of Amityville, nearEddyville, Iowa. The area was an unassuming Midwesternplains farming community some forty miles southeast ofDes Moines, which suited the young couple's rural sensibilities. She was raised in a strictfundamentalist Christian household.^[3]

Frustrated by her parents' beliefs, she renounced her church membership and left the town at age seventeen, relocating to the nearby city ofKirkville inWapello County. It was there where she met George Davidson, a young farmhand. They were wed in 1869 and had their only son, Clarence, little more than a year later in 1871.^[3] At the same time, Clarissa decided to seek a thorough education at the age of nineteen, and attended a private school in nearbyOttumwa. She later became one of the six teachers in all of Eddyville, working for around eight years largely in small, one-room country schools.^[3]

As a young woman, Dixon regularly attendedlabor movement,communist, andanarchist gatherings inChicago. Using a toy typesetting device, she produced a political leaflet, functioning as an unsalaried specialist and representative regarding labor reform andwomen's suffrage for local newspapers. Her devotion to these reforms led her to voluntarily write for these publications – such asThe Chicago Sentinel,The American Nonconformist, andThe Iowa Farmers' Tribune — papers that circulated widely but didn't pay their writers.^[4]

As early as 1883, Dixon's politically charged essays andmanifestos were attracting both praise and scorn from around the country. She was being solicited by papers and magazines from the nation's largest cities, though her popularity mainly rested among the more impoverished communities of the northern Midwest.^[5] In 1889 she would joinSigismund Danielewicz's newCalifornia-based anarchist paperThe Beacon. Dixon became a semi-regular contributor toThe Beacon while still living in distant Kirkville, Iowa.^[6]

Urging to escape the Midwest and its fundamentalist atmosphere, she took the train alone toSan Francisco in 1890, a city with a then-lively colony of unconventional writers.^[7] Dixon, it has been suggested, may have been specifically drawn to thebohemianism of the literary community, but it's unknown precisely which aspects of the city and California more broadly appealed to her.^[4] After moving to California, Danielewicz handed overThe Beacon's printing equipment and subscription list to her. Dixon's friendships during this period included the writersJack London,George Sterling andAmbrose Bierce.^[8]

While in San Francisco, she teamed up with a youngIrish immigrant, Harry Cowell, to found the fortnightly anarchist paper,Enfant Terrible.^[5] She used this opportunity to provide a more unfiltered and strong-willed disposition. Her style of writing and use of propaganda is exemplified in one ofEnfant Terrible's first 1891 publications:

The clergyman has no more right than theclown to marry people. The judge has no more right than the jail-bird to sentence people. The policeman has no more right than thepauper to arrest people. The tax collector has no more right than any other thief to filch people's property. The legislator has no more right than the lackey to make laws. I have no reverence for God, nor parents, nor sovereigns, nor presidents, nor popes, nor bishops, nor dead bodies, nor ancient institutions; in short, I have no reverence for any person or thing.^[5]

As well as in a 1892 article fromthe Boston journalLiberty:

The State uses money robbed from the parents to perpetuate its powers of robbery by instructing their children in its own interest. The church also, uses its power to perpetuate its power. And to these twin leeches... are the tender minds of babies entrusted for education.^[9][10]

Dixon opposed therevolutionary philosophy of socialism, calling for a more "evolutionary" than "revolutionary" transformation, reinforcing education and cultivation of individual freedom over insurrection, achievingutopia via gradualreform. She ended a treatise inThe Enquirer by advocating for men and women to organize with the call, "Working people of the world, unite; you have only your chains to lose, you have a world to win."^[6]

Dixon and Cowell would marry in 1893.^[11] She lost most of her possessions in the1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.^[12] She would flee the state and settle with her mother's family in the American Plains and Midwest, later settling briefly inNew York City.^[6]

She released her only published book in February 1909, thesapphic feminist novelJanet and Her Dear Phebe, whichThe 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".^[13] TheFrederick A. Stokes Company would contractually pay her $100 for the novel, but after poor sales, she received no royalties and the publishing company refused multiple manuscripts for new material she sent them over the following four years.^[14]

Dixon's second child,Henry Dixon Cowell, was born in 1897, at which point she was forty-six years old.^[15][16][17] The married Cowell couple built a crude cottage on the outskirts ofMenlo Park, California. Clarissa took a particular interest in anti-authoritarian relations between parents and children, adopting aSpencerian approach to raising the young boy, writing, "[Spencer] has shown that the status of women and children improves in proportion to the decline ofmilitarism and the advance ofindustrialism."^[10]

Due to an ongoing affair between Harry and a French mistress, the Cowells amicably divorced in 1903, by which time Henry was five years old. Clarissa from then on raised Henry as a single mother.^[16]

In 1914, Dixon began a typed manuscript of biographical details of her son Henry's early life,^[18] which she completed before her death frombreast cancer in 1916, at age 64.^[1]

In the years following her death, Henry sold Clarissa's poetry collection. He additionally set sixteen of his mother's poems to music.^[14]

• Anarchism in the United States
• History of the socialist movement in the United States

• Hicks, Michael (2002).Henry Cowell, Bohemian. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.ISBN 0-252-02751-5.
• Rich, Alan (1995).American Pioneers: Ives to Cage and Beyond. Phaidon Press.ISBN 0-714-83173-5.
• Sachs, Joel (2012).Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-510895-8.
• Dixon, Clarissa Belnap (1909).Janet and Her Dear Phebe. Frederick A. Stokes.

• Frog Peak Music online edition ofJanet and Her Dear Phebe

• 1851 births
• 1916 deaths
• 19th-century American educators
• 19th-century American memoirists
• 19th-century American newspaper founders
• 19th-century American non-fiction writers
• 19th-century American poets
• 19th-century American women educators
• 20th-century American non-fiction writers
• 20th-century American novelists
• 20th-century American women novelists
• 20th-century anarchists
• Civil rights activists from California
• Trade unionists from Illinois
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• American anarchist writers
• American anti-capitalists
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• American people of English descent
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• Deaths from breast cancer in California
• People from Hennepin, Illinois
• People from Menlo Park, California
• Poets from California
• Progressivism in the United States
• Trade unionists from Indiana
• Writers from San Francisco
• LGBTQ rights activists from California
• 19th-century American women poets

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