Clara "Clarissa" Belnap Dixon[a][b] (November 30, 1851 – May 15, 1916) was an American anarchist philosopher, labor activist, feminist and writer who lived at various times in the Great Plains and California.

[1] The family's ancestry was of mostly Scotch and Irish descent, but Samuel's lineage was partially English and had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomer Jeremiah Dixon, one of the surveyors behind the American Mason–Dixon line.

The family moved at some point, to let all the children to attend free public school and church in the small village of Amityville, near Eddyville, Iowa.

The area was an unassuming Midwestern plains farming community some forty miles southeast of Des Moines, which suited the young couple's rural sensibilities.

[3] Frustrated by her parents' beliefs, she renounced her church membership and left the town at age seventeen, relocating to the nearby city of Kirkville in Wapello County.

Using a toy typesetting device, she produced a political leaflet, functioning as an unsalaried specialist and representative regarding labor reform and women's suffrage for local newspapers.

Her devotion to these reforms led her to voluntarily write for these publications – such as The Chicago Sentinel, The American Nonconformist, and The Iowa Farmers' Tribune — papers that circulated widely but didn't pay their writers.

[7] Dixon, it has been suggested, may have been specifically drawn to the bohemianism of the literary community, but it's unknown precisely which aspects of the city and California more broadly appealed to her.

While in San Francisco, she teamed up with a young Irish immigrant, Harry Cowell, to found the fortnightly anarchist paper, Enfant Terrible.

[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 from breast cancer in 1916, at age 64.