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Eighty-six years before a group of Northern California women spelled P-E-A-C-E with their bare bodies to oppose war with Iraq, a forthright socialite who kept her clothes on was just as outspoken about World War I.
The properly brought-up Los Angeles woman was threatened with tar and feathers and kept under government surveillance for standing up for peace amid a clamor for war. She did so at a time when she, like other women, wasn't even allowed to vote.
Fanny Bixby Spencer, one of California's richest women, was a gutsy turn-of-the-century social and political activist who cared more for her causes than for the approval of society.
From the slums of Boston and San Francisco to the streets of Los Angeles and the farmlands of Costa Mesa, her turbulent political career was marked by a commitment to the downtrodden and to a world free of war. She was a celebrity heroine to many, and a celebrity dupe to others who jeered her in the streets. Daughter of Jotham Bixby, "the father of Long Beach," she was part playwright, poet, social worker and philanthropist who roused emotions with her advocacy of radical causes, including organized labor, women's suffrage and halting the child-labor abuses that helped shape 20th century Los Angeles.
Like a rebel in paradise, she spent most of her life caught up in socialism and feminism. But she could retreat from that hurly-burly to the bucolic setting of her birth, a two-story adobe on the Rancho Los Cerritos overlooking the Los Angeles River.
She was born Fanny Weston Bixby in 1879 and grew up in one of Los Angeles' wealthiest families, owners of the 27,000-acre sheep ranch that evolved into the cities of Long Beach, Downey, Paramount and Lakewood.
It was there that her education in socialism began in the 1880s.
As a child she observed her grandfather, the Rev. George W. Hathaway, telling stories about his career. He had been an avid abolitionist and Congregationalist minister in Maine who braved a disapproving crowd by inviting suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone to speak to his congregation.
Later, he turned his home into an underground railway station to help runaway slaves escape to freedom. His granddaughter Fanny, a risk-taker like her grandfather, would later write...