Anna Strunsky Walling was known as an early 20th-century Jewish-American author and advocate of socialism based in San Francisco, California, and New York City. She was primarily a novelist, but also wrote about social problems and the labor movement. Born in the Russian Empire in what is now Belarus, she emigrated as a child with her family to New York City in the United States in 1886. After a few years they moved to San Francisco. Strunsky studied at Stanford University, where she met writer Jack London and later became part of a radical group known as "The Crowd", of which London was also a member. They wrote an epistolary novel together, publishing it anonymously in 1903. She wrote a memoir of him after his early death in 1916.

The Woman's Peace Party (WPP) was an American pacifist and feminist organization formally established in January 1915 in response to World War I. The organization is remembered as the first American peace organization to make use of direct action tactics such as public demonstration. The Woman's Peace Party became the American section of an international organization known as the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace later in 1915, a group which later changed its name to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.