Meredith Tax
Meredith Tax used her writing both to highlight the tremendous upheaval of her own times and to reimagine the struggles of suffragists and union organizers. Tax became involved with the anti-war movement in 1968 and also helped create Bread and Roses, an early feminist-socialist collective. From the start, her writing intertwined with her activism—her 1970 article “Woman and her Mind: The Story of Daily Life” is considered one of the founding documents of the women’s movement. She served as founding co-chair for the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, which sparked the Reproductive Rights National Network. Tax went on to write a history of class conflict in the suffrage movement and two historical novels, Rivington Street and Union Square, depicting the struggles of a union organizer in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. When her children’s book, Families, sparked a 1993 censorship case for depicting nontraditional families, Tax created Women’s WORLD, an international free-speech organization that fights gender-based censorship. Tax served as US director and head writer for the Centre for Secular Space, a think tank that opposes fundamentalism and works to promote human rights. She died on September 25, 2022.