Tax, Meredith

TAX, MEREDITH (1942-2022). A leading intellectual and organizational figure in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Meredith Tax became a well-known novelist and political polemicist in later years. Less associated with the Left generally than with specific causes, gendered and global, she remained prominent throughout her life.

Born into a comfortably wealthy Jewish family in suburban Milwaukee, Tax entered Brandeis University to study English. After graduating in 1964, she moved to London on a Fulbright fellowship and there became involved with British and other expatriate American activists, first in antiwar, then in feminist movements. Returning to the United States to teach English at Brandeis, she quickly clashed with the administration. Blocked from future teaching jobs by a damaging letter in her file, she had already rejected a conventional career path and set herself on writing a history of US working women. One of the original members of Bread and Roses, a second-wave feminist project of linked collectives in the Boston area, she co-published Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life, in 1970 with Bread and Roses and the New England Free Press. This highly popular pamphlet wove her own personal experience with theory, identifying the societal roots and functions of women’s internalized oppression.

Tax herself meanwhile changed paths dramatically, by 1971 joining the hyper-sectarian Maoist movement. She moved to Chicago with her first husband, Jonathan Schwartz, both cadres in the October League (OL). Working for a time in a factory, she eventually clashed with OL leadership on women’s issues, prompting her expulsion, which also brought the end of her marriage and loss of childcare.

Relocated to the Upper West Side in New York and remarried, this time to the rising professor Marshall Berman, Tax reset herself as activist and published author of the Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (1980). The exploration of American women’s organizing helped inform her commitment to the formation of autonomous women’s groups working within coalitions. Her further writing included two historical novels depicting Jewish women on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century: Rivington Street (1983) and a sequel Union Square (1988). In later years, she divorced again.

A flood of varied activities followed. Tax became the founding co-chair of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, an early reproductive rights group in New York, and author of the children’s book Families (1981), which affirmed a variety of family forms. Teaching union members at the Murphy Institute of the City of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies, she was able to get her students’ writings published in a book she edited titled Night School Voices (2009). A co-founder of the Women’s Committee in PEN American Center, she became the first chair of the Women Writers’ Committee in International PEN, the Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Democracy, and in 2011 board chair of The Centre for Secular Space, an international women’s group formed to strengthen secularism.

Returning to literary polemics but now bitterly hostile toward her erstwhile comrades and to many participants in peace movements, she penned the highly polemical Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights (2013). She opposed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, surprising many of her fellow activists. Her final book project, in part championing the social experiment in heavily Kurdish Rojava, Syria, was realized in A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2015).

Alix Kates Shulman, “Meredith Tax,” The Nation, Oct.31, 2022.

Meredith Tax Papers, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University

Website of Meredith Tax, Writer and Feminist Organizer, https://www.meredithtax.org/blog.php.