Meredith Tax

Meredith Tax was born in Wisconsin and educated in the Milwaukee public school system. She attended Brandeis University, where she majored in English and graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, both of which she took at the University of London. In London, she became involved in the antiwar movement and decided she wanted to become an activist rather than an academic. Returning to the US in 1968, she continued her antiwar work and was one of the initiators of Bread and Roses, an early socialist-feminist organization in Boston. Her first important piece of writing, “Women and Her Mind: the Story of Everyday Life,” (1970) is considered a founding document of the women’s movement. She has described her early women’s movement experiences in an essay in The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (Crown, 1998).

Between 1969 and 1979, Tax worked at a variety of jobs, including academic piecework, factory, hospital, and secretarial labor, and freelance writing, while defining herself primarily in terms of her political activism. During this period, she moved from Boston to Chicago, where she was active in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. In 1976, she moved to New York, where she became a founding co-chair of one of the first reproductive rights organizations, CARASA, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse.

In 1979, an advance for her novel, Rivington Street, enabled her to begin to write full time. She completed a history book she had been working on for ten years, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917. It was published in 1980 and is still used in college history courses. Rivington Street, a leftwing feminist family saga of Jewish immigration, was published in 1982 and was a dual main selection of the Literary Guild. Its sequel, Union Square, was published in 1988.

Tax has also written many literary and political essays, mainly for the Village Voice and The Nation. Her children’s picture book, Families (1981) was a pioneering effort to present a non-normative view of the family. As part of a state mandated family life education curriculum in Fairfax Country, Virginia, it became the subject of a censorship campaign by the Christian Coalition in 1993, and was dropped by its publisher, Little Brown. The Feminist Press has since republished it in both English and Spanish.

In 1986, Tax and Grace Paley initiated the PEN American Center Women's Committee. Since that time, she has devoted much of her energy to defense and advocacy on behalf of censored women writers around the world. In 1991, she became founding Chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee and in 1994, she and a diverse board of other feminist writers founded the Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development, or Women’s WORLD, of which she is President.

Women’s WORLD has played an important role in exposing the connections between gender and censorship, and in defending women writers under attack. A number of Tax’s essays on gender-based censorship and related issues, including “World Culture War,” are posted on the Women’s WORLD website, www.wworld.org.

Meredith Tax has been married and divorced twice, and has two children.