Tax, Meredith

Meredith Tax was born in Wisconsin on September 18, 1942. She was educated in the Milwaukee public school system and at Brandeis University, where she graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and with Woodrow Wilson and Fulbright fellowships. She then studied at the University of London where she became involved in the anti-war movement. Returning to the U.S. in 1968, she continued her anti-war activism and was one of the founding members of Boston's Bread and Roses collective, a socialist feminist group.

Her essay, Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Daily Life, (1970) is often considered a founding document of the woman's movement and is one of the first texts to discuss sexual harassment. Then moving to Chicago, she worked in factories and as a nurses aide and continued her activism in the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

In 1976, she moved to New York, and was founding cochair of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), which helped start the Reproductive Rights National Network, of which she was a steering committee member. She also was a parent initiator of an alternative public elementary school in District 3 in New York.

Tax's writings include a history book, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict (1980), two historical novels, Rivington Street (1982) and Union Square (1988), and a children's picture book, Families (1981).

In 1986, Tax and Grace Paley initiated the PEN American Center Women’s Committee and became its co-chairs; she later became founding Chair of International PEN’s Women Writers’ Committee and, in 1994, was founding President of Women’s WORLD, a global free speech network that fights gender-based censorship.

This biographical note was created in part from information provided on Tax's website, meredithtax.org

From the guide to the Meredith Tax papers, 1956-2009, (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)