Meredith Tax, "a second-wave feminist and author whose scholarship on labor movements informed her own class-conscious activism," died September 25 at age 80, the New York Times reported. Tax "was in London studying English literature on a fellowship when the Vietnam War escalated, and she and her roommate, Ann Barr Snitow, who would go on to help found the organization New York Radical Feminists, threw themselves into the antiwar movement." She met American labor organizer Jonathan Schwartz, who would become her husband, and they eventually moved to Boston, where Tax and others started Bread and Roses, a socialist-feminist collective.
She began researching the labor and suffrage movements of the late 19th century, which led to her first book, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (1980). It would take 10 years for the book to find a publisher, during which Tax joined the October League (from which she was expelled for criticizing its treatment of women), worked on an assembly line in a Zenith factory in Chicago, then as a nurse's aide. She contributed an essay to the feminist journal Notes From the Second Year: Women's Liberation. In 1977, Tax, Alix Kates Shulman and others formed a political action group called the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. "She never stopped being a leftist feminist," Shulman told the Times. "She never abandoned her commitment to the working class and to the poor."
Tax's other books include the historical sagas Rivington Street (1982) and Union Square (1988), as well as a children's book, Families (illustrated by Marylin Hafner), "that in 1994--13 years after it was published--was banned in Fairfax, Va., for its depiction of divorce and of single, gay and lesbian parenting," the Times noted. With Grace Paley, she was a founder of the International PEN Women's Writers Committee, and went on to run other international organizations devoted to free speech and women's rights, including two groups that supported an all-female Kurdish militia in northern Syria. The Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2016), her fifth book, is an account of that militia's actions. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 was republished in paperback earlier this year by Verso ($29.95).
