THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Meredith Jane Tax
September 18, 1942 – September 25, 2022
“I was in violent rebellion against a middle class suburban world in which women were expected to stay home and perform their wifely duties rather than have a public life.”
A writer and political activist since the late 1960s. Member of Bread and Roses, an early socialist-feminist group in Boston. Her 1970 essay, “Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life,” is considered a founding document of the movement. Active in the antiwar movement and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in the ’70s. In 1977 was founding co-chair of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), which helped start the Reproductive Rights National Network.
Author of several books, including a children’s picture book, Families, which became a censorship case when it was attacked by the Christian Coalition for its nontraditional approach to family structure. She has also written many political and literary essays, for The Nation among other journals. In 1986, along with Grace Paley, initiated the PEN American Center Women’s Committee and became its co-chairs. Founding Chair of International PEN’s Women Writers’ Committee. Founding President of Women’s WORLD, a global free speech network that fought gender-based censorship, 1994-2005.


Photo 1. London 1966. Photo by Ann Snitow. Photo 2. At a demonstration led by the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (Califano). New York, 1978.

Meredith Tax in 2016. (Miriam Berkley/Verso Books)
More About Meredith:
- Meredith Tax’s website
- Obituary
- Meredith Tax Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
- Wikipedia page
- Cited in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, pages 455-456