Meredith Tax

Meredith Tax is US director of the Centre for Secular Space, and a writer and political activist. She was a member of Bread and Roses, an early socialist-feminist group in Boston, and her 1970 essay 'Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life' is considered a founding document of the US women's liberation movement. She has written The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (1980; 2001); two historical novels, Rivington Street (1982; 2001) and Union Square (1988; 2001); a children's picture book, Families (1981; 1996, 1998), and many political and literary essays, for the Nation among other journals. In 1986, she and Grace Paley initiated the PEN American Centre Women's Committee and became its co-chairs; Meredith 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.