Meredith Tax, a second-wave feminist and author whose scholarship on labor movements informed her own class-conscious activism, died on Sept. 25 at a hospice facility in Teaneck, N.J. She was 80.

The cause was breast cancer, said her son, Elijah Tax-Berman.

Ms. 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.

Ms. Tax fell in love there with an American labor organizer, Jonathan Schwartz, who would become her husband, and they eventually moved to Boston, where Ms. Tax and others started Bread and Roses, a socialist-feminist collective. There, Ms. Tax began researching the labor and suffrage movements of the late 19th century.

That research led to her first book, published in 1980 and reissued just this year. Its title, “The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917,” might suggest that it would be a slog to read, but Ms. Tax was an engaging writer on a mission: to learn how the alliances of the past — when members of the nascent women’s movement at the turn of the 20th century worked alongside trade union activists, anarchists, Marxists and others involved in social change — might help the organization of second-wave feminism.

The movement had been devolving into factions in those heady early years, and Ms. Tax and many others had found it, as she put it, “too narrow in its social base, too white and too politically immature to be able to reach its goals.”

It would take 10 years for the book to find a publisher. In the meantime, Ms. Tax was busy.

She joined the October League, a Marxist organization, but was thrown out for criticizing its treatment of women. (Its leadership thought she had a bad attitude, she recalled later.) She worked on an assembly line in a Zenith factory in Chicago, then as a nurse’s aide. She contributed an essay to the buzzy feminist journal Notes From the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, where her writing appeared alongside that of Kate Millet, Carol Hanisch and other heroines of feminism’s second wave.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/books/meredith-tax-dead.html