The 80-year-old Feminist Author and Activist Meredith Tax has Passed Away

Meredith Tax, a well-known second-wave feminism activist and author who pushed herself, her classmates, and society to reconsider entrenched beliefs about gender, race, and class, has passed away. She was 80. According to Tax's friend Frances Kissling, who did not immediately disclose information, this 80-year-old feminist author passed away on Sunday. Activist Ariane Brunet posted a notice of her passing on Facebook. A true activist, according to Brunet, would make damn sure we would hear about it and join the cause and could recognize the gravity of a women's battle wherever in the world. It doesn’t matter if a woman has a husband or not. Financial independence is vital for everyone. Being raised in an upper-class Jewish household in Milwaukee, Tax's life was frequently one of self-discovery. Before the 1960s politicized and radicalized her into studying the world instead of literature, this Brandeis University alumna had visions of a glittering career in the arts or a glass cage. Instead, she confronted Planned Parenthood and other proponents of abortion rights on the subject of sterilization abuse. This feminist author was expelled from the Leninist October League after criticizing their treatment of women. She was divisive even inside activist societies. So when she worked in a Zenith TV plant in Chicago in the 1970s and was the only person of color on the assembly line, she had to deal with her reckoning. In a short blog autobiography, this feminist author said, "The first thing I had to learn how to do was hard physical labor; the second was to shut up." I've always been an intelligent girl who loved to think for herself. I now had to learn how to listen very carefully, to listen like people do when they are in the minority, to pay attention to not just what others said but also to what they didn't say, to changes in their voices, and changes in their body language. Tax lamented the absence of a feminist alternative to Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street earlier in 2022. Instead, young feminists focus on social media, blogs, and campaigns. This approach requires paying a lot of attention to personalities, branding, and notoriety, she claimed in a piece for The Nation. Tax's viewpoint was contested by Rachel Carmona, executive director of Women's March. She described the sizable 2017 protests immediately after President Donald Trump's inauguration as an example of online activism changing itself into activism in the streets, on the ground, where and when needed most in a letter to The Nation. The nonfiction work "The Rising of the Women" as well as the novels "Rivington Street" and "Union Square" were all written by Tax. This feminist author contributed to several periodicals, including The Nation, The Guardian, and The Village Voice. Her 1970 pamphlet "Woman and Her Mind," considered a seminal work of second-wave feminism, examined how social norms influenced men's and women's conduct. Men are trained to be proactive, to go out and find what they need rather than to look good and wait for it to come to them. The author claimed that men don't watch every passing cloud over interpersonal relationships as if their destiny relied on them. "There's a rationale behind that. There isn't. Women pay close attention to their environment. They must be. In our civilization, men regularly rape, mug, and kill women they don't know. Therefore, it's dangerous to walk down the street unattended.