Meredith Tax – författare

This sprawling historical novel follows the fortunes of four enterprising, courageous Jewish women on New York's Lower East Side. Hannah Levy masterminds her family's escape, despite her radical husband's objections, from czarist Russia after the Kishinev pogroms; elder daughter Sarah becomes a union organizer and a socialist while the younger Ruby rises to the top of the fashion design world; their friend Rachel abandons her ultra-Orthodox background to go to work for the Jewish Daily Forward. Through their lives, loves, and convictions, Meredith Tax draws the reader irresistibly into the explosive events that shaped women's possibilities in the early twentieth century.  An absorbing, epic novel, Rivington Street is also suitable for use as a classroom text.

In this landmark study of American labor history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrializing landscape of North America. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose remarkable history is chronicled in this work.With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism.First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.

In this landmark study of American labor history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrializing landscape of North America. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose remarkable history is chronicled in this work.With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies'' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism.First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers'' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.