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.
 

Meredith Tax is a historian, activist, and writer whose books include The Rising of the Women and Union Square. She helped found the Boston socialist-feminist group Bread and Roses, was active in the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, and helped establish the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. She is president of Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development (Women's WO RLD), a free speech network of women writers.