Robin Morgan, the child star of the 1940s and 50s who became a leading second-wave feminist, poet, essayist, and editor, has died at age 85. Her death was confirmed Saturday by the Women's Media Center, an organization she co-founded with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday. The statement did not specify the location, date, or cause of death.
Morgan was a central figure in the defining moments of second-wave feminism, expanding on the achievements of the suffragists a half-century earlier. In 1968, she helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant, where activists tossed their bras into a “freedom trash can,” a gesture soon mythologized as burning. Her 1970 essay anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, is considered one of the essential texts of the modern women's movement.
Legacy of Words and Actions
Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory” and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem Monster, with lines like “I want a women's revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at feminist rallies. Her poem Arraignment captured the movement's embrace of Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath's suicide in 1963. Morgan's rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth's song J'Accuse Ted Hughes.
Julie Burton, president of the Women's Media Center, called Morgan “one of the architects of the contemporary women's movement,” hailing her writing and “global leadership for justice and equality.”
Activism and Confrontation
Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment from both left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees' efforts to unionize. In her widely reprinted 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.
Morgan had male and female lovers and was married for more than 20 years to the gay poet Kenneth Pitchford, with whom she had a son, the musician, activist, and record company executive Blake Morgan. She described her marriage as a “two-member commune” and was so resistant to labels that she remembered being “straight-baited” by feminists who thought she should be a lesbian and chastised by conservatives who assumed she was a lesbian.
Literary and Organizational Contributions
Besides her 2001 memoir Saturday's Child, Morgan completed more than 20 books, including The Word of a Woman: Feminists Dispatches and the poetry collections Monster and Dark Matter. She followed Sisterhood Is Powerful with Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and Sisterhood Is Forever (2002), featuring contributors such as Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir, and Eve Ensler. For several years, she was editor-in-chief of Ms magazine.
In 1984, Morgan was a founder of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, an early feminist thinktank. In 2005, she, Steinem, and Fonda launched the Women's Media Center, which supports “the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media.” More recently, she hosted a syndicated radio show and remained active despite being diagnosed with Parkinson's, which inspired several poems and a TEDWomen talk in 2015.
Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York, Morgan never saw her father while growing up and was told – falsely – by her mother that he was dead. Her mother also shaved a year off her age, claiming she was born in 1942, to make her early public career seem more impressive. She met stars from Abbott and Costello to Sal Mineo and was popular enough to inspire commercial tie-ins like Robin Morgan dolls. Magazines described her as “unspoiled” and “courteous” and “the ideal girl-next-door.”
In Saturday's Child, Morgan recalled producer Dan Ehrenreich squeezing her shoulder so hard that she could feel his fingernails, turning her microphone away, and placing his hand over her mouth. She wrote, “I realized that I loved and respected that child who fought back in what was the first political act I recall ever daring to make.” Her legacy endures through her writings and the organizations she helped build.
