Robin Morgan, the once-beloved child performer of the 1940s and 1950s who later became a defining voice of American radical feminism as a poet, essayist and editor, has died at 85.
Morgan had continued writing new books and poetry until late in life. She died Saturday in New York following a series of recent health problems, according to her son, Blake Morgan. Her death came just days after that of Gloria Steinem, her longtime friend and fellow activist.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Morgan helped shape a transformation in women’s lives, politics and self-understanding. She often noted the striking arc of her own life: the former “Ideal American Girl” and adored “Little Robin Morgan” became a rebel, organizer and tireless advocate for justice, with major accomplishments as well as a prison record and an FBI file.
Craig Barritt
Morgan stood near the heart of several landmark moments in second-wave feminism, the movement that built on the suffrage victories of an earlier generation. In 1968, she helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant, where demonstrators threw bras and other symbols of women’s oppression into a “Freedom Trash Can” — an act later misremembered in popular culture as bra burning. Two years later, she edited “Sisterhood is Powerful,” an essay anthology now regarded as a foundational work of the modern women’s movement.
Even with her prominence as an activist, Morgan saw herself first as a poet and artist, work that deeply informed her politics, her son said.
“She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” Blake Morgan said, citing one of her best-known lines: “hate generalizes, love specifies.”
Her influence lived in actions, language and imagery. Morgan is widely credited with coining “herstory,” the feminist recasting of “history,” and with popularizing the clenched fist combined with the female symbol as an emblem of women’s liberation. Her poem “Monster,” including the lines “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” became a rallying cry within feminist circles and beyond.
Another poem, “Arraignment,” reflected the movement’s embrace of Sylvia Plath and its anger toward Plath’s husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others held responsible for Plath’s 1963 suicide. Morgan’s blunt couplet, “I accuse/Ted Hughes,” later inspired the title of Sonic Youth’s “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”
Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant-garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That,” she called out libertines and activists from Hugh Hefner to Abbie Hoffman, the latter of whom she likened to “any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids.”
In her personal life, Morgan had male and female lovers and was married for more than 20 years to the gay poet Kenneth Pitchford, with whom she had her son, a musician, producer and record company founder.
She once 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.
In her 2001 memoir “Saturday’s Child,” she expressed joy and amazement at how her life turned out and how she was able to retain “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor.”
“Put that in your apple pie and smoke it,” she wrote.
Besides “Saturday’s Child,” she completed more than 20 books, including “The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches,” and the poetry collections “Monster” and “Dark Matter.” She followed “Sisterhood is Powerful” with “Sisterhood is Global” (in 1984), and “Sisterhood is Forever” (2002), featuring such contributors as Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Ensler. For several years, she was editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine.
Steinem would call her an ideal “utility player,” gifted in almost every way a protest movement might require. As an organizer, she helped found such 1960s feminist groups as New York Radical Women and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). She was part of the Youth International Party, the left-wing “Yippies” led by Hoffman and Jerry Rubin among others, but soon became disgusted with how the group treated women and left.
In 1984, she was a founder of an early feminist think tank, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute. In 2005, she, Steinem and Jane Fonda launched the Women’s Media Center, which has a mission to support “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 16 years ago with Parkinson’s disease, which inspired several poems and a TEDWomen talk in 2015.
In a different era, she might have been just another forgotten child star. Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York, she 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 even more impressive.
The blonde, talented Robin was modeling by age 3, hosted her own “Little Robin Morgan” radio show at age 5 and around the same time was featured on the radio (later television) game show “Juvenile Jury.” From 1949-57, she appeared in the hit TV domestic comedy series “Mama” and made appearances on “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Kraft Theater” and other shows.
She would meet some of the era’s biggest stars, from Abbott and Costello to Sal Mineo, and was popular enough to inspire such commercial tie-ins as Robin Morgan dolls. Magazines described her as “unspoiled” and “courteous” and “the ideal girl-next-door,” immune from “violent outbursts of antagonism against established society.”
But off camera, and sometimes on, she was so far from her image that her first “serious” childhood poem began: “Go, rage, winter the world with despair.” During one broadcast of “Juvenile Jury,” the question was whether a boy deserved to be spanked. Morgan was supposed to joke that he should wear padding under his pants, but she instead declared that all physical punishment was wrong.
As she recalled in “Saturday’s Child,” producer Dan Ehrenreich squeezed her shoulder so hard that Morgan could feel his fingernails. He turned her microphone away and eventually placed his hand over her mouth.
“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,” Morgan wrote.
Once in her late teens, she began taking classes at Columbia University, attended poetry workshops and became politically active. She marched for civil rights and ending the Vietnam War and met protesters, artists and such poets as W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, who gave her a man’s eye view of the creative process, “But, my dear, women should be poems, not write them.”
In 1962, she met Pitchford at a Manhattan party. Once the other guests had left and the host urged her to go with them, Pitchford lit candles, put Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the record player and became her “First.” They later walked for hours and ended up on a downtown park bench.
“You have such an air of possibility about you, Robin” he told her. “It makes me believe anything can happen.”
