Robin Morgan, Pioneering Feminist Writer and Gloria Steinem Ally, Dies at 85

Robin Morgan died Saturday in New York at 85, leaving behind a life that moved in two distinct acts—one scripted by Hollywood, the other written by her own hand as a radical voice for women's liberation.

She began as a child star, blonde and marketable, the kind of girl magazines called unspoiled and courteous. Born in Lake Worth, Florida in 1941, she was modeling by age three, hosting her own radio show at five, and by the time she was eight, appearing regularly on the television comedy series "Mama," which ran from 1949 to 1957. She shared screens with Abbott and Costello, appeared on game shows and dramatic anthologies, and inspired dolls bearing her name. The industry had decided who she was: the ideal girl-next-door, incapable of antagonism toward the established order.

But the girl behind the camera was someone else entirely. During one broadcast of "Juvenile Jury," when asked whether a boy deserved spanking, she was supposed to deliver a light joke. Instead, she declared that all physical punishment was wrong. The producer's response was swift and silencing—he squeezed her shoulder hard enough that she felt his fingernails, turned her microphone away, and eventually placed his hand over her mouth. Years later, in her 2001 memoir "Saturday's Child," Morgan would reflect on that moment with clarity: she had loved and respected the child who fought back, recognizing it as her first political act.

By her late teens, she had left that world behind. She attended Columbia University, took poetry workshops, marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and moved through circles of artists and poets. In 1962, she met Kenneth Pitchford, a gay poet, at a Manhattan party. He lit candles, played Dvorak, and told her she had an air of possibility about her. They married and remained together for more than twenty years, raising a son together in what Morgan described as a two-member commune. She would later say she was "straight-baited" by feminists who thought she should be a lesbian and chastised by conservatives who assumed she was.

During the 1960s and '70s, Morgan became a central figure in what historians would call second-wave feminism. In 1968, she helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant, an action that would be mythologized as bra-burning but was actually the tossing of undergarments and other items into a "Freedom Trash Can." She co-founded New York Radical Women and the provocatively named Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). She joined the Youth International Party, the Yippies, but grew disgusted with how the movement treated women and left. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of Grove Press, fighting alongside employees seeking unionization.

That same year, she edited "Sisterhood is Powerful," an anthology of essays that became one of the essential texts of the modern women's movement. The book's title itself reflected her gift for distilling large ideas into memorable language—a skill her son Blake Morgan, a musician and record company founder, attributed to her poet's mind. She is widely credited with coining the term "herstory," the feminist reclamation of history, and with popularizing the clenched fist combined with the female symbol, an icon that became synonymous with women's liberation. Her poem "Monster," with its line "I want a women's revolution like a lover / I lust for it," was quoted at rallies and beyond. Another poem, "Arraignment," helped crystallize the movement's embrace of Sylvia Plath and its condemnation of Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others held responsible for Plath's suicide in 1963. The couplet "I accuse / Ted Hughes" later inspired the title of Sonic Youth's song "J'Accuse Ted Hughes."

Over the following decades, Morgan's output was relentless. She completed more than twenty books, including "The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches" and poetry collections such as "Monster" and "Dark Matter." She followed "Sisterhood is Powerful" with "Sisterhood is Global" in 1984 and "Sisterhood is Forever" in 2002, the latter featuring contributions from Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir, and Eve Ensler. She served as editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine. In 1984, she founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, an early feminist think tank. In 2005, she, Steinem, and Jane Fonda launched the Women's Media Center, dedicated to supporting the visibility and decision-making power of women and girls in media.

In 1970, she published the essay "Goodbye to All That," a widely reprinted piece that confronted the establishment from both left and right, calling out figures from Hugh Hefner to Abbie Hoffman, whom she compared unfavorably to a movie star abandoning his first wife and children. The government labeled her an "anarchist housewife." She was someone who could take on power with precision and wit, never losing sight of the specific injustice beneath the grand ideology. In her later years, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease sixteen years before her death, she continued working—hosting a syndicated radio show, writing new books and poems, and delivering a TEDWomen talk in 2015. Her son said she considered herself primarily a poet and artist, and that this work fed directly into her activism. She once wrote, "Put that in your apple pie and smoke it," a line that captured her threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor, the thing that allowed her to survive and thrive across decades of struggle.