Robin Morgan, poet and second-wave feminist icon, dies at 85

Robin Morgan, the former child star who went on to become a poet, editor and a leading voice of second-wave feminism in the United States, has died at 85. Morgan died on Saturday in New York after a series of health problems in recent weeks, her son Blake Morgan said.

Her death came days after that of her close friend and fellow activist Gloria Steinem. Morgan was a central figure in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, while also building a body of work as a poet and writer. Her son said she was still working on new books and poems.

During those years, Morgan was involved in some of the defining moments of second-wave feminism, which built on the gains made by the suffragists decades earlier. In 1968, she was among the organisers of the first protest against the Miss America pageant, where activists threw bras into a “Freedom Trash Can”, an act later turned into the myth of bra-burning. In 1970, she edited “Sisterhood is Powerful”, an essay collection seen as one of the key books of the modern women’s movement.

Even so, Blake Morgan said his mother saw herself first as a poet and artist, and that her writing shaped her activism. “She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” he said, pointing to one of her lines: “hate generalizes, love specifies.”

Morgan was widely credited with coining the term “herstory”, a feminist reworking of “history”, and with popularising the clenched-fist female symbol of the liberation movement. Her poem “Monster”, with the line “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at rallies and elsewhere. Another poem, “Arraignment”, reflected the movement’s embrace of Sylvia Plath and its anger towards Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s 1963 suicide. Morgan’s couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” later inspired the title of Sonic Youth’s “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”

She also took on power across the political spectrum. A government report once called her an “anarchist housewife”. In 1970, she and other protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of Grove Press, whose owner Barney Rosset was fighting efforts by employees to unionise. In her widely reprinted 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That”, she criticised figures ranging from Hugh Hefner to activist Abbie Hoffman, 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 the marriage as a “two member commune”. She later wrote that she was so resistant to labels that she was “straight-baited” by feminists who thought she should be a lesbian and criticised by conservatives who assumed that she was one. In her 2001 memoir “Saturday’s Child”, she wrote of her surprise at how her life had unfolded and how she had kept “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor.” She added: “Put that in your apple pie and smoke it.”

Morgan wrote more than 20 books, including “Saturday’s Child”, “The Word of a Woman: Feminists Dispatches”, and the poetry collections “Monster” and “Dark Matter”. She followed “Sisterhood is Powerful” with “Sisterhood is Global” in 1984 and “Sisterhood is Forever” in 2002, with contributors including Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Ensler. She also served for several years as editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine.

Steinem described her as an ideal “utility player”, gifted in nearly every way a protest movement might need. Morgan helped found feminist groups including New York Radical Women and Women’s Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, or W.I.T.C.H. She was also part of the left-wing Youth Party, or Yippies, led by Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, but later left after becoming disillusioned with how women were treated in the group.

In 1984, she helped found the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, an early feminist think tank. In 2005, she joined Steinem and Jane Fonda in launching the Women’s Media Center, which works to support “the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media.” In later years, she hosted a syndicated radio show and stayed active after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 16 years ago, a condition that also inspired several poems and a TEDWomen talk in 2015.

Long before that public life, Morgan had become a child star. Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York, she grew up without seeing her father and was falsely told by her mother that he was dead. Her mother also reduced her age by a year, saying she had been born in 1942 so that her early career would seem even more remarkable.

By the age of 3, she was modelling. At 5, she hosted the “Little Robin Morgan” radio show and was also featured on “Juvenile Jury”, first on radio and later on television. From 1949 to 1957, she appeared in the hit TV comedy series “Mama” and also acted in “Robert Montgomery Presents”, “Kraft Theater” and other programmes. She met major stars of the time, including Abbott and Costello and Sal Mineo, and was successful enough to inspire Robin Morgan dolls and other tie-ins. Magazines called her “unspoiled”, “courteous” and “the ideal girl-next-door”, and described her as free from “violent outbursts of antagonism against established society.”

But Morgan later wrote that she was very different from that public image. She said her first “serious” childhood poem began: “Go, rage, winter the world with despair.” On one episode of “Juvenile Jury”, she was meant to joke that a boy who might be spanked should wear padding under his trousers. Instead, she said all physical punishment was wrong. In “Saturday’s Child”, she recalled that producer Dan Ehrenreich squeezed her shoulder so hard she could feel his fingernails, turned her microphone away and finally put 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,” she wrote.

Her overt political life took shape in her late teens. While taking classes at Columbia University and attending poetry workshops, she joined marches for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. She met protesters, artists and poets including W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, who once told her: “But, my dear, women should be poems, not write them.” In 1962, she met Pitchford at a Manhattan party. After the others had left, she wrote, he lit candles, put Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the record player and became her “First”. They then walked for hours and ended up on a downtown park bench, where he told her: “You have such an air of possibility about you, Robin. It makes me believe anything can happen.”

From child star to feminist organiser, editor and poet, Morgan lived a life that moved far beyond the image that first made her famous. Her work in literature, media and the women’s movement remained closely linked through decades of activism and writing.

With PTI Inputs

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