Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan was an American poet, writer, radical feminist, journalist, lecturer, and former child actor whose work helped define second-wave feminism in the United States and connect it to a global women's movement. She was born on 29 January 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, after her mother, Faith Berkeley Morgan, traveled from New York to give birth away from public scrutiny as an unmarried woman. For years Faith told Robin her father had died in World War II; only as a young adult did Robin learn that her father was Dr. Mates Morgenstern, and that her true birth year was 1941 rather than the 1942 date her mother had used for publicity.

As a toddler she was steered into modeling by her mother and aunt. By about age five she had a New York radio program, Little Robin Morgan, on WOR, and she appeared on Juvenile Jury. At eight she became a television presence as Dagmar Hansen on the CBS series Mama. She worked in Golden Age television with directors including Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, then left Mama at fourteen to pursue writing rather than remaining a child star.

She continued education as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University and worked at Curtis Brown Literary Agency in the early 1960s, meeting writers including W. H. Auden. In 1962 she married poet Kenneth Pitchford; their son Blake Morgan was born in 1969; they later divorced (1983 per Wikipedia). Morgan moved through civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism, briefly the Youth International Party, then into radical feminism as a founding member of New York Radical Women. She was a key organizer of the 1968 Miss America pageant protest in Atlantic City, wrote the pamphlet No More Miss America!, and designed the raised-fist-in-Venus feminist symbol popularized there. She co-founded W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), helped seize the underground paper Rat, and published the landmark essay "Goodbye to All That" (1970), naming sexism inside the male New Left.

That same year she compiled and introduced Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology the New York Public Library later cited among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Royalties seeded The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, an early U.S. feminist grant-giving vehicle. Follow-up anthologies Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and Sisterhood Is Forever (2003) framed international and millennial feminist agendas; with Simone de Beauvoir and women from dozens of countries she helped found the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a pioneering feminist think tank. Her poetry collections (Monster, Lady of the Beasts, Upstairs in the Garden, A Hot January, later Parkinson's-era work including poems read at TEDWomen) and nonfiction (Going Too Far, The Demon Lover, Saturday's Child, Fighting Words) made her both a literary and political presence. She received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in poetry (1979) and many journalism and human-rights honors.

As a journalist and editor she contributed widely, then served as editor-in-chief of Ms. from 1989 to 1994, relaunching it as an ad-free international bimonthly. In 2005 she co-founded the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda to make women more visible and powerful in media. From 2012 she hosted Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, a syndicated radio show and podcast that reached audiences in more than 100 countries and eventually passed 500 episodes. WMC materials state that Gloria Steinem was godmother to Blake Morgan, reflecting decades of friendship among the three co-founders.

Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2010 and public about it from 2013, she advocated with the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, helped launch a Women and PD initiative, and distilled the experience into poems she performed at TEDWomen 2015, saying she felt "distilled" rather than diminished. She died on 5 September 2026 at age 85, days after Steinem's death. Blake Morgan and WMC president Julie Burton announced that she died peacefully in her sleep. Jane Fonda called her "a living legend" whose Sisterhood anthologies helped educate a generation, including Fonda's own path to 9 to 5. Julie Burton called her one of the architects of the contemporary women's movement. Her papers are held at Duke University's Sallie Bingham Center and in a smaller collection at Harvard.