Robin Morgan, Child Star Turned Feminist Firebrand, Dies at 85
Robin Morgan, a wholesome child star of the 1940s and ’50s who grew up to become an all-American radical as a poet, essayist, editor and second-wave feminist, died Saturday in New York. She was 85.
Her son, Blake Morgan, a musician, producer and record company founder, said she died after suffering a series of health problems in recent weeks and had still been working on new books and poems. Her death came only days after that of Gloria Steinem, her close friend and longtime comrade.
Steinem once called Morgan the ideal “utility player” of the women’s movement. Together with Jane Fonda, the two helped found the Women’s Media Center in 2005, an organization built to expand women’s visibility and decision-making power in journalism and entertainment.
Morgan’s path from beloved postwar child performer to radical writer and organizer was one of the more improbable journeys in American public life. She was born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York. She never saw her father while growing up; her mother falsely told her he was dead. Her mother also shaved a year off her age, presenting her as born in 1942, to make her early career look even more impressive.
By age 3, Morgan was modeling. At 5, she was hosting her own radio show, “Little Robin Morgan.” She became a familiar presence on “Juvenile Jury” and, from 1949 to 1957, on the family sitcom “Mama,” and appeared on “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Kraft Theater” and other live programs of that era. There were Robin Morgan dolls, and magazines described her as “unspoiled,” “courteous” and the “ideal girl-next-door,” seemingly immune from rebellion.
She was not immune. During one broadcast of “Juvenile Jury,” asked whether a boy deserved to be spanked, Morgan abandoned the scripted joke and declared that all physical punishment was wrong. The producer turned her microphone away and eventually placed his hand over her mouth. In her 2001 memoir “Saturday’s Child,” 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.”
In her late teens, Morgan took classes at Columbia, attended poetry workshops, and marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. She met poets including W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, one of whom offered the era’s standard wisdom: women should be poems, not write them.
By 1968, she was at the center of the movement that came to be called second-wave feminism. She helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant, where women threw bras into a “Freedom Trash Can,” an act soon mythologized as bra-burning. Her 1970 anthology “Sisterhood is Powerful” became a foundational text of the modern women’s movement. Morgan was also widely credited with coining “herstory,” the feminist reworking of history, and with popularizing the emblem of a raised fist inside the female symbol.
Despite her public role, Morgan insisted that she was primarily a poet and artist. Her son remembered that quality after her death. “She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” he said. One of her lines, “Hate generalizes, love specifies,” became a kind of motto.
Her poem “Monster” gave demonstrators a lasting chant: “I want a women’s revolution like a lover / I lust for it.” In “Arraignment,” she helped shape the movement’s embrace of Sylvia Plath and its condemnation of Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide. Morgan’s couplet “I accuse / Ted Hughes” was later used as the title of Sonic Youth’s “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”
Morgan was equally hard on the male-dominated left. In 1970, after she was arrested with other protesters who occupied the offices of Grove Press to support employees seeking to unionize, she wrote the widely reprinted essay “Goodbye to All That.” She attacked Hugh Hefner and compared Abbie Hoffman to “any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids.” A government report called her an “anarchist housewife,” a label she seemed to wear without apology.
Her private life was equally difficult to categorize. In 1962, at a Manhattan party, she met the poet Kenneth Pitchford. Once the other guests had left, Pitchford lit candles, put Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony on the record player and became, in Morgan’s telling, her “First.” She later remembered him saying: “You have such an air of possibility about you, Robin. It makes me believe anything can happen.”
They married, had a son, Blake, and remained together for more than twenty years. Pitchford was gay, which made the marriage unusual even by 1960s standards; Morgan called it a “two-member commune.” She was “straight-baited” by women in the movement who thought she should be a lesbian, and criticized by conservatives who assumed she was. She resisted the labels.
Morgan’s books eventually numbered more than twenty, including the poetry collections “Monster” and “Dark Matter,” the essay collection “The Word of a Woman,” and the memoir “Saturday’s Child.” In the memoir, she looked back with wonder at her own journey and kept what she called “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor.” Its closing line was pure Morgan: “Put that in your apple pie and smoke it.”
She also edited “Sisterhood is Global” and “Sisterhood is Forever,” with contributors ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to Eve Ensler, and served as editor in chief of Ms. Magazine for several years.
Morgan helped found New York Radical Women and the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, better known as W.I.T.C.H. She spent time with the Yippies but left, disgusted by how the group treated women. In 1984 she was a founder of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and in 2005 she co-founded the Women’s Media Center.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease sixteen years before her death, Morgan remained active. She hosted a syndicated radio show, delivered a TEDWomen talk in 2015, and continued to write poems and books until the end.