NewzNEW YORK (AP) — 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, has died. She was 85.Morgan, who was still working on new books and poems, died Saturday in New York after suffering a series of health problems in recent weeks, said her son, Blake Morgan. Her death came just days after that of her close friend and fellow activist Gloria Steinem.During the 1960s and ’70s, Morgan embodied and inspired historic changes in how women lived and thought.
As she was happy to point out, the onetime “Ideal American Girl” and adored “Little Robin Morgan” was a rule breaker and justice seeker with a notable list of achievements, along with a prison record and an FBI file.Morgan was at the center of the some of the defining moments of what came to be called second-wave feminism, expanding upon the achievements of the suffragists a half-century earlier. In 1968, she was among the organizers of the first protest against the Miss America pageant, joining fellow activists in tossing their bras (soon mythologized as burning) into a “Freedom Trash Can.” The 1970 essay anthology she edited, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” is considered one of the essential texts of the modern women’s movement.Yet she considered herself primarily a poet and artist, and that work fed into her activism, 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,” said Blake Morgan, pointing to such quotes of hers as “hate generalizes, love specifies.”Morgan was credited for coining “herstory”Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory,” the feminist reworking of “history,” and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement.
Her poem “Monster,” with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem “Arraignment” helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the estab…
Leading second-wave feminist co-founded Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Gloria SteinemRobin Morgan, a 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, has died. She was 85.Morgan’s death was confirmed Saturday by the Women’s Media Center, an organization she co-founded with Jane Fonda and the celebrated author and activist Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant-garde Grove Press, whose owner, …
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