Robin Morgan died at 85, the Women’s Media Center said on Saturday. Julie Burton called her “one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement.”
Her death closes the life of a writer and organizer whose work helped define second-wave feminism. The source did not specify the location, date, or cause.
Women’s Media Center
Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. Burton, the center’s president, also said Morgan helped build the movement’s public language and record. That includes Sisterhood Is Powerful, the 1970 essay anthology Morgan edited, and the first protest against the Miss America pageant in 1968.
Those projects sit beside a wider body of work. Morgan is widely credited with coining herstory and with popularizing the clenched fist and female symbol icon of the liberation movement.
Robin Morgan and Blake Morgan
Morgan’s son, Blake Morgan, is a musician, activist and record company executive. Her family life also included a marriage of more than 20 years to Kenneth Pitchford, and she said she had male and female lovers.
She published the memoir Saturday’s Child in 2001 and completed more than 20 books. Among the titles and pieces tied to her name are Monster, Goodbye to All That, Arraignment, Saturday’s Child, and J’Accuse Ted Hughes. Her poem Monster was quoted at feminist rallies, while Arraignment captured the movement’s embrace of Sylvia Plath and condemnation of Ted Hughes.
Grove Press
Morgan’s activism also brought arrest. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of Grove Press. Her essay Goodbye to All That was widely reprinted that same year.
The record left by her work is direct and public: a writer who moved from child star to organizer, helped shape a movement’s language, and left behind books, poems, and protests that kept her name in circulation long after each event ended.
