Robin 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. 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. 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 one-time “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. Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, called Morgan “one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement”, hailing her writing and “global leadership for justice and equality”. The statement didn’t specify the location, date or cause of Morgan’s death.
Morgan was at the center of 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.
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 song J’Accuse Ted Hughes. Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right.
In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs. 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 a son, the musician, activist and record company executive Blake Morgan.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
