Robin Morgan (born January 29, 1941) is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century".

Child actor

thumb|left|200px|Morgan in WOR radio studio at The Robin Morgan Show in 1946

Due to circumstances at her birth, her mother claimed that Robin Morgan was born a year later than she actually was At that time, she was working as an editor at Grove Press and was involved in an attempt to unionize the publishing industry. When Grove summarily fired her and other union sympathizers, she led a seizure and occupation of their offices in the spring of 1970, protesting the union-busting, as well as the dishonest accounting of royalties to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow. Morgan and eight other women were arrested that day. Today, the trading cards are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the University of Iowa library. The weekly hour was picked up by CBS Radio two weeks after its launch and is broadcast on CBS affiliate WJFK each Saturday. The program features commentary by Morgan about recent news, and interviews with activists, politicians, authors, actors and artists.

Activism

By 1962 Morgan had become active in the anti-war Left, and had also contributed articles and poetry to such Left-wing and counter-culture journals as Liberation, Rat, Win, and The National Guardian. Morgan also wrote the Miss America protest pamphlet No More Miss America!

With NYRW, Morgan published Notes from the First Year in 1968 and Notes from the Second Year in 1970. Both were important publications in the burgeoning women in print movement, an effort by second-wave feminists to establish autonomous communications networks of feminist periodicals, presses, and bookstores created by and for women which was associated with feminist separatism and lesbian feminism. Notes from the First Year was one of the first identifiably separatist feminist publications in 1968. Over 560 were established in the next five years, many of them run as collectives like NYRW. Morgan's print activism also included participating in the feminist takeover of Rat due to its sexist content and editorial policies. In the February 1970 LibeRATion issue, she wrote: "If men return to reinstate the porny photos, the sexist comic strips, the 'nude chickie' covers (along with their patronizing rhetoric about being in favor of Women’s Liberation) — if that happens, then our alternatives are clear. Rat must be taken over permanently by women or Rat must be destroyed."

In 1968 Morgan also cofounded Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), a radical feminist group that used public street theater (called "hexes" or "zaps") to call attention to sexism. Concerning the feminist organization W.I.T.C.H., Morgan wrote:

:The fluidity and wit of the witches is evident in the ever-changing acronym: the basic, original title was Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell [...] and the latest heard at this writing is Women Inspired to Commit Herstory." WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

Morgan has traveled extensively across the United States and around the world to bring attention to cross-cultural sexism. She has met with and interviewed female rebel fighters in the Philippines, Brazilian women activists in the slums/favelas of Rio, women organizers in the townships of South Africa, and underground feminists in Iran. It also included what Morgan called "verbal karate": useful quotes and statistics about women. The anthology was cited by the New York Public Library as one of the “New York Public Library's Books of the [20th] Century”. However, the anthology was banned in Chile, China, and South Africa.

Journalism

Morgan's articles, essays, reviews, interviews, political analyses, and investigative journalism have appeared widely in such publications as The Atlantic, Broadsheet, Chrysalis, Essence, Everywoman, The Feminist Art Journal, The Guardian (US), The Guardian (UK), The Hudson Review, the Los Angeles Times, Ms., The New Republic, The New York Times, Off Our Backs, Pacific Ways, The Second Wave, Sojourner, The Village Voice, The Voice of Women, and various United Nations periodicals, etc.

Articles and essays have also appeared in reprint in international media, in English across the Commonwealth, and in translation in 13 languages in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Morgan has written for online audiences and blogged frequently. Among her best known articles are "Letters from Ground Zero" (written and posted after the September 11 attacks in 2001 — which went viral), "Goodbye To All That #2", "Women of the Arab Spring", "When Bad News is Good News: Notes of a Feminist News Junkie", "Manhood and Moral Waivers", and "Faith Healing: A Modest Proposal on Religious Fundamentalism". Her online work is hosted in the archives of the Women's Media Center. According to a 1972 review of her first book of poems, Monster, in The Washington Post: "[These poems] establish Morgan as a poet of considerable means. There is a savage elegance, a richness of vocabulary, a thrust and steely polish..... A powerful, challenging book."

Morgan's poetry collections include A Hot January: Poems 1996–1999 (W. W. Norton, 1999), Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque (Doubleday, 1994), Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New 1968–1988 (W. W. Norton, 1990), Death Benefits (Copper Canyon Press, 1981), Lady of the Beasts (Random House, 1976), and Monster (Random House, 1972). Of the book A Hot January, Alice Walker wrote: "Morgan proves that exquisite poetry can be the most surprising gift of grief. A volume as proud, fierce, vulnerable, and brave as the poet herself." A review of Upstairs in the Garden, noted: "As a vindication and celebration of the female experience, these inventive poems successfully wed feminist rhetoric with vivid imagery and sensitivity to the music of language." Two books of poems, Lady of the Beasts and Depth Perception, earned reviews in Poetry Magazine with critic Jay Parini stating that "Robin Morgan will soon be regarded as one of our first-ranking poets." The Burning Time was placed on the Recommended Quality Fiction List of 2007 by the American Library Association, Her most recently published book of non-fiction is Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right (2006).

Organizations

The Sisterhood Is Global Institute

In 1984, Morgan, together with the late Simone de Beauvoir of France, and women from 80 other countries, founded The Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI), an international non-profit NGO with consultative status to the United Nations, which has for three decades functioned as the world's first feminist think-tank. The institute has played a leading policy-formulation, strategic, and activist role in the evolution of the international Women's Movement. SIGI has also developed a global communications network through which an umbrella of NGO interest, advice, contacts, and support is collectively mobilized to empower the global women's movement.

Among its many activities, the Institute pioneered the first Urgent Acton Alerts regarding women's rights; the first Global Campaign To Make Visible Women's Unpaid Labor In National Accounts; and the first Women's Rights Manuals For Muslim Societies (in 12 languages). Its most recent project is Donor Direct Action (donordirectaction.org), which links front-line women's rights activists around the world to money, visibility, and popular support: minimum bureaucracy, maximum impact.

Women’s Media Center

In 2005, Morgan co-founded the non-profit progressive organization, The Women's Media Center with her friends actor/activist Jane Fonda, and activist Gloria Steinem. The focus of the organization is to make women powerful and visible in the media.

Lectures and professorships

An invited speaker at numerous universities in North America, Morgan has traveled—as organizer, speaker, journalist—across North America, Europe, and the Middle East to Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa. According to a New Yorker magazine article published in the aftermath of Morgan's essay "Goodbye to All That" (#2) going viral on the Internet, "At five feet tall Morgan is, not for the first time, the little woman who has started a big war." In her original essay, "Goodbye to All That" (1970), Morgan bade adieu to "the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea," referring to the "male Left". She also asserted that Charles Manson was "only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy."

Two years later, Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Ted Hughes of the battery and murder of Sylvia Plath. There were lawsuits, Morgan's 1972 book Monster which contained that poem was banned, and underground, pirated feminist editions of it were published.

Another controversial quote is from her 1978 book, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, where she stated: "I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

Morgan famously walked off The Tonight Show in 1969 when it screened vintage footage of her as a child actor while she was trying to speak seriously about the first national march against rape. Of the incident, she has been quoted as saying: "Imagine talking about such a subject and having it trivialized like that." In this speech she referred to Elliott as a "transsexual male" and used male pronouns throughout, charging her with being "an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer-with the mentality of a rapist." At the end of her speech she called for a vote on ejecting Elliott, with over two-thirds voting to allow her to remain, however the minority threatened to disrupt the conference and Elliott chose to leave after her performance to avoid this. The event demonstrated the high tension surrounding transgender women's involvement in the women's movement of the 1970s.

Personal life

Robin Morgan grew up in New York, first in Mount Vernon, and later in Manhattan, on Sutton Place. She graduated from The Wetter School in Mount Vernon, in 1956, and was privately tutored from then until 1959. Morgan continues to tackle topics such as religion, politics and sex in fiery commentaries on her radio show WMC Live with Robin Morgan.

Today Robin Morgan lives in Manhattan. In her book, "her passion for writing, especially poetry, is vividly conveyed, as is her love and respect for her son, born in 1969," according to The New York Times Book Review.

In April 2013, Morgan announced publicly that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, discussing the diagnosis on her radio show WMC Live with Robin Morgan, revealing that she had been diagnosed in 2010, but that her quality of life was thus far "normal". Since her diagnosis, Morgan has become active with the Parkinson's Disease Foundation (PDF), completing training to become part of the organization's Parkinson's Advocates in Research initiative. In 2014 she was the catalyst and took a leadership role in PDF's new Women and PD initiative, which will seek to better serve women impacted by Parkinson's disease by understanding and resolving gender inequalities in PD research, treatment, and caregiver support. Morgan has also written new poetry inspired by her battle with the disease, and performed a reading of some of the poems as a TED Talk, at the TEDWomen 2015 conference.

Birth and parents

Her mother, Faith Berkeley Morgan, traveled from her New York residence to Florida to give birth, in order to avoid public scrutiny for her unmarried status.

Harvard University Library also holds a smaller collection of Morgan's papers, including personal papers, correspondence, subject and research files, and financial records.

Filmography

;1940s

  • Citizen Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini (playing Francesca S. Cabrini as a child)
  • The Little Robin Morgan Show as herself (WOR radio show)
  • Juvenile Jury as herself

;1950s

  • Mama as Dagmar Hansen
  • Kraft Television Theatre's Alice in Wonderland (as Alice)
  • Mr. I-Magination (as self)
  • Tales of Tomorrow (starring as Lily Massner)
  • Kiss and Tell TV Special (starring as Corliss Archer, 1956)
  • Other videos and kinescopes in the Robin Morgan Collection at the Paley Center for Media, NYC

;1980s - 2010s

  • Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography [Feature length Documentary] (as herself) (1981)
  • The American Experience TV Documentary (as herself) (2002)
  • 1968 TV Documentary with Tom Brokaw (as herself) (2007)
  • Interview by Ronnie Eldridge (2007)
  • Makers: Women Who Make America on PBS (2013)

Publications

Poetry

  • 1972: Monster (Vintage, )
  • 1976: Lady of the Beasts: Poems (Random House, )
  • 1981: Death Benefits: A Chapbook (Copper Canyon, Limited Edition of 200 copies)
  • 1982: Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque (Doubleday, )
  • 1999: A Hot January: Poems 1996–1999 (W. W. Norton, )
  • 1990: Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New (W. W. Norton, )

Nonfiction

  • 1977: Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, (Random House, )
  • 1982: The Anatomy of Freedom (W.W. Norton, )
  • 1989: The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (W. W. Norton, )
  • 2001: The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (Updated Second Edition, Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc., )
  • 1992: The Word of a Woman (W.W. Norton, )
  • 1995: A Woman's Creed (pamphlet), The Sisterhood Is Global Institute
  • 2001: Saturday's Child: A Memoir (W. W. Norton, )
  • 2006: Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (Nation Books, )

Fiction

  • 1987: Dry Your Smile (Doubleday, )
  • 1991: The Mer-Child: A New Legend for Children and Other Adults (The Feminist Press, )
  • 2006: The Burning Time (Melville House, )

Anthologies

  • 1969: The New Woman (Poetry Editor) (Bobbs-Merrill, )
  • 1970: Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (Random House, )
  • 1984: Sisterhood Is<!-- Capitalize the second titular word as "Is" because that is how it is done on the book. --> Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (Doubleday/Anchor Books; revised, updated edition The Feminist Press, 1996, )
  • 2003: Sisterhood Is<!-- Capitalize the second titular word as "Is" because that is how it is done on the book. --> Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (Washington Square Press, )

Essays

  • "The politics of sado-masochistic fantasies" in
  • "Light bulbs, radishes and the politics of the 21st century" in

Plays

  • "Their Own Country" (debut performance, Ascension Drama Series, New York, December 10, 1961, at 8:30pm, Church of the Ascension, reception immediately following.)
  • "The Duel." A verse play, published as "A Masque" in her book Depth Perception (debut perf. Joseph Papp's New Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, New York, 1979)

References

  • Women's Media Center
  • The Sisterhood is Global Institute
  • Ms. Magazine
  • Robin Morgan Papers at Duke
  • Papers of Robin Moore at Harvard
  • Robin Morgan Video produced by Makers: Women Who Make America