Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan — latest news, discussion & facts — IJR

Adult life and career

As she entered adulthood, Morgan continued her education as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University. She began working as a secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency, where she met and worked with such writers as poet W. H. Auden in the early 1960s. She had already begun publishing her own poetry (later collected in her first book of poems, Monster, published in 1972). Throughout the next decades, along with political activism, writing fiction and nonfiction prose, and lecturing at colleges and universities on women's rights, Morgan continued to write and publish poetry.

In 1962, Morgan married poet Kenneth Pitchford. She gave birth to their son, Blake Morgan, in 1969. The couple divorced in 1983. 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.

In the mid-1970s, Morgan became a contributing editor to Ms. magazine, and continued her affiliation there as a part- or full-time editor in the following decades. She served as editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1989 to 1994, turning it into a successful, ad-free, bimonthly international publication, which won awards for both writing and design and received acclaim among journalists.

In 1979, when the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed, featuring famous women from politics, media and entertainment, culture, sports, and other areas of achievement, one of the cards featured Morgan's name and picture. The trading cards are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the University of Iowa library.

In 2005, Morgan co-founded the non-profit progressive women's media organization the Women's Media Center, with friends actor/activist Jane Fonda and activist Gloria Steinem. Seven years later, in 2012, she debuted a weekly radio show and podcast, Women's Media Center Live With Robin Morgan. The broadcast is syndicated in the US and, as a podcast, is published online at the WMCLive website, and distributed on iTunes in 110 countries. It was praised by The Huffington Post as "talk radio with a brain" and featured commentary by Morgan about recent news, and interviews with activists, politicians, authors, actors and artists. The weekly hour was picked up by CBS Radio two weeks after its launch and is broadcast on CBS affiliate WJFK each Saturday.

Activism

By 1962, Morgan had become active in the anti-war Left, and had also contributed articles and poetry to such left-wing and counterculture journals as Liberation, Rat, Win, and The National Guardian.

In the 1960s, she became increasingly involved in social-justice movements, notably the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. In early 1967, she was active in the Youth International Party (known in the media as the "Yippies"), with Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. However, tensions over sexism within the YIP (and the New Left in general) came to a head when Morgan grew more involved in Women's Liberation and contemporary feminism.

In 1967, Morgan became a founding member of the short-lived New York Radical Women (NYRW) group. She was the main organizer of their inaugural protest of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. She designed the feminist symbol of a raised fist within the Venus symbol for that protest of the 1969 Miss America pageant, where it was popularized. 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 co-founded 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."

With the royalties from her anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan founded the first feminist grant-giving foundation in the US: The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, which provided seed money to many early women's groups throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She made a decisive break from what she described as the "male Left" when she led the women's takeover of the underground newspaper Rat in 1970, and listed the reasons for her break in the first women's issue of the paper, in her essay titled "Goodbye to All That". The essay gained notoriety in the press for naming specific sexist men and institutions in the Left. Decades later, during the Democratic primaries for the 2008 presidential race, Morgan wrote a fiery sequel to her original essay, titled "Goodbye to All That #2", in defense of Hillary Clinton. The article quickly went viral on the internet for lambasting sexist rhetoric directed toward Clinton by the media.

In 1977, Morgan became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). 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 traveled extensively across the United States and around the world to bring attention to cross-cultural sexism. She 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. Twice, in 1986 and 1989, she spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, to report on the conditions of women. Morgan also spoke at universities and institutions in countries across Europe, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as in Australia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Over the years, Morgan received numerous awards for her activism on women's rights. The Feminist Majority Foundation named Robin Morgan "Woman of the Year" in 1990; she received the Warrior Woman Award for Promoting Racial Understanding from The Asian American Women's National Organization in 1992; in 2002 she received a Lifetime Achievement in Human Rights from Equality Now, and in 2003 The Feminist Press gave her a "Femmy" Award for her "service to literature". She also received the Humanist Heroine Award from The American Humanist Association in 2007.

Limbaugh FCC incident

In March 2012, Morgan, along with her Women's Media Center co-founders Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, wrote an open letter asking listeners to request that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate the Rush Limbaugh–Sandra Fluke controversy, where Rush Limbaugh referred to Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and "prostitute" after she advocated for insurance coverage for contraception. They asked that stations licensed for public airwaves carrying Limbaugh be held accountable for contravening public interest as a continual promoter of hate speech against various disempowered and minority groups.

Authorship

Morgan published 21 books, including works of poetry, fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. Well before she was known as a feminist leader, literary magazines published her as a serious poet. 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." In 1979 Morgan received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, then held a writing residency at the arts colony Yaddo the following year. During this time she worked on a cycle of verse plays.

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."

She published three books of fiction up to 2015. Her debut novel was the semi-autobiographical Dry Your Smile (published by Doubleday & Company, 1987), followed by The Mer-Child: A Legend for Children and Other Adults (published by The Feminist Press at City University of New York, 1991). Her most recent work of fiction is a historical novel titled The Burning Time (Melville House Books, 2006), set in the 14th century, based on court records of the first witchcraft trial in Ireland. The Burning Time was placed on the Recommended Quality Fiction List of 2007 by the American Library Association, in addition to being the 2006 Paperback Pick by Book Sense (The American Booksellers Association).

Morgan compiled, edited, and introduced several influential anthologies: Sisterhood Is Powerful: The Women's Liberation Anthology (1970), Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (1984), and Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (2003). She also wrote non-fiction, including Going Too Far (1978), The Anatomy of Freedom (1984), The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989), The Word of a Woman (1994), and Saturday's Child: A Memoir (2001). One of the most widely translated of Morgan's books and a best-seller, The Demon Lover is a commentary on the psychological and political roots of terrorism, and New York Times Book Review called it "Important...compelling....[Morgan] is intense and at times magnificent." Her last published book of non-fiction was Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right (2006).

Criticism

Morgan was placed under arrest as a direct result of her activism; she had received death threats from both the Right and the Left. 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.

As the leading organizer of the 1968 protest of the Miss America Pageant, "No More Miss America!", Morgan attacked the pageant's "ludicrous 'beauty' standards" and also accused the pageant of being racist, since at that time no African American woman had been a contestant. In addition, according to Morgan, in sending pageant winners to entertain troops in Vietnam, the women served as "death mascots" in an immoral war. Morgan asked, "Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values – racism, militarism, capitalism – all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman."

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 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 was quoted as saying: "Imagine talking about such a subject and having it trivialized like that." In 1974, with her phrase "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice" (from her essay "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape"), she became a central figure on one of the most divisive issues in feminism, particularly among anti-pornography feminists in Anglophone countries.

In 1973, Robin Morgan gave the keynote speech at the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in which she criticized Beth Elliott, a performer and organizer of the conference, for being a transgender woman. 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. She published her first serious poetry in literary magazines at age 17.

In an article published by the Jewish Women's Archive, Morgan revealed that she was of Jewish ancestry, but identified her religion as Wiccan and/or atheist. She is quoted as saying, "When compelled to define myself specifically in ethnic terms—I have described myself as being European American of Ashkenazic (with a touch of Sephardic) Jewish ancestry. I respect and understand the desire of others to affirm their ethnic roots as central to their identities, but while I'm quite proud of mine, I feel they're just not particularly central to my identity. I am deeply opposed to all patriarchal religions, including though not limited to Judaism." Morgan continued to tackle topics such as religion, politics and sex in commentaries on her radio show WMC Live with Robin Morgan.

In her final years, Robin Morgan lived in Manhattan. Blake Morgan, her son with ex-husband Kenneth Pitchford, is a musician, recording artist, and founder of New York-based record company ECR Music Group.

In 2000 Norton published Morgan's memoir, Saturday's Child, in which she wrote candidly about "the shadowy circumstances of her birth; a lifelong, impassioned, love-hate relationship with her mother; her years as a famous child actor and her fight to escape show business to become a serious writer; her marriage to a fiery bisexual poet and how motherhood transformed her life; her years in the civil rights movement, the New Left, and counterculture; her emergence a leader of global feminism; and her love affairs with women as well as men," according to BookNews.com. 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". Morgan became 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 sought to better serve women impacted by Parkinson's disease by understanding and resolving gender inequalities in PD research, treatment, and caregiver support. Morgan also wrote 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.

Early life and family background

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. Robin's father, a medical doctor named Mates Morgenstern, did not accompany pregnant Faith on her trip.

Until Morgan was 13 years old, her mother Faith claimed that Robin's father had been killed in World War II. However, Robin overheard conversations between her mother and aunt suggesting her father was alive. When she confronted her mother, Faith changed her story to assert that Robin's father had escaped from one Nazi concentration camp after another, and that she had saved his life by sponsoring his immigration to the United States where he had no family. Not until several years later did Robin get proof that this was also a lie.

Morgan learned the truth, both about her father, who was still alive, and how old she really was, early in 1961. Now a young woman, no longer working in show business, Robin found a listing for the medical practice of an obstetrician, Dr. Mates Morgenstern, in the New Brunswick, New Jersey telephone directory. Suspecting this might be her father, she had sought a meeting with him, without her mother's knowledge, and ultimately paid a surprise visit to his New Jersey office in January 1961.

Morgenstern revealed that he was aware of Robin's fame as a child actor, but had remained firm in his decision to avoid contact with Faith Morgan, having chosen not to see her again after the only time he visited her and the infant Robin. He also told Robin, during their conversation in his medical office, that she in fact was born on January 29, 1941, exactly one year earlier than she thought, and disclosed the copy of her original birth certificate, that he had stored in his office. In order to conceal the out-of-wedlock birth, Faith Morgan had asked her Florida obstetrician to sign an affidavit stating that the birth took place on January 29, 1942.

During the conversation in his office, Morgenstern told his daughter that he first met her mother after his arrival in the United States, more than a year before the United States entered World War II, and that she had had nothing to do with his immigration. He added that he had known Faith only briefly and claimed that she had fantasized their relationship as more important than it was. By the time Morgan met her father, he had married and had two sons with a woman he had known since they were both children in Austria. Having been separated by the war, they resumed their relationship after she arrived in the United States not long after Robin was born, which probably also added to Morgenstern's decision to abandon Faith and their daughter.

She met her father only once more, in February 1965 when he invited her and her husband to his New Jersey home. Morgenstern did not want his sons to know that they had a half-sister and Morgan acceded to his request that they tell his two sons that she was "the daughter of an old friend." She refused to do so again, however, and never met him or her two half-brothers again.

Morgan described the two encounters that she had with her biological father in her autobiography, Saturday's Child: A Memoir.

When Faith Morgan developed Parkinson's disease, in her early 60s, Robin telephoned her biological father to let him know. When she asked if he wanted to say goodbye, he declined. During Faith's illness, her life savings, which consisted of the money Robin had earned in her radio and television career (by then a six-figure sum that had accumulated in the bank), was stolen, by her two elderly home caregivers. Morgan discovered this but ultimately chose not to press charges.

Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan

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Live room · 1 here

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Child actor

Adult life and career

Activism

Sisterhood anthologies

Journalism

Authorship

Organizations

Lectures and professorships

Criticism

Personal life

Early life and family background

Death

Legacy

Archives

Filmography

Publications

Poetry

Nonfiction

Fiction

Anthologies

Essays

Plays

Related journals

About Robin Morgan

About Robin Morgan

Article

Notable quotes

Related journals

Live room · 1 here

Notable quotes

Article

Child actor

Adult life and career

Activism

Sisterhood anthologies

Journalism

Authorship

Organizations

Lectures and professorships

Criticism

Personal life

Early life and family background

Death

Legacy

Archives

Filmography

Publications

Poetry

Nonfiction

Fiction

Anthologies

Essays

Plays

Related journals