Robin Morgan (January 29, 1941 – September 5, 2026) was an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and onetime child actor. From the early 1960s on, she had 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". She wrote more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was the editor of Ms. magazine.
During the 1960s, Morgan participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements; in the late 1960s, she was a founding member of radical feminist organizations such as New York Radical Women and W.I.T.C.H. She founded or co-founded the Feminist Women's Health Network, the National Battered Women's Refuge Network, Media Women, the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers, the Feminist Writers' Guild, the Women's Foreign Policy Council, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, GlobalSister.org, and Greenstone Women's Radio Network. She also co-founded the Women's Media Center with journalist and social movement activist Gloria Steinem and actress, author, and activist Jane Fonda. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.
The circumstances at her birth led her mother to claim that Robin Morgan was born a year later than she actually was (see birth and parents), and throughout her career as a child actor, she was thought to be a year younger than she actually was, both by herself and others.
Already as a toddler, her mother, Faith, and mother's sister Sally started Robin as a child model. At the age of five, believed to be four, she got her own program, titled Little Robin Morgan, on the New York radio station WOR. She was also a regular on the original network radio version of Juvenile Jury. Her acting career took off when she was eight and started in the TV series Mama, as Dagmar Hansen, the younger sister in the family depicted in the series. The show premiered on CBS in 1949, starring Peggy Wood, and was a great success. Morgan played Cecchina Cabrini in Citizen Saint (1947).
During the Golden Age of Television, Morgan starred in such "TV spectaculars" as Kiss and Tell and Alice in Wonderland, and guest starred on such live dramas as Omnibus, Suspense, Danger, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Robert Montgomery Presents, Tales of Tomorrow, and Kraft Theatre. She worked with directors such as Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Ralph Nelson; writers such as Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling; and performed with actors such as Boris Karloff, Rosalind Russell, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Cliff Robertson.
Having wanted to write rather than to act since she was four, Morgan fought her mother's efforts to keep her in show business, and left the cast of Mama at age 14.
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 highly successful, ad-free, bimonthly, international publication, which won awards for both writing and design, and received considerable 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. Today, the trading cards are 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 has been 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.
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.
In the 1960s she became increasingly involved in social-justice movements, notably the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam war. 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 key 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 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."