The poet, novelist and political theorist Robin Morgan, who has died aged 85, was a key figure of second-wave feminism. From 1976, she was a contributing editor of the influential Ms magazine, founded by her friend and close collaborator Gloria Steinem, and served as its editor in chief from 1989 until 1994.
In 1967, she co-founded the radical activist group New York Radical Women, and the following year, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (Witch), which used street theatre and other actions to protest against cultural sexism. In 1970, she edited the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, now considered a foundational text of second-wave feminism, and, with the royalties received, founded the Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund to support women’s organisations. In all, she published 22 books, including three landmark anthologies.
Morgan was one of the first feminists of her generation to point out the misogyny within male leftist counterculture. Her 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, published in Rat, a leftist newsletter, scorned both the so-called “sexual revolution” and the male radicals who expected women to type out their manifestos and share their beds while denying them political voice.
She coined some of the feminist movement’s most effective and enduring slogans, including “Porn is the theory; rape is the practice”, a line that captured her lifelong opposition to pornography. On the anti-feminism backlash, which characterised the women’s movement as dangerous, she observed: “We are the women that men have warned us about.” She came up with the term “herstory”, for history written from a female perspective.
It was a direct action with New York Radical Women that first put Morgan in the spotlight: in 1968, she helped organise a protest against the Miss America pageant in New Jersey during which women tossed bras, girdles and cleaning equipment into a “Freedom Trash Can” – although it was not set on fire, this gave rise to the derogatory put-down of feminists as “bra burners”.
Born in Lake Worth, Florida, Robin was the daughter of Faith Berkley, a shop assistant, and Mordechai Morgenstern, a gynaecologist. The couple were not married, and Faith had moved to Florida from New York to hide her pregnancy. Robin was 20 when she first met her father.
Pushed by an aunt into child modelling, she was a performer from the age of five, with her own programme, The Little Robin Morgan Show, on the New York radio station WOR and a starring role on the popular TV show Mama between 1950 and 1956. In her teens she rebelled, leaving acting to become a writer, and at 16 began studying literature informally at Columbia University in New York. She joined a writing workshop, where she met the poet Kenneth Pitchford, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front. Married from 1962 until their divorce in 1990, they had a son, Blake, in 1969.
As a former leftist revolutionary, when Morgan joined a newly formed women’s group in the 1960s, it was her intention to convert them to Marxism; instead, they converted her to radical feminism. She never lost her taste for coalition work, but her politics were now unambiguously her own.
In The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989), she made connections between violence and misogyny by men on both left and right. “It is the common denominator of strutting machismo,” she wrote, “that links the random killings of the street terrorist with murderous state terrorism.” Her Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (2006) took on Christian fundamentalism with equal force.
Alongside Steinem and Jane Fonda, she was a co-founder of the Women’s Media Center in 2005. Its aim was to improve both representation and the positive participation of women and girls in the media.
In 2008, she published Goodbye To All That #2 – an essay on the misogyny aimed at Hillary Clinton during her run to become the Democratic presidential candidate. Mass-forwarded by Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, it went viral. “Me, I’m voting for Hillary,” Morgan wrote, “not because she’s a woman, but because I am.”
In 2015, she organised a conference on the sexual exploitation of women in the sex industry, hosted by the Carter Center, Atlanta, the organisation founded by the former US president Jimmy Carter to promote human rights. As a result of her friendship with Carter, an indictment of pornography appeared on his website – a first for a former president. Carter was also the first male guest on Morgan’s weekly radio programme, WMC Live.
I first met her in 1997 at a meeting in a Manhattan cafe, where Andrea Dworkin had gathered a group together to talk about how to call rapists to account through the criminal justice system. Softly spoken, she wore her feminist notoriety lightly. There was nothing egotistical about her; she once told me that her most important work was mentoring later generations of political activists. Close to her heart was the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a feminist thinktank founded in 1984 with Simone de Beauvoir, which raises money for organisations improving the lives of women and girls globally.
The anti-pornography scholar and activist Gail Dines said that Morgan “saw porn as front and centre of radical feminist theory and politics … she talked about the disgrace of the third wave, and how missing porn as the material and ideological mouthpiece of patriarchy would destroy feminism.”
Asked in a 2007 interview for the Humanist magazine what it meant to be a radical feminist, she replied: “It means daring to be uncompromising, daring to be angry.”
Her poetry collection Dark Matters (2018) explored ageing, mortality and resilience. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2010, and, according to her son, feared decline, not death.
On the question of generational handover, she was unyielding. “It’s only natural for people to want to stay in charge of the movement they poured their life energies into,” she once said.
“Get your own damned torch,” she told a young woman who intimated that it was time to pass hers on. “I’m still using mine.”
She is survived by her son, Blake.
• Robin Evonne Morgan, poet, writer and feminist activist, born 29 January 1941; died 5 September 2026
