Robin Morgan

Robin Evonne Morgan was born on January 29, 1941, in Lake Worth, Florida, and from the very beginning she defied easy categories. A child prodigy who hosted her own nationally syndicated radio program on WOR at age five, she became a household name as Dagmar Hansen on the beloved CBS television series "Mama" — a role that earned her the title "The Ideal American Girl." Yet Robin had known since age four that she wanted to be a writer, and at fourteen she walked away from stardom to pursue that calling, leaving show business against her mother's wishes and never looking back. She immersed herself in New York's literary world, studying in poetry workshops at Columbia University and working as a literary secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency, where she collaborated alongside poets including W.H. Auden. Through the early 1960s her world expanded outward: she marched for civil rights, organized against the Vietnam War, and found her defining purpose in the radical feminist movement taking shape around her. In 1967 she co-founded New York Radical Women, and in the fall of 1968 she organized one of the most galvanizing protests of the era — the demonstration against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. That same year she designed the iconic feminist symbol, a raised fist within the Venus circle, that became the visual language of a generation. She co-founded W.I.T.C.H., a radical feminist collective that used street theater and guerrilla tactics to expose sexism wherever it hid. Her most enduring contribution came in 1970 with the anthology "Sisterhood Is Powerful," a landmark that the New York Public Library named one of the 100 most influential books of the twentieth century. It launched a career of more than twenty books — poetry, fiction, memoir, and nonfiction — including "The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism" (1989), the memoir "Saturday's Child" (2000), and her final poetry collection, "Harvesting Darkness" (2023). She is widely credited with coining the term "herstory." At Ms. Magazine, where she served as a contributing editor beginning in 1976 and then as editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1994, Robin relaunched the publication as an ad-free, international bimonthly that won wide critical praise. In 2005 she co-founded the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda. From 2012 until her death she hosted over 500 episodes of "Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan," reaching audiences in 110 countries each week. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2010, Robin revealed the diagnosis publicly in 2013 with the same directness she brought to everything — and simply kept working. She passed away on October 5, 2026, at a Manhattan hospital, at the age of eighty-five. She is survived by her son, Blake Morgan. "Hate generalizes, love specifies," she wrote — and in every poem, protest, and broadcast, she proved it.