Robin Morgan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Robin Morgan
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Morgan in 2012
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| Born | January 29, 1941 Lake Worth, Florida, U.S.
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| Education | Columbia University (BA) |
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| Years active | 1940s–present |
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Notable work
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Sisterhood anthologies |
| Spouse(s) |
Kenneth Pitchford
(m. 1962–1983) |
| Children | Blake Morgan |
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.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
During the 1960s, she 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 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 activist Gloria Steinem and actor/activist Jane Fonda. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.
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Child actor
Due to circumstances at her birth, her mother claimed 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.
Adult career
As she entered adulthood, Robin 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 features 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. 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.
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 group. She was the key organizer of their September 1968 inaugural protest of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Morgan wrote the Miss America protest pamphlet No More Miss America!, and that same year 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. Morgan designed the universal symbol of the women’s movement––the female symbol, a circle with a cross beneath, centered with a raised fist. The Oxford English Dictionary also credits her with first using the term "herstory" in print in her 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful.
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 towards 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 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. Twice––in 1986 and 1989 she spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza, to report on the conditions of women. Morgan has also spoken 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 has 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 has also received the Humanist Heroine Award from The American Humanist Association in 2007.
Sisterhood anthologies
In 1970, Morgan compiled, edited, and introduced the first anthology of feminist writings, Sisterhood is Powerful. The compilation included now-classic feminist essays by such activists as Naomi Weisstein, Kate Millett, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Florynce Kennedy, Frances M. Beal, Joreen, Marge Piercy, Lucinda Cisler and Mary Daly, as well as historical documents including the N.O.W. Bill of Rights, excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto, the Redstockings Manifesto, historical documents from W.I.T.C.H., and a germinal statement from the Black Women’s Liberation Group of Mount Vernon. 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”. Morgan established the first American feminist grant-giving organization, The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, with the royalties from Sisterhood Is Powerful. However, the anthology was banned in Chile, China, and South Africa.
Her follow-up volume in 1984, Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, compiled articles about women in over seventy countries. That same year she founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, notable for being the first international feminist think tank. Repeatedly refusing the post of president, she was elected secretary of the organization from 1989 to 1993, was VP from 1993 to 1997, and after serving on the advisory board, finally agreed to become president in 2004. A third volume, Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium in 2003, was a collection of articles mostly by well-known feminists, both young and "vintage", in a retrospective on and future blueprint for the feminist movement. It was compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Morgan, and Morgan wrote "To Vintage Feminists" and "To Younger Women", which were both included in the anthology as Personal Postscripts.
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 served as a contributing editor to Ms. magazine for many years, receiving the Front Page Award for Distinguished Journalism for her cover story titled "The First Feminist Exiles from the USSR" in 1981. She served as the magazine's editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1994, re-launching it as an ad-free, international bimonthly publication in 1991. This earned her a series of awards, including the award for Editorial Excellence by Utne Reader in 1991, and the Exceptional Merit in Journalism Award by the National Women's Political Caucus. Morgan resigned her post in 1994 to become Consulting Global Editor of the magazine, which she remains to this day.
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.
Authorship
Robin Morgan has 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.
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."
Morgan had published three books of fiction as of 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 has 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 has herself written non-fiction, including Going Too Far (1978), The Anatomy of Freedom (1984), 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 most recently published book of non-fiction is Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right (2006).
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 in the Jewish Women's Archive, Morgan reveals she is of Jewish ancestry, but identifies her religion as Wiccan and/or atheist.
Today Robin Morgan lives 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 April 2013, Morgan announced publicly that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. 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.
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
- 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, ISBN: 978-0-394-48226-2)
- 1976: Lady of the Beasts: Poems (Random House, ISBN: 978-0-394-40758-6)
- 1981: Death Benefits: A Chapbook (Copper Canyon, Limited Edition of 200 copies)
- 1982: Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque (Doubleday, ISBN: 978-0-385-17794-8)
- 1999: A Hot January: Poems 1996–1999 (W. W. Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-32106-7)
- 1990: Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New (W. W. Norton, ISBN: 0-393-30760-3)
Nonfiction
- 1977: Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, (Random House, ISBN: 0-394-72612-X)
- 1982: The Anatomy of Freedom (W.W. Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-31161-7)
- 1989: The Demon Lover: On the ... Terrorism (W. W. Norton, ISBN: 0-7434-5293-3)
- 2001: The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (Updated Second Edition, Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN: 978-0743452939)
- 1992: The Word of a Woman (W.W. Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-03427-1)
- 1995: A Woman's Creed (pamphlet), The Sisterhood Is Global Institute
- 2001: Saturday's Child: A Memoir (W. W. Norton, ISBN: 0-393-05015-7)
- 2006: Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (Nation Books, ISBN: 1-56025-948-5)
Fiction
- 1987: Dry Your Smile (Doubleday, ISBN: 978-0-7043-4112-8)
- 1991: The Mer-Child: A New Legend for Children and Other Adults (The Feminist Press, ISBN: 978-1-55861-054-5)
- 2006: The Burning Time (Melville House, ISBN: 1-933633-00-X)
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, ISBN: 0-394-70539-4)
- 1984: Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (Doubleday/Anchor Books; revised, updated edition The Feminist Press, 1996, ISBN: 978-1-55861-160-3)
- 2003: Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (Washington Square Press, ISBN: 0-7434-6627-6)
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)
See also
In Spanish: Robin Morgan para niños
