Robin Morgan, feminist writer and close friend of Gloria Steinem, dies at 85

Robin Morgan, the former child star who became a poet, essayist, editor and prominent second-wave feminist, has died at 85. Her son, Blake Morgan, said she died Saturday in New York after suffering a series of health problems in recent weeks, just days after the death of her close friend and fellow activist Gloria Steinem.

Morgan stood at the center of major changes in how women lived and thought during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, she helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant. Protesters threw bras into what became known as the “Freedom Trash Can,” an episode later mythologized as bra burning.

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She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words.

Two years later, Morgan edited “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” an anthology regarded as a foundational text of the modern women’s movement. Yet her son said she saw herself primarily as a poet and artist, and that her creative work shaped her activism.

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hate generalizes, love specifies.

“She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” Blake Morgan said. He cited one of her best-known lines, “hate generalizes, love specifies.” Morgan is also widely credited with coining “herstory,” a feminist reworking of “history,” and with popularizing the clenched-fist female symbol associated with the liberation movement.

Her poems became part of feminist protest culture. “Monster,” with its declaration, “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at rallies. Her poem “Arraignment” reflected the movement’s embrace of Sylvia Plath and condemnation of Plath’s husband, poet Ted Hughes. Its couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” later inspired Sonic Youth’s song title “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”

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I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it.

Morgan challenged institutions on the left and right. A government report labeled her an “anarchist housewife.” In 1970, she and other protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of Grove Press during a labor dispute. In her essay “Goodbye to All That,” she also criticized figures ranging from Hugh Hefner to Abbie Hoffman.

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I accuse/Ted Hughes