Robin Morgan—the pioneering feminist writer, poet, activist and longtime Ms. editor—died Sept. 5 at 85, leaving behind more than half a century of writing and organizing that transformed feminism in the United States and around the world.
Editor’s note: This profile of Robin Morgan was written for the forthcoming Fall 2026 issue of Ms., on the occasion of her stepping down as the magazine’s global editor. Morgan died peacefully in her sleep on Sept. 5, 2026, at the age of 85—just days after her friend and feminist partner Gloria Steinem.
“Robin Morgan was one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement,” said Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center. “Her global leadership for justice and equality, her work as a pioneering journalist who gave voice and visibility to women, and her fierce artistry as an internationally recognized poet and author of more than 20 books—these all constitute the legacy she has forged over decades of creative, cultural and political work.”
The piece has been lightly updated for publication.
For Robin Morgan, stepping down as global editor of Ms.—where she had also been a frequent contributor since 1979 and served as editor in chief from 1989 to 1994—meant she would probably be writing more, not less.
After all, the feminist activist, editor, essayist and poet had a profusion of projects in the works, ones on which she was looking forward to focusing more of her energy: a book of essays spanning loosely, according to Morgan, “from the fall of the [Twin] Towers to the rise of AI.” Another novel to add to her prior four. And more poems, always more poems, which, for Morgan, happened “no matter what.”
Over the course of her life, she published more than 20 books: eight collections of poetry, including Monster (1972) and Harvesting Darkness (2023); and nonfiction titles such as The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989) and Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (2006). Especially not to be forgotten are the anthologies she edited: Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and Sisterhood Is Forever (2003).
While Morgan “at her very heart is a poet,” according to Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center, she was also “bar none, an activist. Call her any hour of the night. She will take your call. She will work through, figure out a plan. She’s extraordinary that way.”
“She is a wonderful connector of changemakers and hope,” Regina K. Scully, co-executive producer of Women’s Media Center Live With Robin Morgan, a podcast with more than 500 episodes, said before Morgan’s death. “I am so inspired by her and urge her to never stop. We need her voice and ‘fighting words’ to carry us forward for many years to come.”
Even though a Parkinson’s diagnosis 17 years ago forced Morgan to scale back engagements that required travel, she remained brimming with the passion of her early days of activism in the 1960s. There were still glimmers of her indefatigable youth as a child star in the 1940s and ’50s, about which she wrote in her gripping memoir, Saturday’s Child (2000), and in the semiautobiographical novel Dry Your Smile (1987).
Born in 1941, Morgan was a precocious child raised by a single mother and aunts. Already as a toddler, she was pressed into service as a child model. By age 5, she was on the radio with a weekly national program.
In 1949, in the early days of television, she played the youngest daughter on CBS’ family show Mama, which aired until 1957. At the height of her young stardom, she was named the “ideal American girl” by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of America.
But even as a girl, she knew she was destined for greater things than to be someone else’s “ideal.” Morgan wanted to be a writer, and after maneuvering herself out of the national spotlight by her late teens, she became one, going from executive assistant at a publishing house to publishing poetry and articles of her own. She also became an activist, fighting for civil rights with groups like CORE—the Congress on Racial Equality—and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—although she often found them wanting in their treatment of women.
In 1970, she famously channeled her burgeoning feminist discontent in the article “Goodbye to All That,” printed in RAT, a leftist New York City newspaper taken over by a group of its women employees who were sick of the paper’s sexism.
“Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea,” Morgan wrote. “There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone.”
That same year, Morgan continued to lay bare the hard truths of women’s oppression, editing the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, which collected historical accounts, personal testimonies, essays, polemics, manifestos and poems that spoke to the need for and strength of the women’s movement.
“Women’s liberation is the first radical movement to base its politics—in fact, create its politics—out of concrete personal experiences,” Morgan wrote in the book’s introduction. “The theory, then, comes out of human feeling, not out of textbook rhetoric. That’s truly revolutionary.”
When Morgan encountered Ms., she was initially wary of what she perceived as its commercialism.
“The cathexis that I had with the magazine was very complicated,” Morgan explained. “I wanted it to be more passionate, and more intellectual, and more engaged with feminist theory. But it was doing a lot of that, actually, at the time.”
Once she became involved with the magazine in the late 1970s, Morgan was gratified to realize that, as she recalled, “there was something in every issue for somebody brand-new who had never heard anything about feminism before,” just as there was something in every issue for those who were already tuned in to the movement.
A decade later, during her five years as the magazine’s editor in chief, Morgan built on the magazine’s tradition of including poetry and fiction in its pages, championing the work of both established writers and ones who had never published with Ms. before.
Poetry and fiction, Morgan said, “[go] under the radar. You can spout rhetoric forever, political or otherwise,” but “one good poem, or one good short story, will just break your heart—and make it all suddenly very clear.”
Morgan made a career of bridging the gap between personal sentiment and political precision, between rhetoric and feeling.
Morgan called Ms. “a real family,” citing the depth and longevity of the relationships many people established through it. She would go on to found the Women’s Media Center alongside Ms. cofounder Gloria Steinem and actor and activist Jane Fonda in 2005.
“Our goal was to create more opportunities for women in media—all types of media, and to shine a light on misrepresentation and underrepresentation of women, including and especially women of color,” Fonda explained.
She credited Morgan with inspiring her own feminist education, decades earlier, via Sisterhood Is Powerful.
“It was an introduction to a point of view about women and their roles that I had not experienced at home or frankly in the anti-war movement,” Fonda said. “It was foundational to the women’s movement for decades to come.”
Morgan’s second anthology, Sisterhood Is Global, highlighted the need for feminism to be not only intersectional but international.
“It was an eye-opener because it was the first time I had ever seen in one place a status of women around the world. And it wasn’t just how many there are,” Burton recalled. “It was: Could they own property? Could they vote? Could they get an abortion? How many years of school could they have? Can they get birth control? Can they be divorced?”
In her introduction, Morgan explained how she hoped to hold up a mirror of transnational possibility: “Just as Sisterhood Is Global is a cross-cultural, cross-age-group, cross-occupation/class, cross-racial, cross-sexual-preference, and cross-ideological assemblage of women’s voices, so is the movement itself.”
It’s no wonder, then, that Morgan eventually came back to Ms. to work on global issues.
“When the Feminist Majority Foundation became publisher and I became executive editor,” Kathy Spillar recalled, “Robin’s willingness to jump back into working with Ms. gave us a global editor with reach around the world, understanding of the issues and the importance of always having a global perspective in the work that we did.”
But earlier this year, the time had come for Morgan to move on to a different kind of work. She described traveling “so much during the year as editor, and internationally, that I never stopped. I mean, I was a little windup doll, and it was quite wonderful, but it was also utterly exhausting.”
Morgan said she was “hoping desperately to get back to work” after stepping away from her extensive responsibilities with Ms. She had essays, fiction and poetry still to write.
Fueled by the indomitable determination that powered her writing, feminism and activism, Morgan was a driving force of the feminist movement for more than half a century. Her work—audacious, global, political and deeply personal—is not finished. It lives on in the movement she helped build and the countless feminists she taught to find their own fighting words.
Rest in power, Robin Morgan.
