In a candid conversation weeks before her death, Morgan reflects on the writing, love and global sisterhood that shaped her life.
I had the privilege of interviewing Robin Morgan this summer. It turned out to be her last ever interview, as it was only a few weeks for her death.
As a pioneer of the women’s movement in the 1970s, Morgan worked closely alongside other acclaimed feminists such as Gloria Steinem, who died three days before Morgan did. She was editor in chief of Ms. magazine from 1989 to 1994, the author of numerous books, editor of the seminal Sisterhood is Powerful, and so much more.
Morgan’s life was a study of integrity and achievement. During our conversation, she allowed me to get a glimpse of herself as she wanted the world to see her: not just as a dedicated activist and writer, but as a woman deeply affected by her work. She wanted to reveal parts of herself that she may have been hesitant to show others in the past. Her fearless battle for women’s equality—along with her compassion and motivation to advocate for present and future generations of women around the world—are all parts of her formidable legacy.
On a hot afternoon in August, I arrived at Morgan’s New York home, situated on a tree-lined block with attractive brick townhouses and cobblestone streets. “Come in, come in!” she exclaimed, gesturing with her hands from her front door.
She was a short woman who smiled with all her teeth and had a full head of short, cropped hair. I followed closely behind her, making sure to give her and her metal walker enough space to maneuver the tight corners. Her apartment seemed to have a personality all its own: a plush purple couch with multiple throw pillows, a tiny breakfast nook in the kitchen situated next to the double doors leading to the garden, a large desk that separated the living room from the bedroom with a small Renoir print above the fireplace.
Then there were the rows upon rows of books lining nearly every wall, all neatly organized. There were no nooks and crannies in Morgan’s apartment, only books.
“I wish I’d written more,” she said to me quietly, looking at her overstuffed shelves. “I should have written more. I know I’ll be on my deathbed thinking, ‘I should have written more.’”
As we walked outside, she smiled and gestured at the true source of her pride: her garden. I marveled at the lush greenery and took great pleasure sitting under the shade of a large, ancient-looking linden tree while listening to the gentle bubbling of a small water fountain.
“I used to sleep out here,” Morgan said, pointing to a reclining day bed and smiling wistfully. Parkinson’s disease had reshaped her body, her speech, the ability to travel freely and her relationships. She was trying to “make something of the disease, rather than what it would make of me.”
“I am proud of the way I’ve been trying to deal with Parkinson’s,” she told me, “but I am not sure I have done it well.”
I noticed she struggled with this feeling of incompleteness; she had achieved so much in her life, she had made such an impact, yet still she wished she had done more.
We moved back inside and sat down on the purple sofa. “I’ve often felt, I was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Morgan told me. “I mean, I should have been at the barricades when I was home writing. I should have been home writing when I was at the barricades.”
She glanced downward. “The story is not finished,” she added, defiantly.
Morgan may not have felt her story was finished. But like any great story, one must start at the beginning.
Morgan grew up in the spotlight as a child actor. “By the time I was 2 or 3, I was so precocious, God help me. I had my own radio program when I was 4.”
She had a strained relationship with her mother, who raised young Morgan as a single parent. Her father left when she was too young to remember him.
“My mother was young,” she said. “She was unmarried. She put [my father] through medical school; she did what women did in the 1940s and he took advantage of all of it. And then he announced he was marrying a girl from Vienna and too bad if she didn’t like it.”
Despite her often-strained relationship with her mother, Morgan was quick to admit “there was never a lack of love.” She soon stepped out of the spotlight and stopped acting altogether. It was not a difficult choice; she knew she wanted to write.
Until she attended Columbia University, she was privately tutored. Her tutors encouraged and nourished her passion for literature and poetry, and when she was 17, she submitted her first poem to The Sewanee Review. She received a letter announcing her poem was accepted—but it was addressed to a “Mr. Robin Morgan.” She said she had a “genderless name” and held no contempt, nor did it dampen her enthusiasm. “That was strange.”
She decided to “keep [her] gender to [her]self,” and they published the poem. As she continued to feed her enthusiasm for writing, submitting her work early on, she began to “leave the ‘Miss’ off [her] name” and would “get published a lot more.” This was a sharp lesson in how the literary world treated women’s work. She said she was “astonished” by discrimination that she and other women experienced, mainly because she “didn’t see any point in it [since] it didn’t make any sense.”
Her formal politicization, not surprisingly, was rooted in the liberal left—and then it was not. The left, like all ideological political groups in those days, was male dominated. She joined leftist movements believing in shared liberation and thinking the genders “were marching together toward freedom and we were all equal—but we weren’t,” she said.
“The women were doing all the shit work, and the men were running around being leaders and heroes. It made me furious.” Her fury lit a spark under her and she wrote “Goodbye to All That,” a direct name-naming attack on the male left, including people and organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party, activists Paul Krassner, Mark Rudd and others.
She was driven out of the left—not to the right, but to “the real left, to the left of the left, and I became a feminist.”
It was around this time that she also fell deeply in love with a woman. Morgan and I were sitting together on her sofa. Her body spasms were barely noticeable and her speech was clear. She was attentive, alert and engaging. She glanced at the Renoir above the fireplace and took a deep breath.
“I fell in love with a woman I had been close to as a friend many years earlier,” she said. “That was Marilyn. She was a member of the New Zealand Parliament when she was 23. She was brilliant. She was fierce and all the wonderful things. She crossed the floor and brought down a government to keep New Zealand nuclear-free. I fell madly, truly, seriously, deeply, wildly in love with her and stayed in love with her for 12 years. We met all over the world. At least seven, eight countries, because she was doing developmental work. My New and Selected Poems are dedicated to her and each of us was coming out with major books during this period. She invented the field of feminist economics.”
The way in which Morgan spoke about Marilyn made it clear to me that this relationship was not just an affair; it was a central axis of her emotional, political and artistic life.
When the relationship came to an end, it left Morgan shattered. She called the breakup “an extremely, acutely, disastrous, devastating breakup from which I never totally recovered.” The grief was so pervasive, it had to be managed through rearranging the physical space of her life. Marilyn had given her a large piece of art that took up most of the wall above her fireplace. Eventually, it had to go. “It was a continual reminder for far too long a time, so I put the little baby Renoir up instead. Object by object, instance by instance, had to be replaced.”
Even so, the love and heartache remained very much alive; the pain “will never completely go away.” Morgan paused to clear her throat, “and that is all I have to say about that.”
In 1962, Morgan married the poet Kenneth Pitchford; they would remain married until 1990. Together, they had one son, Blake, who was close to his mother until the end of her life.
In the 1980s, Morgan began to feel that the focus of national organizing had become more about infighting and fundraising than activism. She wanted to be where women “didn’t have the luxury” of internal wars and were “up against it” yet still organizing, like the women teaching girls to read in secret schools in Afghanistan.
She traced this transformation to the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1980. Morgan identified the conference as a key turning point, commenting that “it started from there.”
She shifted her focus to matters of global import. Her work abroad led her to the Philippines, where she traveled with local guides and international humanitarian workers to reach an indigenous community.
She described one particular arduous trek through a dense forest.
“When you finally get to the village,” Morgan said, “you meet with this woman, Gunawa, and you learn she is your age. Her skin looks like leather from working in the sun in the rice paddies. She lives in a lean-to, which is literally a sheet of metal on the side of a hill, and it is poverty beyond belief. You ask her a question that [you] have asked prime ministers as well as incredibly poor women, which is: What is she most ashamed of, and what is she proudest of?
“Her answer was that she was ashamed because she couldn’t read and proud that her children could. She said that she had never been outside her village, had never even been across the rope bridge. But there are signs on the road and the signs tell you where you are and where you are going. She said to me, ‘If I knew how to read, I would know then: who I was, where I was and where I was going.’”
Morgan paused, tears appearing in her eyes as she recalled this memory. As she gathered herself, she leaned in close, her eyes fixed and serious. “So, what we are doing, you and I, is not unimaginable. We are adding to that body of knowledge.” She spoke with the authority one would expect from a giant of the women’s movement.
“But everything,” she continued, “that we add is paying back, little by little, you know? For other women, for ourselves, for our children, for the rest of us. It is an enrichment that is quite fantastic and Gunawa is one woman among many who taught me that.”
As we concluded our conversation, I felt both uplifted and weighed down. Preserving feminism in the way Morgan laid it out, where our purpose is to use what we have learned to inspire future generations, seemed like a huge undertaking.
But perhaps that is what being a feminist is.
Carrying the torch for other women who just want to learn, to express themselves, to be heard, to be treated equally. A feminist must shoulder the awesome responsibility of nourishing other women’s hunger for knowledge, rooting their politics in love and intimacy with the world and honoring the commitment to never stop trying––even in despair––because the act of trying is, on its own, a worthy and rewarding way to spend a life.
“And I tell myself,” Morgan said to me as I got ready to leave, “even if we don’t make it, we can say this: At least we tried.”
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Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
