(January 29, 1941 – September 5, 2026) was an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and onetime child actor. From the early 1960s on, she had 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 wrote more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was the editor of Ms. magazine.
During the 1960s, Morgan 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 National Network of Rape Crisis Centers, 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.
At the age of five she got her own radio 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. Over the years Morgan’s articles, essays, reviews, interviews, political analyses, and investigative journalism have appeared in publications worldwide. She is also an accomplished author, having 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. She passed away yesterday at the age of 85.
Following her death, The New York Times noted Morgan as the “face of radical feminism” whose works helped build the “institutions of the modern feminist movement”. The Associated Press mentioned how Morgan “embodied and inspired historic changes in how women lived and thought”. She was also regarded as the architect of the modern women’s movement.
