Robin Morgan, the poet, editor and organizer who helped define second-wave American feminism, died Saturday in New York at 85.
Her death came days after that of Gloria Steinem, her longtime friend and collaborator.
Born in Lake Worth, Florida, in 1941, Morgan was a working child performer before she was an activist, appearing on the television series “Mama” from 1949 to 1957.
She organized the 1968 protest outside the Miss America pageant that pushed the movement into national view, co-founded New York Radical Women and the group known as W.I.T.C.H., and edited the 1970 anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” which became a standard text of the era.
She founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute in 1984, edited Ms. magazine, and in 2005 launched the Women’s Media Center with Steinem and Jane Fonda.
She is credited with coining the term “herstory” and with popularizing the clenched-fist emblem widely used by the movement.
Morgan had lived with Parkinson’s disease since a 2010 diagnosis and continued to write until recently. “She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” her son, Blake Morgan, said, pointing to one of her own lines: “hate generalizes, love specifies.”
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