feminist

NEW YORK — Robin Morgan, a wholesome child star of the 1940s and ‘50s who grew up to become an all-American radical as a poet, essayist, editor and second-wave feminist, has died. She was 85.

Morgan, who was still working on new books and poems, died Saturday in New York after suffering a series of health problems in recent weeks, said her son, Blake Morgan. Her death came just days after that of her close friend and fellow activist Gloria Steinem.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Morgan embodied and inspired historic changes in how women lived and thought. As she was happy to point out, the onetime “Ideal American Girl” and adored “Little Robin Morgan” was a rule breaker and justice seeker with a notable list of achievements, along with a prison record and an FBI file.

Morgan was at the center of the some of the defining moments of what came to be called second-wave feminism, expanding upon the achievements of the suffragists a half-century earlier. In 1968, she was among the organizers of the first protest against the Miss America pageant, joining fellow activists in tossing their bras (soon mythologized as burning) into a “Freedom Trash Can.” The 1970 essay anthology she edited, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” is considered one of the essential texts of the modern women’s movement.

Yet she considered herself primarily a poet and artist, and that work fed into her activism, her son said.

“She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” said Blake Morgan, pointing to such quotes of hers as “hate generalizes, love specifies.”

Morgan was credited for coining ‘herstory’

Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory,” the feminist reworking of “history,” and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem “Monster,” with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem “Arraignment” helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s song “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”

Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the counterculture Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That,” she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.

“Goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave can say with impunity to a woman on the staff of Liberation magazine, The trouble with you is you’re an aggressive woman,” she wrote.

“Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner is groovy ’cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Playboy Mansion — goodbye to Hefner’s dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs and all the boys in the front room — who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol’ Abbie is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you’re Making It.”

She led an unconventional personal life

In her personal life, Morgan had male and female lovers and was married for more than 20 years to the gay poet Kenneth Pitchford, with whom she had her son, a musician, producer and record company founder. She once described her marriage as a “two member commune” and was so resistant to labels that she remembered being “straight-baited” by feminists who thought she should be a lesbian and chastised by conservatives who assumed she was a lesbian.

In her 2001 memoir “Saturday’s Child,” she expressed joy and amazement at how her life turned out and how she was able to retain “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor.”

“Put that in your apple pie and smoke it,” she wrote.

She wrote more than 20 books, including a memoir

Besides “Saturday’s Child,” she completed more than 20 books, including “The Word of a Woman: Feminists Dispatches,” and the poetry collections “Monster” and “Dark Matter.” She followed “Sisterhood is Powerful” with “Sisterhood is Global” (in 1984), and “Sisterhood is Forever” (2002), featuring such contributors as Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Ensler. For several years, she was editor in chief of Ms. Magazine, which Steinem co-founded.

Steinem would call her an ideal “utility player,” gifted in almost every way a protest movement might require. As an organizer, she helped found such 1960s feminist groups as New York Radical Women and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). She was part of the Youth International Party, the left-wing Yippies led by Hoffman and Jerry Rubin among others, but soon became disgusted with how the group treated women and left.

In 1984, she was a founder of an early feminist think tank, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute. In 2005, she, Steinem and Jane Fonda launched the Women’s Media Center, which has a mission to support “the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media.”

More recently, she hosted a syndicated radio show and remained active despite being diagnosed 16 years ago with Parkinson’s disease, which inspired several poems and a TEDWomen talk in 2015.

A child star in the ‘40s

In a different era, Morgan might have been just another forgotten child star. Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Fla., and raised in New York, she never saw her father while growing up and was told — falsely — by her mother that he was dead. Her mother also shaved a year off her age, claiming she was born in 1942, to make her early public career seem even more impressive.

The blond, talented Robin was modeling by age 3, hosted her own “Little Robin Morgan” radio show at age 5 and around the same time was featured on the radio (later television) game show, “Juvenile Jury.” From 1949-57, she appeared on the hit TV domestic comedy series “Mama” and made appearances on “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Kraft Television Theatre” and other shows.

She would meet some of the era’s biggest stars, from Abbott and Costello to Sal Mineo, and was popular enough to inspire such commercial tie-ins as Robin Morgan dolls. Magazines described her as “unspoiled” and “courteous” and “the ideal girl-next-door,” immune from “violent outbursts of antagonism against established society.”

But off camera, and sometimes on, she was so apart from her image that her first “serious” childhood poem began: “Go, rage, winter the world with despair.” During one broadcast of “Juvenile Jury,” the question was whether a boy deserved to be spanked. Morgan was supposed to joke that he should wear padding under his pants, but instead declared that all physical punishment was wrong.

As she recalled in “Saturday’s Child,” producer Dan Ehrenreich squeezed her shoulder so hard that Morgan could feel his fingernails. He turned her microphone away and eventually placed his hand over her mouth.

“I realized that I loved and respected that child who fought back in what was the first political act I recall ever daring to make,” Morgan wrote.

Her political activity began in her late teens

Once in her late teens, she began taking classes at Columbia University, attended poetry workshops and became politically active. She marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and met protesters, artists and such poets as W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, who she said gave her a man’s-eye view of the creative process: “But, my dear, women should be poems, not write them.”

In 1962, she met Pitchford at a Manhattan party. Once the other guests (“boozy bikers” and “stoned, hallucinating Joffrey dancers”) had left and the host urged others to go with them, Pitchford lighted candles, put Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the record player and became her “first.” They later walked for hours and ended up on a downtown park bench.

“You have such an air of possibility about you, Robin,” he told her. “It makes me believe anything can happen.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. He was sporting chains. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.

Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. “I just want to tell you how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years — and my husband too,” she told an astonished Steinem.

There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”

The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years. “I’ve come to believe that inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir. “We have only to discover it — and ride.”

Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. She was 92.

“Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the posts said.

An activist, journalist, and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her New York apartment, Steinem described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.”

“I raise money. I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet,” she told The New Yorker in 2015.

Steinem, who struggled with stage fright most of her life, talked with women at gigantic conferences and in intimate kaffeeklatsches. At book signings and on barstools, she sought their stories, sometimes re-telling them in her essays and on her countless speaking tours. Her portfolio of issues was vast, from sexual violence, female genital mutilation and racism to the more mundane injustices that helped fuel a movement for sweeping social change.

At one campus visit, the discussion turned to men who expect women to pick up after them. A young Japanese woman, silent for most of the increasingly raucous session, stood up, turned around to address 500 other audience members and said: “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor, I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.”

She had never before said a word in public, she told the cheering crowd.

Steinem had a “gift for empathy,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote when the feminist icon turned 80 in 2014.

“Women who read about her or saw her on TV felt that if they ran into her on the street, they would really get along with her. And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations.”

Gloria Steinem, left, and Pat Carbine, two of Ms. magazine’s founding editors, in 1980.

(Dave Pickoff / Associated Press )

Famously attractive, Steinem over the years gave hope to young women who wanted to “stand up for their rights without being called man-haters,” Collins wrote. “She was evidence that it was possible to be true to your sisters while also being really, really attractive to the opposite sex.”

At the same time, she alienated the religious right with her fervent pro-choice advocacy. When Lands’ End featured an interview with Steinem in its 2016 catalog, outraged readers threatened a boycott. Company officials then cut their ties with the woman they had headlined as a “legend.”

Steinem first drew public notice when she was in her 20s and struggling to establish herself as a freelance writer. Her breakthrough story was a funny, scathing account of her two weeks as a Playboy “bunny” — a scantily clad cocktail waitress at Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan nightclub.

In some ways, the story backfired. Steinem became known not as a crusader for women but as a former bunny. For several years, her magazine assignments continued to veer toward “women’s page” topics — in 1964, she wrote about textured stockings for the New York Times — and even after she delved into serious political issues for New York magazine, she wasn’t taken as seriously as she would have liked.

In 1968, a Washington Post columnist described her as “the mini-skirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.” Two years later, a headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Gloria: Beautiful Brain in Ditto Body.”

Meanwhile, the women’s liberation movement had propelled itself into the mainstream, ignited by writers like Betty Friedan. For Steinem, though, it became a passion only after she covered a meeting during which women opened up about their illegal abortions. The event was held to protest a legislative hearing on abortion where the only witnesses were 14 men and a nun.

“Suddenly I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem recalled in 1983. “I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and I told no one. If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should we be made to feel criminal and alone?”

Nearly 60 years after her unwanted pregnancy, Steinem dedicated her memoir to the British physician who arranged her abortion after she agreed to two conditions.

The first was that she never reveal his name. (She did, long after his death.)

The second: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”

Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem didn’t attend school regularly until seventh grade. Most winters, her father Leo, an ebullient, 300-pound dreamer who was often in debt, would drive the family down back roads in a trailer, stopping here and there to sell antiques he’d picked up along the way.

Ruth Steinem, Gloria’s mother, was a former journalist who was hospitalized for long periods with severe mental health problems. From the age of 11, after her parents divorced and her older sister Susanne left home, Gloria often cared for her mom.

In an essay, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” Steinem recalled her mother cutting her arm when she smashed a window to escape the Nazi invaders that only she could see. “I remember a long Thanksgiving weekend holding on to her with one hand and holding my eighth-grade assignment of ‘Tale of Two Cities’ with the other,” Steinem wrote.

Despite her patchy schooling, Steinem received a scholarship to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa after majoring in government. After spending two years in India on a fellowship, she worked briefly for an international youth organization funded by the CIA.

Basing herself in New York in 1960, she quickly became known for her stylish prose, sharp wit, and striking appearance. Within a decade she was “Gloria-Steinem-the-antiwar-gorgeous- bachelor girl who was pictured with Henry Kissinger in Time and Life…,” according to a breathless 1970 account in the Los Angeles Times.

But she was also the Gloria Steinem who helped start New York magazine, who wrote insightfully about the intersection between racism and sexism, and who in 1971 became the first woman chosen to address an annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review.

She zeroed in on the school’s failings.

“There is a course on international whaling law but none on women’s rights internationally,” she told the black-tie gathering. “An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was. The same man replied to a request that at least one full-time female professor be hired by answering that women faculty brought problems because of ‘sexual vibrations’…”

The following year, Steinem, with several other feminist journalists, founded Ms. Its first, tentative edition, a 40-page insert into New York magazine, sold out in eight days.

The debut issue of Ms. included pieces on gender stereotypes, lesbian relationships, and job discrimination. It also featured an open letter from 53 prominent women — including tennis great Billie Jean King, singer Judy Collins and Steinem — who revealed that they had undergone abortions.

While the magazine’s monthly circulation eventually topped 500,000, it also fueled skeptics. “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” newscaster Harry Reasoner predicted on national TV.

Ms. also took flak from some of Steinem’s sister feminists, who contended that it cast women as victims. As new waves of feminists confronted different issues, some became exasperated by Steinem’s seemingly perennial role as the face of the women’s movement.

“Guys in the media chose Gloria as our leader,” said feminist writer Susan Brownmiller in 2016. “A lot of us, our hope is that eventually, history will straighten this all out and say, no, Gloria came in a little later, and her very loyal supporters have backtracked that history.”

Steinem remained a contributing editor to Ms. for 15 years.

Gloria Steinem at home in New York City, 2010.

(Annie Leibovitz / Penguin Random House)

Meanwhile, she was crisscrossing the country, campaigning for liberal Democratic candidates, fighting laws restricting abortion, and urging legislators to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Like Sky Masterson, the wandering gambler in Damon Runyon stories, I’ve been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible,” she wrote, “and he didn’t wash his hair with hotel soap, eat from vending machines, or sit up late organizing with the hotel maids.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama gave Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Her books include a 1983 essay collection, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”; a 1986 portrait of Marilyn Monroe; her 2015 memoir, “My Life on The Road”; and works on aging and self-esteem.

Over the years, Steinem had longstanding romantic relationships with a number of men but vowed never to marry or have children.

However, at 66, she broke her vow and married David Bale, a British businessman and animal rights advocate. By then, the institution of marriage had changed for the better, she later explained.

“We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws,” she said. “If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights.”

Three years after their marriage, Bale died of brain cancer. Steinem’s stepchildren include the actor Christian Bale.

At 80, Steinem celebrated her birthday by riding an elephant in Botswana.

In the following years, she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, spoke at the Women’s March on Washington, helped save her hometown’s last abortion clinic and gave numerous interviews denouncing President Trump’s views on women. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play and was honored by Rutgers University with the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies.

For fun, she danced. When asked by TV hosts, she occasionally demonstrated a well-worn soft shoe routine, though her heart was with the tango.

“It’s a sick, authoritarian dance,” she told a reporter, “but I loved it.”

Chawkins is a former Times staff writer.