Robin Morgan, a prolific feminist author and radical activist who edited the landmark 1970 anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” served as editor in chief of Ms. journal for 5 years and helped arrange one of the primary protests of the Miss America pageant, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 85.
The dying, in a hospital, was confirmed by her son, the musician Blake Morgan, who’s her sole survivor.
From the entrance traces of a much-splintered feminist motion, Ms. Morgan gave voice to ladies as a poet, journalist, novelist, memoirist, agitator and iconoclast. She got here of age within the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War actions, however together with different younger ladies of the brand new left, she discovered these actions dominated by males, and, particularly, males who needed to maintain ladies as second-class residents.
“We were tired of making coffee and not policy,” she told The Guardian in 2006.
Ms. Morgan precipitated shock waves in 1970 when she revealed an essay in Rat, an underground newspaper. The article, titled “Goodbye to All That,” named particular males as sexists. “Goodbye to Hip Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution,” she wrote, stating that the murderous Charles Manson was “only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy.” The piece turned an on the spot traditional of second-wave feminism; it additionally introduced her dying threats from counterculture activists. “They called it ‘the shot heard round the Left,’” she told The New Yorker in 2008.
She returned to that theme in 2008 with “Goodbye to All That (#2),” an essay calling out the toxic misogyny aimed at Hillary Clinton, then a senator who was operating for the Democratic presidential nomination. The article went viral (and was mass-forwarded by Chelsea Clinton, her daughter).
Ms. Morgan’s early activism within the late Nineteen Sixties included cofounding the novel feminist teams Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell and New York Radical Women, which in 1968 organized one of the first protests in opposition to the Miss America pageant for its objectification of ladies.
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At the protest, on Atlantic City’s boardwalk in New Jersey, a number of hundred ladies staged guerrilla theater actions: Some threw bras, girdles, hair curlers, mops and different symbols of ladies’s “enslavement” right into a trash bin (however, opposite to fashionable perception, Ms. Morgan insisted that there was no bra burning). The climax of the day’s occasions was the unfurling of a banner inside the town’s conference corridor that mentioned, “Women’s Liberation.” The protest earned Ms. Morgan prominent mention in The New York Times Magazine beneath the headline, “Meet the Women of the Revolution, 1969.”
She coined the time period “herstory” — historical past written from ladies’s level of view — and claimed partial credit score for the slogan “the personal is political.” Her phrase “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice” turned a rallying cry for the anti-porn motion.