Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan (born January 29, 1941) is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor.

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.

As she entered adulthood, Robin Morgan continued her education as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University.

The show premiered on CBS in 1949, starring Peggy Wood, and was a great success.

Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement.

During the 1960s, she 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.

She began working as a secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency, where she met and worked with such writers as poet W. H. Auden in the early 1960s.

In the 1960s she became increasingly involved in social-justice movements, notably the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam war.

In 1962, Morgan married poet Kenneth Pitchford.

By 1962 Morgan had become active in the anti-war Left, and had also contributed articles and poetry to such Left-wing and counter-culture journals as Liberation, Rat, Win, and The National Guardian.

In early 1967, she was active in the Youth International Party (known in the media as the "Yippies"), with Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner.

However, tensions over sexism within the YIP (and the New Left in general) came to a head when Morgan grew more involved in Women's Liberation and contemporary feminism.

She gave birth to their son, Blake Morgan, in 1969.

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 has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.

When Grove summarily fired her and other union sympathizers, she led a seizure and occupation of their offices in the spring of 1970, protesting the union-busting, as well as the dishonest accounting of royalties to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow.

Morgan and eight other women were arrested that day.

In the mid-1970s Morgan became a Contributing Editor to Ms. magazine, and continued her affiliation there as a part- or full-time editor in the following decades.

She had already begun publishing her own poetry (later collected in her first book of poems, Monster, published in 1972).

Throughout the next decades, along with political activism, writing fiction and nonfiction prose, and lecturing at colleges and universities on women's rights, Morgan continued to write and publish poetry.

In 1979, when the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed, featuring famous women from politics, media and entertainment, culture, sports, and other areas of achievement, one of the cards featured Morgan's name and picture.

Today, the trading cards are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the University of Iowa library.

The couple divorced in 1983.

At that time, she was working as an editor at Grove Press and was involved in an attempt to unionize the publishing industry.

She served as editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1989 to 1994, turning it into a highly successful, ad-free, bimonthly, international publication, which won awards for both writing and design, and received considerable acclaim among journalists.

In 2005, Morgan co-founded the non-profit progressive women's media organization, The Women’s Media Center, with friends actor/activist Jane Fonda, and activist Gloria Steinem.

Seven years later, in 2012, she debuted a weekly radio show and podcast, Women’s Media Center Live With Robin Morgan. The broadcast is syndicated in the US and, as a podcast, is published online at the WMCLive website, and distributed on iTunes in 110 countries.

It has been praised by The Huffington Post as "talk radio with a brain" and features commentary by Morgan about recent news, and interviews with activists, politicians, authors, actors and artists.

The weekly hour was picked up by CBS Radio two weeks after its launch and is broadcast on CBS affiliate WJFK each Saturday.

The program features commentary by Morgan about recent news, and interviews with activists, politicians, authors, actors and artists.

In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.

Due to circumstances at her birth, her mother claimed that Robin Morgan was born a year later than she actually was (see birth and parents), and throughout her career as a child actor, she was thought to be a year younger than she actually was, both by herself and others.

Already as a toddler, her mother, Faith, and mother's sister Sally started Robin as a child model.

At the age of five, believed to be four, she got her own 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.