Robin Morgan has died - author of Sisterhood is Powerful and more

[IwantToRetire]

Over the course of her life, she published more than 20 books: eight collections of poetry, including Monster (1972) and Harvesting Darkness (2023); and nonfiction titles such as The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989) and Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (2006). Especially not to be forgotten are the anthologies she edited: Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and Sisterhood Is Forever (2003).

While Morgan “at her very heart is a poet,” according to Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center, she was also “bar none, an activist. Call her any hour of the night. She will take your call. She will work through, figure out a plan. She’s extraordinary that way.”

https://msmagazine.com/2026/09/05/rest-in-power-robin-morgan

For many grass roots feminists she was remembered, a bit like Sheila Rowbotham in the UK, for calling out the sexism of so called allies in the male left.

In 1970, she famously channeled her burgeoning feminist discontent in the article “Goodbye to All That,” printed in RAT, a leftist New York City newspaper taken over by a group of its women employees who were sick of the paper’s sexism.

“Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea,” Morgan wrote. “There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone.”

The full text of this is available at https://www.bard.edu/library/archive/newspapers/students/Observer/1970/OB70_03_11.pdf page 10 although print quality really bad.

Well the time has come begun to say goodbye to our second wave sisters, so it would seem.

we must carry the torch.

We will, we will.

A Ceremony [extract from]
...
Look, we have left the grove.
We will grow old, and older.
One of us will die, and then the other.
The earth itself will be impaled
on sunspokes. It doesn't matter.
We have been imprinted on the protons
of energy itself,

and so stand in another atmosphere,
where an undiscovered start we will never live to see
casts shadows on a grove of succulents we cannot yet imagine.
There our interchangeable features still vibrate and blur,
each smile half of one circle,
each utterance spiraling like light
upward in shudders along the spine
as if the moon and you and I were slivers
of one mirror, gazing on herself at last.

from Lady of the Beasts, 1976.

RIP Robin Morgan

If you can get your hands, or your ears, on her 1976 poetry book Lady of the Beasts - there are 2nd hand copies out there, and I think it's on Kindle - have a look at her suite of poems inspired by six tapestries of 'The Lady with the Unicorn' at the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

The island is carpeted with periwinkle,
yellow flag, woodrose, and violet.
Thistles bed into nests
for field daisies, which brood yoke-hearted
inside broken egshell petals.
On such ground they stand -
the animal born of myth,
the woman born of woman.

If you like poetry, that is, sorry I'm making assumptions! But I think her 'Voices on Six Tapestries' is brilliant. I'll remember her as a wonderful poet, although I know she was so much more.

I know many women who were / are feminists who appreciated her politics and activism but for them it was her poetry. (a bit above me I'm afraid ... )

I never knew she was a child star!

I really love Goodbye to All That. I think the first time (apart from SCUM) that I had read something from a woman who was so engraged by men. And realising spending time with them as "allies" just led to betrayal.

And however many decades later, left leaning men are just the same.

Or maybe worse in light of TWAW.

NB AI summary but I didn't know about this speech!

At the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles, Morgan delivered the keynote address. The speech was aimed directly at Beth Elliott, a trans woman who was performing and helping organize the conference. 1, 2]

In this address—later published in her 1977 essay collection Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist—Morgan argued that lived experience as a biological female was essential to understanding patriarchal oppression. Her arguments laid the groundwork for modern debates regarding sex-segregated spaces: 1, 2, 3]

• Rejection of Gender over Biological Sex: Morgan explicitly refused to acknowledge trans women as female, stating: "I will not call a male ‘she’; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’...". 1]
• The "Impostor" Claim: She framed transgender identity not as an innate sense of gender, but as an opportunistic intrusion by biological males, famously accusing trans women of being "impostors" and "destroyers". 1, 2, 3]
• Trivialization of Harassment: She asserted that the street harassment experienced by a trans person was fundamentally different from the systemic violence faced by biological women, dismissively suggesting it was a hassle that a "male transvestite... may enjoy". 1]

!!!!!!!

I didn't either! but thank you so much for the summary, it's amazing.

Radical feminism got a lot of things right from Day 1, I think because it's based on the idea that: you name the society, and the most basic division in it will be between the women and the men; and you name the heap, and women will be at the bottom of it.

That's my take on radical feminism - I know I'll never match Robin Morgan's eloquence in either poetics or politics

Obituary by Julie Bindel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/14/robin-morgan-obituary