As a child, Robin Morgan had her own nationally syndicated radio program; she spent adulthood using that early command of public attention to bring women's ideas and voices into print, protest and broadcasting. Morgan, the poet, editor and organizer whose 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful became an essential text of second-wave feminism, died in New York on September 5, 2026, at 85.

The child known as Little Robin Morgan began modeling as a toddler and hosted her own program on New York station WOR during the 1940s. Her Robin Morgan official website also recorded appearances on Juvenile Jury and steady work in live television. As Dagmar Hansen on the CBS series Mama, she became a household name. After seven years, she left the series to write.

Morgan later took classes at Columbia University without matriculating and began publishing poetry in literary magazines at 17. The pivot from performer to poet became more than a career change. In the 1960s she joined civil rights and antiwar campaigns, then helped organize New York Radical Women and W.I.T.C.H. Language, image and audience became part of her organizing method.

That combination was visible in Atlantic City in 1968, when Morgan helped organize the protest against the Miss America pageant. Demonstrators placed cosmetics, curlers and other symbols of prescribed femininity into a Freedom Trash Can. The action introduced the emerging women's liberation movement to a national audience, while the supposed burning of bras became a myth.

Two years later, Morgan edited Sisterhood Is Powerful, gathering work by women who did not yet have a national feminist forum. The Women's Media Center said she used proceeds from the book's success to make grants to women's groups. The volume became a central movement document, and Morgan was widely credited with bringing the word herstory into common feminist use.

Morgan considered poetry the current running through that public work. Her books eventually numbered more than 20 across poetry, fiction, memoir, political theory and reportage, including Monster, Dark Matter and Saturday's Child. The Associated Press reported that the movement carried lines from her poem Monster into rallies, an unusually direct passage from a poet's page to collective speech.

Her anthologies widened their horizon with Sisterhood Is Global in 1984 and Sisterhood Is Forever in the next generation. She also helped found the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, an international center for feminist ideas and action. Those titles captured a durable part of her project: building connections across borders and time.

Morgan became editor in chief of Ms. magazine in 1989 and served through 1994. In her own account for Ms. magazine, she described restoring an explicitly feminist editorial identity and extending its international reach through reporting from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

In 2005, she joined Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem in founding the Women's Media Center. She later wrote, hosted and produced Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan. By the center's count, the program ran for 13 years, reached 112 countries and produced 500 episodes.

Her son, musician and producer Blake Morgan, distilled the connection between her creative and political lives: “But first and foremost, she was an artist.” That judgment fits the whole arc, from a child speaking into a radio microphone to the poet arranging a chorus of writers in Sisterhood Is Powerful. Morgan's poems, anthologies, Ms. issues, organizations and hundreds of broadcasts remain as instruments for people still trying to make women's experience visible and women's speech consequential.