May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.
May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.
May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.– Robin Morgan, Monster (1972)
The Sallie Bingham Center mourns the loss of Robin Morgan who, through her prolific speaking, writing, and organizing, helped shape feminist thought and activism for more than half a century. An award-winning poet, journalist, and political theorist, Morgan was a leader of the contemporary women’s movement. In 1967, as a founding member of the New York Radical Women (NYRW) group, she was a key organizer of their inaugural protest of the Miss America pageant, an event that brought the emerging women’s liberation movement into public view.
In addition to Morgan’s books of poetry, novels, and nonfiction works, she edited a series of groundbreaking anthologies—Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Sisterhood Is Global (1984), and Sisterhood Is Forever (2003)—that brought together the voices, ideas, and experiences of generations of women and helped uplift feminist thought around the world. Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as “One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century”.
Morgan’s accomplishments continued across every medium in which she worked. With the royalties from Sisterhood Is Powerful, she founded The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, which provided seed money to many early women’s groups during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, she co-founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, creating one of the first international feminist advocacy organizations. As editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine from 1989 to 1994 and global editor for more than twenty-five years, she helped develop it into an ad-free, international publication. In 2005, she joined Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem in founding the Women’s Media Center to raise the visibility and influence of women and girls in media. And for the last fourteen years, she wrote and hosted over 500 episodes of WMC Live with Robin Morgan, an award-winning syndicated weekly radio program and podcast.
Morgan is widely credited with coining the word “herstory” to champion history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the experiences and point of view of women. Her own papers, which she placed in the Sallie Bingham Center from 2001 to 2026, offer an extensive record of a life lived at the intersection of literature, journalism, and revolutionary social change. The collection documents decades of organizing and advocacy, correspondence and collaboration, and writing and artistic expression. Her son Blake Morgan observed, “But first and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is political, and that as she once wrote, ‘Hate generalizes, love specifies.’”
We are grateful to have learned from Robin Morgan and to be the stewards of her papers as just one dimension of her enormous legacy.
Header image: Robin Morgan, New York City, 2023. From https://www.robinmorgan.net/images/