Robin Morgan fought the men who tried to silence her
By Ruth Behrens · Reporting from Newell, Iowa ·
There is a specific kind of cruelty in being paid to be a prop.
# The Hand Over the Mouth
Robin Morgan spent her childhood as a prop. She began modeling at three, hosted her own show, "Little Robin Morgan," by five, and spent ten years on the set of the TV series Mama. The moment that defined her adulthood happened on the set of Juvenile Jury. The Guardian and The Independent reported that a producer named Dan Ehrenreich once squeezed her shoulder, turned her microphone away, and clamped his hand over her mouth.
The mechanism of that silence is universal. Whether a producer dominates a studio or a few executives fix the price of livestock in a boardroom, the person at the top treats the subordinate as a tool rather than a human. In her memoir Saturday’s Child, Morgan wrote that she eventually loved the child who fought back. That resistance was more than a personal victory; it was her first political act.
The Lie of the Groovy Boy
By the 1960s, Morgan left the dolls behind for poetry and protest. In 1968, she helped organize the first Miss America protest, where women threw bras into a "Freedom Trash Can." Two years later, she edited the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful. Her most honest work, however, involved challenging the "revolutionaries."
In her essay "Goodbye to All That," which cbsnews.com noted targeted Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner, Morgan exposed the "groovy" facade. She argued that the men leading the peace movement silenced women as effectively as the establishment did. She compared Hoffman to a movie star who abandons his children once he finds fame.
This friction defines the real work of second-wave feminism. Critics claim the movement merely campaigned out of resentment or disrupted the home to serve a loud, academic theory. That argument fails because it ignores how the 1950s nuclear family often functioned as a site of silence. Morgan’s own mother lied about her father and her birth year to polish her daughter's image as a child star. A household built on a foundation of lies cannot be defended as a "traditional" sanctuary. Second-wave feminism sought the sovereignty of the individual; it was a refusal to let another person write one's life.
What the Word Costs?
Morgan fought Parkinson’s in her final years, but she never stopped editing the narrative. In 2005, she co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem—who died just days before her—to give women the power to hire editors and set the lead story in the press. She lived a life of unconventional boundaries, including a two-decade marriage to the gay poet Kenneth Pitchford, which she called a "two-member commune."
Interest in Sisterhood Is Powerful will likely surge now that Morgan and Steinem are gone. Her son, Blake Morgan, may find a way to blend her poetry with his music. But her legacy exists beyond books or the coining of "herstory."
Robin Morgan’s life proves that the most dangerous woman is the one who remembers exactly how it felt when a hand clamped over her mouth. Whether her "anarchist housewife" label seems absurd or her politics seem extreme, the necessity of her fight remains. A person who refuses to be a prop is the only kind of person who can tell the truth.