NEW YORK — Robin Morgan, the poet, essayist, editor, and second-wave feminist whose allies included Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, has died. She was 85.

Morgan died Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026, in New York after a series of health problems in recent weeks, her son, musician and producer Blake Morgan, told the Associated Press. She was still working on new books and poems. Her death came days after that of Steinem, her close friend and fellow activist, who died Wednesday, Sept. 2.

Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center — which Morgan co-founded with Steinem and Fonda in 2005 — called her “one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement,” citing her writing and “global leadership for justice and equality.”

Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York, Morgan was a child radio and television performer — including on the CBS series Mama — before turning to poetry, journalism, and activism. In 1968 she helped organize the first protest against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where demonstrators tossed bras and other items into a “Freedom Trash Can.” In 1970 she edited the essay anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, widely treated as a foundational text of the modern women’s movement, and later followed it with Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and Sisterhood Is Forever (2002).

She served as editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine for several years and published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the memoir Saturday’s Child and poetry collections such as Monster and Dark Matter. She is widely credited with popularizing the term “herstory” and the clenched-fist women’s symbol used in liberation marches. Her poem “Monster,” with lines including “I want a women’s revolution like a lover / I lust for it,” was quoted at rallies for decades.

“She was someone who was able to take very big ideas and distill them succinctly, like a poet, into a few words,” Blake Morgan said, pointing to her line “hate generalizes, love specifies.”

Morgan remained active later in life, hosting a syndicated radio show and, according to AP, living with Parkinson’s disease for 16 years — a condition that inspired poems and a 2015 TEDWomen talk. In her memoir she wrote that she had kept “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor,” adding: “Put that in your apple pie and smoke it.”

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