THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Robin Morgan

“I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. If there’s some girl child, four generations hence, who has a memory of her great, great, great grandmother having freed herself because of something I said, that’s what I care about.”

Interviewed by Eleanor Pam, VFA President, July 2023

EP:  Welcome to the VFA Pioneer Histories project, Robin Morgan. We’re thrilled that you’re going to be part of our collection. I know you don’t like the superlatives that I throw at you very often, and I’m going to throw one more at you, which is that I believe you are one of the most consequential feminists of our generation.

RM:  Thank you very much, Eleanor. That’s so lovely, thank you. I don’t know about consequential or not, but I’m here. I’m still here.

EP:  There you are, demurring, but yes, you are, thank God. So, let’s start from the beginning, even though I know that you have reservations about talking about your life as a child star because you think it overrides.

RM:  No, I mean, I’m beyond that. It doesn’t matter. If any people still remember it, or know it. But the point is, I survived it and I learned a number of important things in doing it which I applied to feminism later, so what’s to dislike?

EP:  Talk a little bit, if you don’t mind, about your growing up years, your family background and so on.

RM:  I kind of went into all that in the memoir, which is heavenly helpful because you can say, “Read it.”

EP:  I did.

RM:  Yes. Well, I was a kid actor and a child star on television and so forth, and I was the sole support of my family; of my mother and my aunt. My father had vanished when I was very little. That’s a difficult position for a child because you have all of the responsibility but none of the power. But on the other hand, it taught me valuable skills. I didn’t realize this at the time, I thought all children had some similar kind of life.

The skills were dealing with the cameras and dealing with press and being a professional and showing up on time and knowing your lines and knowing your moves. All of that, interestingly enough, came in handy when I became a writer, because I was lecturing and giving poetry readings and so forth, and especially when I became a political activist.

In fact, before the Atlantic City demonstration, I gave sort of one-on-one tutorials to my sisters about how to deal with the press. But otherwise, it was a difficult childhood. I was an A student, and I had to excel in everything. I was pushed very hard, and it was my mother and my aunt who really raised me. I didn’t meet my father until I was 18 or 19, and then it was not a happy occasion. But one survives that, and as I say, there were good things about it.

EP:  I did read your memoir, Saturday’s Child. I thought the prose was dazzling.

RM:  Thank you.

EP:  I thought that the section that you talked about with meeting your father was so painful, that it stays in my mind to this day, actually. I’ve told you before that I thought that book was a masterpiece, and you demurred, as you always do. But I do. Very poignant. Let me very quickly go through some of what you did as a child star, and then I’ll get back to your mom and your dad. At age two, you were actually a model when you were a toddler in diapers.

RM:  I didn’t loll around in the crib very long.

EP:  You did not lull, and you’re still not lulling, actually. At age four, you had your own radio show titled, Little Robin Morgan on WOR. You were a regular on the network radio version of, Juvenile Jewelry. From age 8 to 14, you would transition to television and play Dagmar. That’s the most famous child in a TV series called, Mama. As in, I Remember Mama. And there was a popular Dagmar doll fashioned in your image that was created and heavily merchandised and marketed throughout the United States. I remember you saying that the creature freaked you out.

RM:  Well, that was weird, to have a doll of yourself, let me tell you.

EP:   I would think. And you were so famous as a child that you were named, the Ideal American Girl.

RM:  I always loved that one, because the people who named me that, were the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the United States. And I often think to myself, if they had known what a feminist they were ordaining, I don’t know that they would have named me the Ideal American Girl. But I’ll claim it. The ideal American girl is a feminist, you bet.

EP:  Your father was obviously cold and rejecting, and your mother put you in show business at an early age, as you say, because she needed the financial support.

RM:  Well also, it was less her fault than perhaps, I don’t know, I was a very precocious child. I talked very early, I read early, I was very curious and so forth. So, I guess the temptation was fairly strong, because people kept coming up and saying, “Oh, she’s pretty, and she’s a chatterbox, and so why don’t you,” dot, dot, dot. I, on the other hand, from the time I was 4, always knew that I wanted to be a writer.

EP:  Really? But you did comment at some point that you resented your mother having put you in at such an early age.

RM:  Oh, yes, of course.

EP:  Was there anything that triggered you into becoming a feminist? Some, Ah-ha, moment of insight, or did it happen gradually?

RM:  I was born. I was born female. That’s the aha moment. Well, no, it’s of course, cumulative. It’s like the receding floor. It drops underneath you, and you think, “Oh, god” and then surely that’s it. And then you’ve been a feminist already for 50 years, and you think, “Well, that’s it. I’ve really heard it all now,” and then something else happens, and the floor recedes again. So, no. There were many moments along the way.

I was a young, serious poet, for example, and I would send out poems to little magazines, to literary magazines, et cetera, and all the university reviews and so on. Without realizing particularly, that I have a genderless name, and that the Brits treat it very much as a male name. So, I just put Robin Morgan as the name of the poet and sent them out. And I began to be accepted a number of very distinguished places, like the Sewanee Review that Faulkner had published in.

And I thought, “My god, isn’t this wonderful,” and I was only a teenager. And then at some point, for some reason I can’t remember why, I put Miss Robin Morgan. We didn’t use Ms. We didn’t know about Ms. yet, and the poems all began coming back, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I intentionally experimented with doing this, and it held absolutely true.

So, from that time on, I stopped using Miss, and I put that away and pondered it in my heart. This is one of the million little microaggressions that pile up in one’s life. But there were many. By the time I was a political activist in the male left, first in the civil rights movement with CORE, and then in the general anti-war movement, by that time, I was already, “Wait a minute, why can’t we have women do that?” But it was still as a part of the left. I saw the left as the overarching entity. I didn’t see it as the other way around, that the left is part of the women’s movement. It was out of that, that I became a feminist.

EP:  We’re going to talk about your break with the male left later. But before we do that, you’ve invented several important things. I should say, designed the feminist logo, which you said you scribbled on a napkin in a restaurant. I don’t know if that’s an apocryphal story, or that is the way it happened.

RM:  It was at home, and I couldn’t really draw very well. My husband then at that time, Kenneth Pitchford, who was a poet, could draw. And so, I asked him, “Could you think circle? And then I want the fist coming up under it.” So, he did two or three drafts, and then he finally got it, and I said, “That’s what I want.”

EP:  That’s great.

RM:  The first use of it was, I had it done up on buttons. I had buttons made for the Miss America pageant, and that was the first time.

EP:  So that was a creative arts issue. But then, because you’re such a wordsmith, Robin, you also invented the word, “Herstory.”

RM:  Oh, yes.

EP:  Which was interesting. And the Oxford Dictionary credited you for that word.

RM:  Did they? Well, that’s lovely. I can’t be more grateful than that. If the OED credits you, wow.

EP:  And that’s what VFA is all about. It’s about herstory.

RM:  Yes, of course. Of course, it is. My only resistance to VFA was never content. My resistance to VFA was I shouldn’t qualify, because I’m still on active duty. I’m not a veteran, and so how can I qualify? But you’re letting me in anyway.

EP:  Well, I’m on active duty, too, but nothing like you. We’ll get into that. And I have to tell you, you’re a precocious 82-year-old as well.

RM:  We try. I keep saying, “I don’t know how I can be 82 because last week I was 38 and I woke up one day and bang, I was 82.” But it’s a good age to be.

EP:  I met you, I don’t know, 55 years ago, maybe something close to 60 years. I mean, that’s crazy. But in the 1960s, you were a very busy woman. You were involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements, as you mentioned. You were part of the street theater, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, the Youth International Party. I have a different acronym for that. I know you like a dollop of wit with your colloquy, so I always called them Yiddish Hippies.

RM:  That was a very brief period, a sojourn. I made it immediately, without trying, into this hidden steering committee of Yippie boys they claimed didn’t exist because they were anarchists. But of course, there was a steering committee. And it was Abbie and Jerry and Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, with his little red MAO button on his little red MAO hat.

RM:  Yes. And their women. I was the only woman who was asked to be there on her own because I wrote well, and they thought they could use that. As it turned out, they never did. The sojourn was pretty quick because I announced I was going to this thing in Atlantic City called the Miss America Pageant, and they all said in chorus, “You can’t. It’s impossible. We’re having Chicago at the same time. You’re going to miss the revolution.” And I went anyway.

EP:  That was the inflection point. Oh, yes.

RM:  Never regretted it.

EP:  And the journey, well, we’ll talk about the divergence in a bit. You started as a secretary at the Curtis Brown literary agents. Rubbed shoulders and worked with W.H. Auden and some other luminaries. And then you married in ’62, to Kenneth Pitchford, the poet, who you mentioned. Gave birth to a wonderful son, Blake, who I met, and was very privileged to see at a concert of Leslie Gore in Greenwich Village.

RM:  Oh, right. That’s when she was a recording artist for him on his label.

EP:  Absolutely beautiful, beautiful young boy. And I know he’s the light of your life.

RM:  Well, he’s wonderful. He’s a man with a sense of humor and a sense of justice, and those are two very useful things in a man. Absolutely. I’m very pleased to be related to him.

EP:  Is he still living next door to you?

RM:  Yes, amazingly enough, he wanted to live next door to me. I would have, and I did, put the continental United States between me and my mother. But no, that was his choice. And he has a wonderful significant other. They’re both singer songwriters. She is, as well as him. He has his own recording company, Engine Company Records, and Engine Company Music Group. So, he’s doing just great. He’s an artist as well, so that gives me special joy.

EP:  Wow.

RM:  And political.

EP:  Then came Grove Press.

RM:  Yes.

EP:  The protests and the sit-ins and the demonstrations, and you had a role there. You were concerned about the union busting, about Betty Shabazz, who I actually chaired a panel that she was on a week before she died. But I saw that you were concerned about the royalties that she was getting, which you felt were dishonestly dispersed.

RM:  Grove Press published a book about Malcolm, and I was privy to the royalty statements. She was getting a very small part of them, and the book was a bestseller. So, I see you all shaking your heads, yes, it was pretty outrageous. So, that, and the secret porn line that Grove Press ran. On the surface, they were all radical revolutionaries, but they made a lot of money off the Black Cat line and this line and that line, which were basically porn, and a lot of it, sadomasochistic porn.

And so, I led a sit-in, and we took over the executive offices, and among the demands, was that Betty Shabazz be paid her proper royalties. We were busted and some of the women had to leave and they skittered out earlier, and some of us remained and were busted on purpose. But it was a huge thing in the publishing industry, which was, of course, not unionized and still isn’t. There was only one fake sort of company union.

EP:  Yes, there were other issues going on as well where women weren’t allowed to be reporters.

RM:  Oh, are you kidding? Or anything.

EP:  They were allegedly the researchers, but actually they were doing all of the work and not getting the credit.

RM:  Publishing, if you looked at it as a pyramid, it was all women at the base.

EP:  Absolutely.

RM:  It was a few white men at the top. Women were children’s book editors, and then eventually, a few, like Toni Morrison, made it into editor because she was so brilliant. But the men were the people who held power. And it was a sheer miracle and hard work, and one sympathetic guy, that Sisterhood is Powerful, and Monster, my first two books, were published at all by Random House.

EP:  Excellent. Well, then we skitter out of the ’60s and into Ms. Magazine in the early ’70s, where you were an editor, contributing editor, sometimes full time, sometimes part time, ultimately editor in chief. That was a successful, ad free, bimonthly international magazine that we all know. You want to share any of your memories of that?

RM:  When I first came to Ms. I came as part of a group of women who came to disrupt it. We were very pure and we were very judgmental. We came out of the male left, after all, which was always busy putting other people down. So, we came and we walked into this office where women were sitting at cardboard desks. They built them out of cardboard, and they were all very nice, and they all said, “Do you want some coffee, and what would you suggest we do to do better?” It’s very difficult to be snotty to people who say that kind of thing. It’s really hard.

Not all of the women I came with felt that way. But a number of us did and thought, “Well, maybe there’s something they could do to be better.” So, I suggested a number of radical feminist names, all of which they picked up on, and that seemed a good thing to me.

And then over the years, it wasn’t until, I think, ’76, because they started publishing in ’72. So, it was around ’76 that I finally agreed, after many appeals, to be a contributing editor, to suggest more names. And then that eventually morphed into being an editor, which morphed into being many years later, by 1990, the editor in chief, which I didn’t want. At each stage, I said, “No, no, no, I don’t want it.”

EP:  I remember you resisting it. I watched a lot of this, a lot of your life contributions in real time, and so it’s very familiar to me.

RM:  You are really a witness as well as being an activist yourself. Yes.

EP:  Gloria had called me up in the early days of Ms. and she said, “We have enough intelligent, intellectual, editorial, editor types,” meaning generals. What we don’t have are people to do the scut work. Do you think you can find people who would be willing to file or type or do that kind of work?” And I invited her down to my college, and I asked the president to invite all the full professors, and we had a meeting, and they all raised their hands, including the college president. Everybody was willing to work for Ms. Magazine. It was very inspirational.

RM:  It still is. This year is its 50th anniversary, of course.

EP:  That’s right.

RM:  Amazing. It’s hard to believe.

EP:  You also in ’67, in that era, actually a little earlier, you co-founded the New York Radical Women.

RM:  Well, now, wait a minute. New York Radical Women had already been in existence, but it changed hands. So, W.I.T.C.H. came out of New York Radical Women.

EP:  Yes, we’re going to talk about W.I.T.C.H. in a bit. Actually, we’re right on target right now. The Miss America protests in Atlantic City. You also wrote, No More Miss America, the pamphlet, and the creation of W.I.T.C.H. So why don’t you talk a bit about that?

RM:  Well, W.I.T.C.H was, I mean, I was a well-meaning ignoramus. I had not done my homework about who the witches really were, so I didn’t know that they were midwives and healers. I sort of knew, but I was going by the image, and I learned in the process that 9 million women; 9 million women and children, and some men, had been burned over a period of three inquisitions in Europe. Not one, but three. Over a 500-year period. So, I didn’t know any of that.

I kind of went with an image of outrageousness and rebellion and defiance, good stuff. And that was all pretty acceptable. And I cloned that with Yippie, which were outrageous tactics. We came up with W.I.T.C.H, out of New York Radical Women. Because New York Radical Women at that time, also birthed The Feminists, which was Ti-Grace Atkinson’s group, and also birthed Red Stockings, which was a group that did a lot of theory and stuff like that.

Well, we didn’t. We were very activist, although some of our members were also in other groups as well. We were very unjudgmental finally at that point. But it wasn’t until much, much later that I really immersed myself in the history of what was done to women over those 500 years. And out of it came a historical novel, The Burning Time, which is based on real women in Ireland, real burning, and real defiance. It’s a book I’m very proud of, but I didn’t know that at the beginning.

So, the interesting thing to me is that W.I.T.C.H is still popular. Not a week goes by, I swear to you, not a week goes by that I don’t get some email, washed up on the beach of my website, or a letter from my publishers that’s forwarded on or something, that says, “I want to join W.I.T.C.H. How can I join?” Well, of course you can’t join. You can just announce that you’re a W.I.T.C.H and start a coven. It’s anarchic in that sense. But it’s having a vogue with young women.

EP:  Yes, it does have its appeal. I could see that. Sure.

RM: It’s lovely. I couldn’t be more pleased.

EP:  A lot of those names that you’re talking about are on a list-serve that I belong to, these old radical women, the survivors. But I need to go back for a second and include in this interview Goodbye to All That, which I loved. It blew me away. And I remember the days of turning the Rexograph machine, and I remember when it landed on my, whatever it was that it landed on, certainly landed on my brain. I was stunned by it. And I know you did a second one, too, a Goodbye to All That Part 2, but on a different matter.

RM:  Well, it came about because Rat, which was this underground newspaper, leftist male, was very good on reporting leftist issues and political issues, like the Columbia uprising at Columbia University, instead of giving land over to people for housing in Harlem. But when it came to women, they did porn. It was the same as Grove Press, but worse. And so, one day I was working at Grove Press, and Jane Alpert called me and she said, “We’re thinking of seizing Rat for an issue. What do you think?” And I said, “Why only an issue, why not permanently?” And she said, “Well, why don’t you come over and we can discuss it?”

And I did, and we did, and we seized it for one issue, and then we never did to give it back. But in that one issue they said, “Well, why don’t you write why women are pissed at the left?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t think you want me to do that.” And they said, “Yes, I think we do.” I said, “Okay.” So, I wrote Goodbye to All That. Problem was of course, that I named names.

EP:  That break with the male left and the deep female left is very interesting. And we’re almost there, and we’re going to get there in a second. I want to talk for a minute about your international work, which I know is very important to you and one of your top priorities.

RM:  It is.

EP:  Could you describe some of your work as a bridge between the American Feminist Movement and the International Women’s Movement?

RM:  I could, but I don’t think of it that way, actually, because that kind of puts us outside the international movement, and I think we’re just a part of it. And there are many parts of it that are way ahead of us. In policy, in structure, in feminism. Sweden, until very recently, when they changed government unfortunately, had a feminist foreign minister, who said she was a feminist. That is how she announced herself. And they had a feminist foreign policy. So, there’s a lot. They had suffrage before we did. Many countries. So, I see us as a part of the Global Women’s Movement with much to learn from it. And now it’s almost assumed, that except for electoral politics, and some other politics as well, we’re just a part of the Global Women’s Movement, which gives me real joy. Real joy.

EP:  You wrote a trilogy, Sisterhood is Powerful, Sisterhood is Global, Sisterhood is Forever.

RM:  Yes, I’ve often said if they discover life on some other planet and if it’s sexist, somebody else is going to have to do Sisterhood is Galactic. That’s it. Because I am not doing this again.

EP:  My question is like asking a mother to choose among her children. But is there a favorite of the three?

RM:  Well, I mean, Sisterhood is Global, because it covered so much and because it introduced me in doing it, to so much. But Sisterhood is Powerful has been loved by so many women. They come up still and they say, “Oh, the little white book with a red fist on the cover oh, my god, it changed my life.” And the women who hid it away from their husbands, the women who buried it under their bed, because so much of what was in it, which now seems evident, moderate almost; some of it doesn’t, some of it still seems radical, but so much was just common sense. It’s almost hard to imagine why it created such a huge splash, but it did. I mean, The New York Times did not list anthologies at that time in bestsellers, because otherwise it would have topped the bestseller list for, I think, about three months. And I took all the monies, and I set up the first feminist fund.

EP:  Yes, you did. Exactly. A grant giving organization for women.

RM:  It was good because most of the first women’s newspapers and battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers came out of those first grants. So, it was good seed money.

EP:  Yes. Well, I have a partiality towards Sisterhood Is Forever because I’m in the acknowledgment.

RM:  That came about because they wanted me to update Sisterhood is Powerful. But I had been such a super purist that I had insisted that everybody had to have her piece copyrighted in her own name. Many of the women didn’t know what copyright was, but, didn’t matter.

EP:  That’s the book where we did the Kathy Boudin thing up at prison.

RM:  Yes, that’s right. Riding back and forth in your car with many long, deep and meaningful conversations. And Kathy did the piece on women in prison. So, they each had their own characteristics, but I decided to do it as a new book because the movement had changed hugely.

EP:  You do change with the evolution, and that’s great. As it should be, actually. In one of those car rides, you actually asked me if you could quote something I said to you, which was very flattering to me. We were talking about you speaking truth to power, and I said, “You also speak truth to the powerless.” And you said, “Oh, could I attribute that to you? I’d love to use that.”

RM:  That is true Eleanor, and it’s a very wise insight. Because sometimes, it’s harder to speak truth to powerlessness. Powerlessness is, by its nature, almost paralyzing with its rage, or with its deprivation, with so many things. Because the powerless function out of a lack. Then, to speak power to them, to say, “You can do this,” can sound hollow. Or if you say, “No, you’re not going to be able to do that, do this instead.” They’re going to resent it. There’s a lot of greed in powerlessness. There’s envy in powerlessness. That’s where all the evils lurk, from deprivation.

EP:  Exactly right. Yes.

RM:  So, to say to speak power to powerlessness. Really, boom. I did quote you many times. I quoted you and always cited the mother of the quote.

EP:  You didn’t have to.

RM:  Oh, I do. I think it’s very important.

EP:  Yes. You’re still on duty and you say you’re not a pioneer feminist because you’re still on duty.

RM:  I’m not a veteran; veteran feminist. Pioneer, I’ll accept the pioneer part.

EP:  You also didn’t like, or resisted, second wave feminism, you said. “No, it’s permanent feminism.”

RM:  There’s a wonderful group somewhere in the Global Women’s Movement, I think it’s British, that calls itself PERMANENT WAVE. They are the permanent wave. I just think it’s hilarious and very witty and playing with language. Blow language in my ear and I will follow you anywhere. And so, there’s a way in which that affects me. Do you understand?

EP:  Oh, yes.

RM:  Well, say more.

EP:  I should say more?

RM:  Yes, say more about it.

EP:  About how it affects you, or about being a permanent wave?

RM:  Well, I mean, different ways. Here is the thing. The thing is, that there have been 10 billion waves of feminism. We now know if we go back far enough, we know that there were twelfth century revolts in Turkey. Women have never been happy down on the plantation, just like Black folks, just like every oppressed group. And so why assume that this is another wave? It has, in that sense, been continual. It has had to ebb at times. It has been repressed and suppressed and co-opted and you name it, but it has never not been there. And when it is at all free to breathe, even a soupcon, it just explodes. It explodes again and again, despite the fact that patriarchy tries to rename it as well as all the other devices to suppress it.

For example, MeToo was called a MeToo movement. It wasn’t called a feminist movement. Excuse me! Of course it’s part of the feminist movement. Of course it is. Now, there’s a Barbie movie, which apparently is pseudo feminist or something, I don’t know. And so, they’re calling it the Barbie movement. Apparently, she explodes at some point and says screw you, or something like that to the patriarchy, which makes it a feminist movie. I mean, what is their problem? It’s the F word, and they could use it and it would make much more sense. But you see, to use it, is to acknowledge its permanency and its intrepidity.

EP:  Your sensitivity to words has always been impressive and I remember your joy at discovering the word ‘quark’ many years ago, Q-U-A-R-K.

RM:  Quark. Yes, great word.

EP:  In other words, the joy of discovery and the importance of naming things, which is what you’re talking about here with the permanent wave.

RM:  My late and much beloved elder and friend, Ursula K. Le Guin, was very big on naming, and wrote a lot about it and is much missed. Suzanne K. Langer, the philosopher, once wrote, that “Naming is itself perhaps the most radical and brilliant act that was ever conceived.” To give things names, my god. And of course, in Ursula you can’t cast a spell of magic or anything unless you know the true name of the thing that you’re affecting. What a wonderful writer. What a great writer.

EP:  Coming down to the contemporary, when you say you’re still on duty. You founded with Jane Fonda, the Women’s Media Center. You have a weekly radio show and podcast. You have a blog, which I read.

RM:  Oh, I’m glad you read it. Thank you.

EP:  You describe yourself really in three ways. You’re an author poet, you’re an activist, and you’re a feminist. Is there one of the three that you would raise up above the others? It’s another one of those, mothers, which of your children do you love most; as your truest or most aligned with your phenomenological self-image. Which is closest to your phenomenological self-image?

RM:  It’s definitely the poet. If I was not a poet, I wouldn’t take up space on this planet.

EP:  I knew the answer to that question before you said it.

RM:  I know you did. Although, the others come in a close second. I remember at some point, in some college in the Midwest, I can’t remember which college it was, but at some point, somebody got up in the Q&A after a speech and said, “Well, you’ve been married to a man, but you’ve had a woman lover or two, and you write poetry, but you also write all these other things, and you’re an activist.

So, what are you? Are you a lesbian? Are you not?” And I said, “I’m a poet, and I’ll forgive you for asking that question if you’ll forgive me for not answering.” It was just really good. I was pleased with myself after that one. But the truth is, they’re kind of seamless. They all flow into one another but it is also true, that if I thought I would never write another poem, I’d probably get out of here pretty fast.

EP:  Well, here’s one of your older books, Upstairs in the Garden. I have many of your books in pride of place, in my own personal library.

RM:  There’s a new one coming out, a book of poems called, Harvesting Darkness this September. And it’s a dark book because it’s been a dark period. But there’s some leavening, and I think it’s the best work I’ve ever done.

EP:  I was about to ask you, what’s your proudest achievement?

RM:  Well, I think it has yet to come. One does try to think that.

EP:  I love that answer.

RM:  Because some of these poems are in quite strict forms. There are sonnets and villanelles and all sorts of things I was surprised to find myself writing, but they’re really good. And right there at the end of my desk is the book that will come out later. This one, Harvesting Darkness comes out this September, and that one, which doesn’t completely have a name yet, is coming out next year. And it is a collection of selected short writings, essays, and blog posts.

Sometimes people say to me, “You’re another book? You’re writing another? My goodness.” And they act so surprised. And I’m always mystified by that because nobody says to a plumber, “Well, you plumbed yesterday. Are you going to plumb again today?” Or to electrician, “You electrified yesterday. You’re going to electrify again today?” It’s what you do.

EP:  That’s been a consistent theme through line through your life. It’s the spine of your life. So let me ask an impossible question. What’s your estimation of the status or state of feminism today? Where do you think we are?

RM:  Assaulted, but very strong. The Trump years were hell. Absolute and total hell. A nightmare, and surreal. Obviously, you’ve read my writings on the subject. And also, that, combined with the fact that the planet is on a ticking clock, makes for days when you wake up and for like, 10 seconds, you hear birdsong and you think, “Wow, it’s good to be alive.” And then you think, “Oh, shit.” Because everything comes in on you again. And I don’t know whether we’re going to make it as a planet.

I look around, I look at the fires and the floods and the tsunamis and the agony of people and the displacement of people, and I don’t know if we’re going to make it. But here’s the thing. If we don’t, giving up ensures that. And at least to keep fighting, is the only way I know to at least make an elegant exit. To at least, I don’t know, it’s a bonnie way to go. If we’re going to have to go, it’s at least a bonnie way to do it.

And I secretly don’t think that we’re going to go. I think we will come up with something. Women, because we’re the ones who’ve been kept from decision making. You don’t take 51% of the world’s population and erase their voices when you’re in trouble, especially. It’s like a burning room and half the people are saying, “Here there’s a door, let’s do that, let’s go out the door. Or there’s windows, we can do both.” And the men are sitting in the middle and saying, “Oh, it’s a burning room!” The women are saying, “But the door.”

So, I think that, odd as it may seem, more and more women will be listened to. We will force that. And I think that we’ll use that for the betterment of the species. Women are human beings like everybody else, and there’s nothing utterly wonderful about us that is so pure and definable as such. We’re just people, but we’re people with such a long, the longest on the planet, history of suffering and of being out of power so long that we’re slightly less corrupted by the gaining of it.

EP:  That gives you a nugget of power, being out of power that long, because there’s a survival core that is created. I’m not surprised that you went from a dystopian view, by the way, to a sunnier point of view of survival.

RM:  Well, listen, affirmation is, somebody said at one point, is my ‘signature chord.’ Which I thought, “Wow, that’s a good thing to have as one’s signature chord.” I don’t know that that’s true, and the new book of poems gives it a race for its money because it’s fairly dark. But I think you have to look at the realities before you can affirm alternatives. And if you’re not honest with your reader or your audience or your constituents, then it’s no use affirming, because that’s not going to be believed either. Why should it be?

I think it’s remarkable that the women’s movement is a worldwide vision, and like this country, is an experiment. The founding framers – I don’t say fathers, I say framers or founders – called it an experiment. And it’s been tested recently, and it’s still being tested. The women’s movement is as much an idea as anything else. When a woman says, “Herman, pick up your goddamn socks,” all the way up to women seizing power.

And that vision is empowered, is personified, by real women’s real lives. Not just the left or the right or the middle or the center. I mean, who would have thought that Kansas, Kansas, would have come through with the referendum on abortion that they did just after the court lowered the boom on the Dobbs decision? Who would have thought? I have worked now, outside what the left had prescribed, I have worked with women on the right, and I’ve worked with women who were housewives and women who were prostituted women, women in prison, women out of prison, and I found the same thing.

There was a woman in the Philippines who I will never forget. I’d been at this point, through the Palestinian camps in the Middle East and in Gaza, and I’d been all over the world, and I came to this place in the Philippines. You had to travel to her village over a rope bridge, which was terrifying, because you shouldn’t look down because there’s a gorge. We got to the other side, and we walked for three more hours in the rice paddies. And then finally, I met her. Her name was Gunawa, and she was abysmally poor. She was about my age, but she looked like my great grandmother. Her weather-beaten skin was like leather. She was missing most of her teeth. She had had 13 children, and she lived in a lean-to. I mean, just a sheet of iron in the paddy.

And of course, with the hospitality of the extreme poor, she offered me coffee, which was fake coffee made from rice husks. And of course, you accept with gratitude. I asked her the same question that I’ve asked prime ministers and peons, which is, “What is your greatest pride and what’s your greatest sorrow?” In South Africa a woman had answered, “I have the same answer for both. Being a woman.” But Gunawa thought quite a long time, and she said, “My greatest pride is that my children are learning to read.”

Because a woman came once a month to the place in town which is a three mile walk back over the rice paddies and the gorge. And the children learned for half an hour to read. But that was her greatest pride, and her greatest sorrow was that she couldn’t read, and she wished for nothing else but to be able to read. And I said, “How can this be? I mean, wouldn’t you care for a better housing, better food, better sustenance?” And she said, “No,” it came back through the translator, “No” she said, “Because, you see, I have never been out of this village in my life. But I might someday go out of this village and I might go across the paddies. And I hear there’s a long way to go, but then you get to some road. And I hear that on the road there are signs and the signs have writing on them. And you see, if I could read, then I could read the writing and I would know where I was going, and where I’ve been.”

EP:  Wow. Great story. I want to turn that question on you, Robin. I wouldn’t have even thought of it but it was a great question you asked. What is your greatest sorrow, and your greatest pride?

RM:  I think, interesting Eleanor, no one’s ever done that. I think my greatest sorrow, is on a personal level I think I stayed married too long, and I think it would have been better if I left earlier. But on a meaningful, bigger level, I think my greatest sorrow is that my species, although it does learn, and its greatest feature is its adaptability, but by god, it waits till the last minute, just maddening. And my greatest pride is in the poetry. I think if I had to sum it up, I would say my greatest pride is in some woman who’s an absolute stranger to me saying, “You don’t know me, but your poetry has meant a great deal.” Then I get both. Then I get the woman.

EP:  I do know you, and I can say that.

RM:  Thank you.

EP:  One of the best poems I’ve ever read is one that you wrote about your silence. A long time ago, about a personal situation.

RM:  Oh, yes.

EP:  You were really gutted at the time.

RM:  Yes, I was. I was indeed.

EP:  The poem was so beautiful and so moving.

RM:  Oh, wow. That’s so lovely Eleanor. I’m so grateful to you both for this series and for giving space for poetry in it as well. I don’t know why we assume that our political beings are only that, but some people do assume it. Other cultures don’t. When you say you’re a poet in, for example, Arab culture, everybody says, “Oh, yes” because there are many. It’s almost impossible to be political unless you’re a poet. And the same with the Latin Americans. But it’s not true in our Anglo-American tradition. And then in other traditions, it’s bad news. Like it’s Mao, and not good poetry. Kind of doggerel and rhetoric. And so, you don’t want to fall into that. You don’t want to do a beat the tambourine and march to the barricades. At least I don’t. That’s not what poetry can do.

EP:  I only have a couple of questions more because you’ve been so generous with your time, so I don’t want to push this too far, but what do you think is our most important gain or gains in the women’s movement, the modern women’s movement? What do you think is our highest or best or most impactful achievement, looking back over this long history?

RM:  Over this period? Well, I think reproductive freedom, because the combination of the pill and the protest. I mean, you can judge it by the backlash. They have never stopped, and they are going to continue and continue. But there’s a lot of, right under that, accomplishments, that I think are really important. I think that in the ’60s and ’70s and even in the ’80s and somewhat in the ’90s, there was a lot of jockeying between movements. Who was going to go to who’s demonstration, who wasn’t going to go. Funding. Funding, whoa, big struggles. And there’s a lot less of that now. There’s a lot of going to each other’s demonstrations. Over George Floyd, for example, everybody poured into the streets.

So, I think probably the most important development in the women’s movement per se, has been the leadership of women of color. In particular, Black women, but not exclusively, and the generosity of them. Internationally, it’s so wonderful because they didn’t used to use the word feminist. When I first, in the late ’70s, was traveling in the Pacific, they would have died rather than use the word feminist.  It was an American word. It was a White woman’s word, but they just proudly now call themselves feminist, and they don’t see any irony in that. Why should they? And it’s not a matter of adopting, it’s that it was the best word. It was a perfectly good word, why shouldn’t we use it?

When you’re fighting two and three and four and five oppressions at one time, you got a lot to choose from and a lot to distract you. So, it’s not surprising that sometimes this didn’t take precedent. And for White women, Euro American, this was the main thing that was their problem. Unless they were disabled, unless they were old, unless they were very young, unless they were lesbian, there’s a lot of subcategories even under that. But let’s say they were really privileged and empowered. This was their one. And so, when other people didn’t immediately share it, they got very upset. And that was unnecessary. It’s the coming together of movements that I see as a very good thing, and the coming together under women’s leadership, because that’s different. It used to be women’s leadership, but then the men would take over.

This has happened again and again and again and again, ad nauseam, and it’s not happening so far. It may take another round or two, I don’t know, if we last that long as a planet. So, it’s a very dicey moment, I think, in our history, our herstory. But I believe we can do it. I know that Gloria sometimes calls it being a “Hopeaholic.” I know what she means by it, but I don’t call it that because it makes it seem as if you’re addicted to something that you don’t want to be addicted to. So, I would call it a certain bedrock trust in women. Bedrock trust. They’re not going to be turned around. They’re not.

EP:  Here’s my last question as kind of a coda to this whole thing, which is, how would you like to be remembered? I hope you don’t hate the question.

RM:  No, I don’t hate the question. And being 82, I’ve thought about it. It’s not, ‘Time’s winged chariot’ that’s not drawing near. In fact, it’s double parked. I have thought about it. I’d love the poems to live. I’d love the writing to live and to be meaningful to people when I’m no longer around. I would love that. But the truth is, and this is very different from my feelings when I was younger, which were about immortality and greatness and whatever.

The truth is, I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. If the work is, if there’s some girl child, four generations hence, who has a memory of her great, great, great grandmother having changed because of something I said, and she can’t remember who said it and doesn’t matter to her anyway, that’s what I care about. And I care about somebody reading a poem of mine 400 years in the future. That’s different, but not really. If it’s a poem, it can even be by Anonymous. How about that? But if the poem lives, if the consciousness lives, that’s the point.

EP:  Well, I hope that that happens. Is there anything you’d like to add or some final statement you’d like to make, Robin?

RM:  Well, no, except that Eleanor, your questions have been quite profound. They really have. I mean, I know you, so I can’t say I’m surprised, but I think that we all compartmentalized, and I somehow thought, the conversations in the car going up to Bedford Hills are one thing, and I know that I said to you, I hope we can stay away from, in doing this, stay away from questions about schisms and spats in the women’s movement and so forth, because ultimately those don’t matter one tittle. What matters is the vision. That’s what you got at. And I’m very grateful. I’m grateful to Mary Jean and I’m grateful to you. And I’m grateful to Veteran Feminists of America.

EP:  Thank you so much. And it’s returned. The gratitude is returned, and the admiration that I have for you has been lifelong.

RM:  Wow. Thank you. Thank you.