How Feminist Activist Robin Morgan Helped Preserve the Legacy of Sylvia Plath

Robin Morgan was an American feminist activist, writer, and organizer born on January 29, 1941, who passed away on Labor Day weekend in 2026. She authored 23 books and founded the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers. Morgan is also known for organizing the 1969 protest of the Miss America Pageant, where feminists symbolically crowned a sheep to critique beauty standards. Her influence extended to preserving the legacy of poet Sylvia Plath, though this aspect of her work is often overlooked in mainstream tributes. Morgan’s activism and writing were deeply intertwined with her political beliefs, emphasizing that the personal is political—a slogan she helped popularize. She argued that art, particularly poetry, was a vital tool for expressing feminist and social justice ideas, and she used her platform to challenge systemic oppression, including violence against women.

Sylvia Plath, a renowned poet who died by suicide on February 11, 1963, was married to Ted Hughes, another prominent poet. Plath’s letters to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, written between 1960 and 1963, described physical and emotional abuse by Hughes. These letters were stolen in the late 1960s or early 1970s by researcher Harriet Rosenstein, who was commissioned to write a biography of Plath but never completed it. The letters resurfaced in 2017, revealing Plath’s allegations of violence, including a claim that Hughes’s abuse contributed to her miscarriage in 1961. Hughes, who controlled Plath’s literary estate after her death, was accused of censoring her work and suppressing her radical politics. Morgan’s poem Arraignment directly addressed these issues, accusing Hughes of destroying Plath’s artistic legacy and enabling violence against women.

Morgan’s poem Arraignment, published in her 1972 collection Monster, accused Ted Hughes of harming Sylvia Plath. The original version began with the lines I accuse / Ted Hughes / of… the murder of Sylvia Plath, but Random House lawyers forced Morgan to rewrite it to avoid libel lawsuits. The revised version used the phrase How can I / accuse / Ted Hughes instead, which Morgan described as a rhetorical strategy to avoid legal consequences while still making her point. The poem argued that Hughes’s censorship and control over Plath’s work amounted to a form of murder—not of her life, but of her artistic and political voice. Morgan’s decision to rewrite the poem was influenced by Hughes’s history of using legal threats to silence critics, a practice known as lawfare. The controversy highlighted the challenges feminist writers faced in challenging powerful male figures in literature.

Despite the legal pressure, Morgan’s poem Arraignment inspired a wave of feminist activism. Women around the world created pirated versions of Monster with the original Arraignment restored, printing them on hot pink paper with a silver sticker featuring Morgan’s face. This grassroots response demonstrated solidarity among feminists who saw Morgan’s work as a call to action against patriarchal control in literature. Morgan’s poem also contributed to the myth that Hughes faced protests during readings in America, though this claim was later debunked by scholar Janet Badia. Instead, the literary establishment, including figures like Doris Lessing, worked to silence Morgan. Her arguments about Hughes’s violence were based on Plath’s own letters, which Morgan had access to before they were stolen, further validating her claims.

Morgan played a key role in elevating Sylvia Plath’s work within the feminist movement through her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, one of the earliest collections to highlight Plath’s poetry and life. The anthology included poems Hughes had removed from Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel, such as The Jailer, and featured a biography of Plath that misstated her age at death and emphasized the lack of a women’s movement at the time. Morgan’s work helped frame Plath as an avatar for feminist ideas, a term later used by scholar Honor Moore in 2009 to describe Plath’s symbolic role in second-wave feminism. Morgan’s anthologies and essays were foundational in shaping early feminist literary criticism, though her contributions are often overshadowed by Hughes’s control over Plath’s estate.