Who was Robin Morgan, the firebrand feminist who accused Ted Hughes of Sylvia Plath’s ‘murder’

Asserting that the Poet Laureate had “real blood on real hands,” she ended the poem challenging Hughes to sue her. Later, she tempered her earlier statement to say: “I want to make it clear that Hughes didn’t kill Sylvia, but that he drove her to suicide.”

From child-star to ‘bra-burning activist’

Born in Florida in 1941 and raised in New York, Morgan was modelling by the age of three, and at five years old she had her own radio show. She appeared on “Mama” from 1949 to 1957 and became so popular that Robin Morgan dolls were sold as commercial tie-ins.

Magazines called her “the ideal girl-next-door,” but a rebellion was gaining strength within her, and she refused to deliver sexist dialogue at a live broadcast.

While studying at Columbia University, she became politically active, but when the poet Anthony Hecht told her, “But, my dear, women should be poems, not write them,” it fuelled her desire to chafe against the expectation, and all her life she insisted that she be recognised as a poet first.

In 1968, she was at the forefront of the protest against the Miss America Pageant, which involved tossing bras into a “Freedom Trash Can,” which has been mythologised as bra-burning.

She co-founded New York Radical Women and the provocatively named Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and was arrested in 1970 after occupying the offices of Grove Press after the owner resisted unionisation efforts.

In her 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she also went after leftist leaders, from Hugh Hefner to Abbie Hoffman, over sexism. A government report once labelled her an “anarchist housewife.” She was editor-in-chief of Ms Magazine, founded by Steinem, for several years.