Robin Morgan

Not even in-your-face women usually have their own hit radio show at the age of five, but Robin Morgan did and it was even called "The Robin Morgan Show." Then she spent the rest of her childhood playing roles on popular television shows during the 1950's.

The 1960's launched not only her writing career (she was a published poet at seventeen), but also her personna as a radical political activist. She walked away from the Youth International Party (the "Yippies") because its leadership was sexist. She organized the first public protest of the Miss America Pageant. She performed street theater to draw attention to the oppression of women. She even came up with the most widely used feminist symbol in the world: a fist in the middle of the symbol for "woman." When Grove Press fired her and a bunch of other folks for trying to unionize the company, Morgan led eight of her colleagues (all in-your-face women) to take over and occupy the offices in protest, though they knew they would be arrested.

Her anthology entitled Sisterhood is Powerful, called one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th Century by the New York Library, covered such topics as female orgasm, radical lesbian relationships, the difficulties of being Black and female, and the nature of prostitution -- in 1970! For her subsequent book, Sisterhood is Global, Morgan sought out revolutionary women in more than seventy countries. And as if that wasn't enough, she spent a couple of decades editing Ms Magazine, just for good measure.

Still holding her own as an in-your-face woman and one of the "women men warned us about" (her line), Robin Morgan also once wrote: "Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible." So let's get to it, huh? Time's wasting!