Saturday's Child

Book excerpt: An amazing trajectory: From child star to prize-winning writer to feminist icon Robin Morgan is famous as a bestselling author of nonfiction, a prize-winning poet, and a founder and leader of contemporary feminism. Before all of that, though, she was a working child actor. From the age of two, “Saturday’s child had to work for a living.” She had her own radio show on New York’s WOR, Little Robin Morgan, by the time she was four; starred during the Golden Age of television in TV’s Mama from ages seven to fourteen; and was named the Ideal American Girl when she was twelve. In Saturday’s Child, she writes for the first time about her working youth, her battles to break away from show business and from her mother, her search for her absent, abandoning father, her entrance into the literary world, and the development of her politics, relationships, and writing. Morgan describes her tumultuous but successful life with startling honesty: her flight from child stardom into literature, her twenty-year marriage to a bisexual man, her joyful motherhood, her lovers, both male and female, her actions as a “temporary terrorist” on the left during the 1970s, and her travels and experiences in the global women’s movement. She writes about compiling and editing the famous anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sisterhood Is Global and later cofounding with Simone de Beauvoir the Sisterhood Is Global Institute. Saturday’s Child follows this “Ideal American Girl” on her path to becoming the feminist icon she is today. Epic in scope, witty, and bravely insightful, this is the tale of half of humanity rising up and demanding its rights, told through the intensely personal story of one remarkable woman.