Goodbye Again.(The Talk of the Town)

Robin Morgan was flopping around her apartment the other day in a brown velour sweatsuit and socks, popping olives in her mouth and lamenting the pace of her recovery from rotator-cuff surgery. "Aging is a bitch," she said. "Excuse the sexist language." Morgan is sixty-seven and good at many things--gardening, writing, acting, coining slogans ("The personal is political," for example)--but convalescing is not one of them.

At five feet tall ("I'm shrinking! I used to be a stately five-two!"), Morgan is, not for the first time, the little woman who has started a big war. This winter, she wrote a follow-up to her notorious 1970 essay "Goodbye to All That," a screed against sexism among her "radical brothers" in the New Left, which was published in an issue of the underground newspaper Rat after women commandeered it. This latest "Goodbye" is only slightly less fiery than the original, in which Morgan bid adieu to "the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea," and asserted that Charles Manson was "only the logical extreme of the normal American male's fantasy."

"They called it 'the shot heard round the Left,' " Morgan said, holding an ice pack on her shoulder with one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. "Ouch," she said, when she tried to take a sip. "Of course, everything took a while then. With the first one, it took about six months for it to leach out across the country. With the Internet, it's six minutes." Morgan posted "Goodbye to All That (#2)," an essay about the misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton--Hillary nutcrackers, the "South Park" episode in which terrorists plant a bomb in Clinton's vagina--on the Women's Media Center Web site, on February 2nd, and since then it has been picked up by thousands of blogs, translated into six languages, reprinted in newspapers around the world, and, most famously, mass-forwarded by Chelsea Clinton. "For a while, I was getting eight hundred e-mails a day," she said. She estimated that one out of every fifty is negative. "I was braced for much more opprobrium."

After the piece in Rat, Morgan got death threats. "Because they said I was divisive--I was hurting the revolution," she said. "There were even threats against my kid!" Her ...