Marilyn Salzman Webb (born October 26, 1942), also known as Marilyn Webb, is an American author, activist, professor, feminist and journalist. She has been involved in the civil rights, feminist, anti-Vietnam war and end-of-life care movements, and is considered one of the founders of the Second-wave women's liberation movement.

Webb holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Chicago - successfully awarded 50 years after sexual harassment derailed her from first receiving it. She pursued her undergraduate education at Brandeis University, graduating with a BA in 1964. Later she studied at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and completed her MS degree in 1981. She had begun studies for her PhD in educational psychology at the University of Chicago in 1964, but left with only the compensatory master's degree in 1967, when her doctorate was nearly completed. After finishing her coursework and passing her preliminary examinations, she abandoned her degree after facing sexual harassment and sexual assault by professors she asked to serve on her dissertation committee. Fifty years later, she contacted administrators, who — after due diligence — welcomed her to finish her dissertation and awarded her a PhD in June 2019.

Webb has had a five decades-long career in journalism and is the author of the acclaimed book, The Good Death: The New American Search to Research the End of Life (Bantam Books, 1997 and 1998), and co-editor (with poet Anne Waldman) of two historic book collections of talks by Beat poets and artists, Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Volume One, and Volume Two (both Shambhala Publications, 1979). She was also an editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, a senior editor at Woman's Day, McCall's, and US Magazine, a writer for New York Magazine, and a daily newspaper reporter. Her pieces have appeared in multiple other publications, including The Village Voice, Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Ms. Magazine, Child Magazine, Parade, The New York Times and USA Today, as well as in numerous book anthologies.

Webb was the co-founder of the first feminist consciousness-raising groups in both Chicago (1966) and in Washington, D.C. (1967). She co-organized the early national Sandy Springs and Lake Villa women's liberation conferences. As a feminist leader, she faced New Left male chauvinism when she spoke to introduce the fledgling women's movement on January 20, 1970, to 10,000+ participants at an anti-war rally against President Richard M. Nixon's inauguration. She and feminist Shulamith Firestone were booed off the protest stage, met by cat calls, derogatory words, and a near crowd riot. Her focus then shifted to Second-Wave feminism and a crucial national decision ensued to separate women's movement organizing from the larger New Left.

As a young feminist in the winter of 1970, Webb co-founded off our backs ("oob"), one of the first of the Second Wave feminist newspapers to appear. It began publishing on February 27, 1970, predating MS Magazine by two years, and was continually published for the next 38 years. By the time publishing ceased in 2008, oob was "the only early feminist journal continuously publishing after four decades," and the longest surviving feminist publication in American history. In fall 1970, Webb left oob and co-founded, directed, and taught in one of the first college-based women's studies programs on an American campus, at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. In 1975, she co-founded Sagaris, a feminist think-tank, that grew out of the Goddard program.

Webb was profiled in early feminist movement days in Esquire magazine, Ramparts magazine, The Washington Star Sunday Magazine, and has since featured in many core books and movies on the New Left and/or the women's movement, including In Our Time, The World Split Open, Daring to Be Bad, The Sixties, Outlaw Woman, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement, For Women Only, Freedom for Women, Young Radicals, Generation on Fire, Rebels with a Cause, the movie She's Beautiful When She's Angry, and others.

As a journalist, Webb has written countless articles on numerous subjects, over many decades. The most influential likely include: "Becoming the Men We Wanted to Marry," (Village Voice), "The Art of Dying," and "The Hospice Way of Death" (New York Magazine), "A Lover's Story: Dr. Kevorkian and the Death of Tom Hyde" (Glamour), "Special Report on Kevorkian Families" (Ladies Home Journal), and Op Ed pieces on hospice and Medicare (The New York Times) and assisted suicide (USA Today).

In addition to Goddard College, Webb has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. There she began a journalism program based on the work of the muckrakers, primarily those published in McClure's Magazine, a turn-of-the 20th century progressive periodical published by S. S. McClure — a famed Knox College alumnus — who showcased investigations by Progressive Era journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and others. Webb now holds the title of Knox College Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism. As part of Knox College's Journalism program, Webb directed students in publishing award-winning articles in professional newspapers, including the March 2011 series, "Maytag Employees in Transition," a 17-part investigation printed in the Galesburg Register-Mail on the five-year aftermath of the closure of the local Maytag Refrigeration Plant. The series won first place awards in both the Illinois Press Association and the Illinois Associated Press Editors Association, plus the coveted Sweepstakes Award for best reporting, all in competition statewide with professional journalists and newspapers.