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Lilian Mohin, Author and Publisher, Passes Away

Author:  Published Date: March 6, 2020 Comments: 1 Comment on Lilian Mohin, Author and Publisher, Passes Away
Drinking a glass of wine and reading Women in the Book Trade

 

On February 21, 2020, author and publisher Lilian Mohin passed away.

Lilian was a co-founder of Onlywomen Press in 1974.

Independent lesbian feminist presses in the 1970s and 1980s were very important. In 1970, feminists tried to reject lesbians from their political and social action. Lesbians were a menace. We were distracting feminists from the “real” focus of feminism: gaining economic and social equality for women. The concept of “intersectionality” just didn’t cross the minds of the mostly straight white feminists.
 
Lesbians called bullshit. The National Organization of Women started to hand out lame apologies. It was too late. Many lesbians had taken matters into their own hands.
 
Out lesbians Lilian Mohin, Sheila Shulman, and Deborah Hart formed the British Onlywomen Press. They acted as both printer and publisher of lesbian and feminist fiction and poetry. They started this influential labour of love in 1974. Onlywomen Press published radical political and sexual theory, poetry and fiction. Many of the titles remain controversial to this day. “We publish books which question heterosexual orthodoxies and gender inequalities,” they said. That would later change to the statement, “We prioritise lesbian authors.” As controversial then as it is now.

Interviews with Lilian are scant, and I have only one source on which to rely: Women in the Book Trade: Three Women Publishers of the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries by Annie Southern.

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In an interview with Southern, Lilian recalled the early Women’s Liberation Movement: “What I remember very firmly is that there was a large meeting of these disparate types of women and that group split very soon thereafter – not asking lines of sexual preference but along political lines… The women who with me set out to start Onlywomen Press were all firmly identified as, and saying so, radical feminists who were also, and saying so, lesbians.”

The name Onlywomen came as “a bit of a mistake” when they rushed to find a new publishing name (they started with Women’s Press, but soon lost rights to the name).

Lilian recounted the time a male typesetter disapproved of the lesbianism in a book of poetry, and melted all the lead typesetting letters, and another when another out up his fists to fight her. She continued on, though, and gave us some memorable works.

Works by Lilian Mohin

The Pied Piper, Past Participants, Beautiful Barbarians, An Intimacy of Equals, The Reach and Other Stories, Not for the Academy, One Foot On The Mountain & Cracks.

 

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Author: LFWSue

1 thought on “Lilian Mohin, Author and Publisher, Passes Away”

  1. She published my sister Katy Watson’s book Spacegirl Pukes in 2005. It was illustrated by Vanda Carter and depicted a girl with two mummies in a picture book for small children, which caused some controversy when it was included in the No Outsiders programme for schools. I knew she’d been ill for a long time but I’m sorry to hear of her death. She did good work and was a pioneer.

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