On February 21, 2020, author and publisher Lilian Mohin passed away.
Lilian was a co-founder of Onlywomen Press in 1974.
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.
[book-info number="1"]
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.
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.