1938–2020
By Anna Wilson
Lilian Mohin was born in England, shortly after her parents escaped from Nazi persecution in Austria. They subsequently moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, where Lilian grew up. She married a US Coastguard cadet at 18, and quickly had two children. Her engagement with radical politics began early, and included an interlude working with the political activist Ralph Nader in the 1960s.
Her husband’s work entailed several moves around the US, until in 1970 he was posted to London. It was there that Lilian found the Women’s Liberation movement and began to immerse herself in its politics and culture, joining consciousness-raising groups and writers’ groups, thereby exploring the revolutionary possibilities of woman-centred change that she held to for the rest of her life. She described herself in an publishing blurb in the 1970s as ‘angry, active, a lesbian, divorced, a poet, a printer, awake…’. The order here is important (Lilian was a careful editor of her own and others’ words): the fervour with which she pursued her chosen path, and the rigour with which she held to her views were defining characteristics of her approach to what became her life’s work, the radical lesbian feminist publishing collective, OnlyWomen Press (OWP). It is notable that the modifier ‘lesbian’ is routinely erased from the historical record of Lilian’s and OWP’s founding, output, and stated intentions; she would have said that she would have expected no less, for a wry streak of knowing cynicism informed both her perception of the patriarchal world in which she operated and her vision of the fragile, fleeting space elsewhere that was always in her mind’s eye.
OnlyWomen Press (originally known as The Women’s Press until that name was formally adopted elsewhere in 1976) was born out of radical feminism’s drive to speak its truth unmediated by male-run, male-dominated institutions that sought to exclude, appropriate, or misrepresent. Together with Sheila Shulman and Deborah Hart, Lilian went to Camberwell College of Arts to learn how to print, before they set up OWP as a publishing and printing collective in 1975. They saw that if women’s words were to be heard, they would have to be able to control the material process: the kind of writing that they were producing and that was driving feminist debate was not getting published. In the early years, the Press organised conferences, ran workshops and promoted gatherings that were centred around writing, debate, and enabling women to find their voice: it was embedded in a radical community.
As well as ensuring ownership of the process, the printing side of OWP was also intended to serve the purpose of supplementing the Press’s publishing; using two offset litho machines, OWP printed both commercial and other radical organisations’ leaflets, magazines and pamphlets, as well as its own prints and reprints. Given that the printing was a means to an end, the Press would take pretty much any job that came through the door; print shops in the late 70s and early 80s were generally of a conservative bent, and were inclined to practice an informal censorship on material of which they did not approve (several of OWP’s early publications that were too large to be printed on their own machines were mysteriously misbound, or had sections erased). Organisations that couldn’t get printed elsewhere came to OWP, including the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, then known as ‘Exit,’ which was at the time actively producing material that provided information on assisted suicide, and so was often subject to police scrutiny. Memorably, OWP also printed many editions of a curious fanzine that published only stories based on the torrid, troubled, and explicit love affair between Mr Spock and Captain Kirk, known to the collective as ‘Pricks in Space’. Lilian was always charming to the very respectable middle-aged women who would bring in the copy, maintaining that they were exemplary of the hidden lives of suburban housewives, ripe for persuasion of the delights of women’s liberation, if only we could work out how to reach them. One of her ambitions, among many, was to proselytise amongst Women’s Institutes.
Lilian believed in the revolutionary power of the word, its ability to change the world, and she also believed we really would be able to use this weapon to tear down and rebuild patriarchy’s institutions—from the outside. The early works from OWP were often the product of writers’ groups or consciousness-raising groups, explorations of how the personal and the political were entwined in individual lives, or of emerging lesbian identity: the kind of material that was previously circulating informally between groups of women as they worked out an indigenous form of feminism that OWP impelled into wider circulation. Increasingly, though, the Press moved toward texts that promoted, reflected and galvanised political debate and controversy. These included the first UK publication of Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, still a foundational text of radical lesbian feminism. Two collections of essays and responses further exemplify the intention to enter directly into the maelstrom, challenging feminist orthodoxy: Breaching the Peace 1983, a collection of papers contesting the value to feminism of peace campaigns in general and Greenham Common in particular, and Love Your Enemy 1981, subtitled ‘the debate between heterosexual feminism and political lesbianism.’ Lilian’s individual contribution to each illustrate her determinedly uncompromising political position:
…the lure of a little acceptability is the lure of balm to the wounds inflicted by anti-lesbianism. Going to ‘Greenham’ is, after all, being seen to be on the side of right, on the side of peace and goodness and ‘natural’ women. And, for the moment, some of them in the peace movement seem to like us. Well, why wouldn’t they? When dykes go to ‘Greenham’ they go to be good, to save rather than change the world —just like everyone else. [Breaching the Peace, 23]
My political work is focused on women, on creating what it can mean to be women. Daily, I attempt to invent the theoretical ground I stand on. There are no acceptable pre-existing patterns for the women we can and must become. [Love Your Enemy, 60].
Lilian was a visionary, and her visions could be breathtaking, finding new insights to fuel our constant quest to overturn all the world’s certainties. She didn’t compromise, partly because she was always convinced that she was right, and that her fierce intellect and formidable powers of articulation could and should win any argument. She also saw cooperation or collaboration with others with different views as inherently suspect: she was not a builder of bridges. These were some of the reasons why, from being a collective, OWP became an entity that Lilian increasingly ran herself, recruiting a steady stream of younger women who loved her, fought with her, and helped keep the Press more or less afloat.
Then, too, times changed, and Lilian’s political position did not: from being on the cutting edge of the evolution of feminism, a radical outlier that punched far above its weight in terms of influence and reach, the Press became a marginal voice. OWP continued to publish significant lesbian works of scholarship and politics, as well as fiction and poetry, but the Press, and Lilian herself, no longer had the world’s ear. When the Press began, it was supported by many small donations from individual women to whom the early pamphlets and poems were water in the desert. It was also grant-funded, but gradually, even Lilian couldn’t persuade any more grants out of the Arts Council, or the monied backers from whom she had previously cajoled money, and Press finances were sustained instead from Lilian’s own pocket. Increasingly affected by MS and vascular dementia, and with her flat mortgaged repeatedly to pay printers’ bills, she was finally persuaded to wind up the Press in 2016.
Whilst this account focuses on Lilian as a political activist, there was of course more to her than that. She was immensely charismatic, and poured boundless enthusiasm into many other aspects of life than the Press. She could be charming and witty, a wonderful companion with whom to explore food, or dance, or any other form of culture that came her way. She loved debate, and although her skill and relentlessness in this activity engendered strong (and often negative) feelings in some, she had the capacity to bring new light to any topic, weaving extravagant and intellectually dazzling flights of fancy and possibility out of nowhere. Lilian’s contribution to the second wave deserves recognition: her words, her work and her vibrant mind helped shape the development of radical feminism in the UK.
Anna Wilson worked at the Press in the 70s and 80s