My mother, Lilian Mohin, who has died aged 81, was a co-founder in the 1970s of the London-based feminist publishing house Onlywomen Press, for which she wrote and edited works of literature and poetry. Lilian set up Onlywomen Press in 1974 with Sheila Shulman and Deborah Hart – and was a director of the company until 2015, when she was forced to step down due to ill health.
Among Lilian’s works that were published by Onlywomen Press were One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry, 1969-1979 (1979) and Beautiful Barbarians: Lesbian Feminist Poetry (1987).
She was born in Sevenoaks in Kent, the only child of Karl Rotter, a silverware designer, and his wife, Hilda (nee Rosenrauch). They had fled from Vienna to the UK in 1938 to avoid persecution by the Nazis and then changed their surname to Rodgers.
When Lilian was still an infant her parents relocated to the US, where she went to Taunton high school in Massachusetts. There she met William Mohin, a cadet at the nearby US Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. They were married in 1957 when Lilian was 18, and within three years had two children – my sister, Andrea, and me.
Due to William’s work they lived in various places around the US, and in each location Lilian would become engaged in the fair housing movement while teaching at inner-city schools. In the late 60s she appeared on the cover of Life magazine with the activist Ralph Nader as one of “Nader’s Raiders” – a group fighting for equal rights in the US.
She and William moved with their family to the UK in 1970. They divorced in 1973, and Lilian subsequently lived in London. She then came out as a lesbian and, in line with her history of activism, made her sexuality into her cause. Once illness forced her to retire from her work with Onlywomen Press, she moved to the Nightingale care home in Clapham, south London, where the professionalism and kindness of the staff and volunteers made her final years much better than they might otherwise have been.
Lilian is survived by Andrea and me, her grandchildren, Theresa and Jacob, great-grandchildren, Samantha, Adam, William and Leo, and her half-brother, Daniel.
