June Arnold: Novelist, Publisher, Lesbian Feminist Activist, and More

By Roberta Arnold

My mother was many things: novelist, publisher, lover, carpenter, lesbian feminist activist, Southern rebel, and my mother. Growing up in Memphis during the depression, Fanny and June, my mother, two conflicting siblings, spent their free time in childhood roaming the landscape on their own. They moved to Houston when their father died so that the family could be helped out financially by their mother’s wealthy brother. June was 12 when on the train with her father’s body in a pine box. Later, she recounted that she would ‘go outside each night and wish upon a star for her father to get well’.

In Houston, June and Fanny grew up in a world of privilege, one that came with all the trappings of entitlement. Despite this, June saw herself as an outsider. My younger sister said that the message our mother gave her was: How would you feel if that happened to you?

Later, June said that status and hierarchy were divisive and she wanted no part of it: “such status would divide me from my sisters and perpetuate the same hierarchies where one person is good/talented/beautiful and others are not and it would bring us no closer to a world where women’s art is a total complex expression of our voices.” [From “Feminist Presses & Feminist Politics,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly III, no. 1. (Summer, 1976).]