The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival Collection

Hart, MI: Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1981. Offset. 8 1/2 x 11 in. Some age toning and creasing; very good. Six discrete items from the 1981 and '82 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival [MWMF]. The MWMF began in 1976 as a women-only two-day festival, steadily growing into a week-long national event. As seen in these documents, in 1982 the festival relocated to a plot of land near Hart, Michigan, where it remained until its closure in 2015. The MWMF was an important institution that consolidated and proliferated American lesbian culture. The materials collected here come from a key moment of rapid growth for the festival: included are two festival maps; the "Amazon Re-Source Directory," an eight page packet listing feminist and lesbian political organizations that was distributed at the 1982 festival; an informational sheet created by Woodswomen with general camping and outdoors safety tips; the 15-page program for the 1981 festival, listing all the workshops, services, concerts, and schedules for the festival, including holograph highlighting workshops and performances of interest; and the four pages of an unbound 1982 festival program, possibly incomplete.

All together, the collection provides insight into the issues preoccupying lesbian organizing in the early-1980s, the administrative work required to make an event of such scale possible, and how a cultural gathering worked to supplement and grow a robust national lesbian culture and network. The experience of participating in the week-long collectively-managed festival with thousands of other women was a transformative event for many who attended. The history of the MWMF reflects the exclusionary political stance many separatists took; after decades prohibiting transgender women from attending the festival, it was discontinued in 2015 after numerous national LGBT organizations called for a boycott.

Primary source documents of this important women's music festival, and records of a prominent strand of trans exclusionary radical feminism.