Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
| Michigan Womyn's Music Festival | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Genre | Women's music |
| Dates | August |
| Location(s) | Hart, Michigan |
| Years active | 1976–2015 |
| Website | |
| michfest.com | |
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, called "the Original Womyn's Woodstock" and often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, was an international feminist music festival held every August from 1976 to 2015 in Oceana County, Michigan, USA, near Hart Township, in a small wooded area known as "The Land." The event was completely built, staffed, run and attended by women. The 40th Festival, in August 2015, was the last one. The Festival, throughout its 40-year history, occupied a central and powerful place in lesbian history, embracing and creating space for the vast diversity of female experience, or as Bonnie Morris described it: “an entire city run by and for lesbian feminists."
Controversy about the festival's intention to be a space for cisgender females only led to protests by trans women and a boycott of the Festival by the LGBT civil rights advocacy group Equality Michigan, which was later joined by the Human Rights Campaign, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National LGBTQ Task Force.
America's first "women's music festivals" began appearing in the early 1970s, starting with day festivals at the Sacramento State and San Diego State University campuses, the Midwest Women's Festival held in Missouri, the Boston Women's Music Festival, and the National Women's Music Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. These first regional women-only events exposed audiences to feminist and openly lesbian artists, most of whom operated independently of the mainstream recording industry. Festival gatherings offered an alternative to urban bars, coffeehouses and protest marches, which were some of the few opportunities for lesbians to meet one another in the early 1970s. The feminist separatism of the spaces was a direct outgrowth of and solidarity with the activism created by black power and other racial solidarity movements.
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