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Making Our Own Kind of Music: The History and Legacy of the Women’s Music Movement

Sweet Honey in the Rock Thirteenth Anniversary Concert Poster

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Division
The movement’s vision of sisterhood fractured as participants debated lesbian separatism, transgender inclusion, and the prominence of race and class based discrimination. While lesbian separatists created a healing and empowering environment for many women, women of color and transgender women faced discrimination that ultimately undermined some festivals and the community they aspired to create.

The Women’s Music Movement was a child of lesbian separatism, an identity-based social and cultural movement that both challenged heterosexism and built and sustained utopian women’s communities.¹ Lesbian separatists believed that women-only spaces empowered, healed, and inspired women by creating a safe environment where they could be their authentic selves. ² Furthermore, separatists argued women’s marginalization in the music industry made separatism a priority.

“If you can name five women singers, engineers, etc, then we’ll stop being women only” Judy Dlugacz (co-founder of Olivia Records) ³

However, as the movement grew, separatism became a highly contested principle.
Some women did not want to exclude their male children, family members, and friends from women’s music events.⁴ Separatism alienated Black women like Sweet Honey in the Rock member Evelyn Harris, who described the divided state of the movement in a 1986 interview.
“I admired the fact that there is a sense of family. But at the same time, as a Black woman I found it difficult when men and boy children were excluded… I found that in woman-only spaces women still need a lot of work on how they deal with each other.”- Evelyn Harris⁵
Black musicians like Harris and Mary Watkins appeared on stage, but white women held the vast majority of behind the scenes roles. Furthermore, Black artists faced additional difficulties finding venues because some concert producers saw their music as less popular and profitable. Although this pattern was not a universal trait of the Movement, it echoed the middle-class and white-dominant structure that Second-wave Feminism also struggled with. Organizers, artists, and producers like Linda Tillery, Alix Dobkin, Robin Tyler, and Holly Near used their platforms and influence to push for anti-racism workshops and consciousness raising sessions, but significant cultural differences caused many women of color in the Movement to feel tokenized or insulted by tone deaf behavior. For example, white lesbian feminists embracing Wicca and paganism was offensive to Native Americans who saw such practices as cultural appropriation. In a 2011 interview with Queer Music Heritage, Gwen Avery shares that she "knew damn well that I was a token person because most of the people that we performed for certainly didn't know a lot of Black women." Though the Women's Music Movement was instrumental in uniting lesbians and feminists of incredibly diverse backgrounds, the result was the confrontation of bias and bigotry.⁶

Transgender exclusion became a clear point of contention as separatists protested transgender woman Sandy Stone’s participation in the Olivia collective. In 1976 the separatist collective the Gorgons protested Stone’s position as Olivia Records' sound engineer, and argued that she was a man or even a FBI agent “infiltrating the women’s movement.”⁷Stone identified as a woman and was excited to work in a feminist collective, but separatists argued that employing her betrayed the movement’s principles. Olivia ardently defended Stone, publicly asserting that “she is a woman we can relate to with comfort and with trust,” but Stone eventually decided to leave the collective in 1979.⁸

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s idea of a “womyn-born-womyn” exclusive space sparked controversy, protests, and boycotts throughout much of the festival’s 40 year run. Separatists felt that trans women with male sex characteristics made some women feel unsafe at festivals where nudity was standard.⁹ Tensions boiled over when festival officials expelled “post operative transsexual leatherdyke” Nancy Burkholder from the 1991 festival. Burkholder attended the festival the previous year and wrote in retrospect that she was “so enthusiastic and wanting to contribute to the community when I went back in ‘91.”¹⁰ Founder Lisa Vogel argued that the experiences of "womyn-born womyn" constitute a "distinct gender identity" that is "honorable, meaningful, unique and rich."¹¹ In the following years transgender women like Davina Anne Gabriel attended the festival in protest, and were welcomed by many attendees. In 1994 queer and transgender activists established Camp Trans.¹² The last festival occurred in 2015.¹³

Festivals like Michigan were instrumental in uniting lesbians and feminists and set the standards for accessibility by including ASL translators and child care stations, but still faced conflicts over difference.

1. Anne M. Valk, “Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a Lesbian Feminist Collective,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 303–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178744. 307-308.
2. Bonnie J. Morris, “‘Anyone Can Be a Lesbian’ The Women’s Music Audience and Lesbian Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (2001): 107.
3. Dee Mosbacher, Radical Harmonies, Documentary, 2002.
4. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019).Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 62.
5. HOT WIRE March 1986 cited in Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 63-64
6. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019).Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 128-130. Bonnie Morris, "'Anyone Can Be a Lesbian' The Women's Music Audience and Lesbian Politics," Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (2001): 100-102.
7. Jamie Anderson, An Army of Lovers (Bella Books, 2019). 65, Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 300.
8. Anderson, 65.
9. Bonnie J. Morris, “‘Anyone Can Be a Lesbian’ The Women’s Music Audience and Lesbian Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (2001): 108.
10. Nancy Jean Burkholder. “A Kinder, Gentler Festival?” TransSisters : The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, December 1993. http://archive.org/details/transsistersjour00unse_0. 5.
11. Lisa Vogel. “Letter to the Community – April 11, 2013 | Michfest,” July 11, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20150330195141/http://michfest.com/letter-to-the-community-4_11_13/.
12. Davina Anne Gabriel. “Mission to Michigan.” TransSisters : The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, December 1993. http://archive.org/details/transsistersjour00unse_0. 8-12
13. Anderson-Minshal, Diane (April 24, 2015). "Op-ed: Michfest's Founder Chose to Shut Down Rather Than Change With the Times". The Advocate.