Michigan Womyn's Music Festival records.

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival records (1976-2015) contain crew guides and handbooks, maps, banners, t-shirts, programs, brochures, posters, meeting minutes, correspondence, inventories, press clippings, as well as recordings and photographs taken during the festival. The collection gives an insight of the intense effort and amount of coordination it took to make the festival possible, and how it evolved and grew more complex with each iteration.

Item, Folder number and/or title, Box number, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival records, MSS 508, Special Collections, MSU Libraries, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

The collection was donated by Lisa Vogel in 2016.

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival website is: http://michfest.com Additional related archival collections: Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Records of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1983-2016 is held at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/sc̃h01528

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was an annual international music festival for women by women. In 1976, Lisa Vogel, her sister Kristie Vogel, and Mary Kindig organized a women-only event in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan where approximately 2,000 women congregated for a three-day music festival from August 20 to 22. From 1976 to 1981 the festival took place in a wooded area near Hesperia, Michigan, during which time the festival grew from a regional to a national event. In 1982, the festival moved to its final location near Hart, Michigan, to 650 acres of private land where each year women assembled tents, built stages, and delivered a variety of services and workshops at the space called "The Land." The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, often referred to as MWMF or MichFest, was produced by We Want the Music Cooperative (WWTMC), later known as We Want the Music Collective, and We Want the Music Company. Artists of all genres were welcome to perform at MichFest. From the beginning, the festival attracted feminist and lesbian activists, with many of the performers as active members of these communities. As the number of artists and attendants grew, so did the complexity of the festival, with pre-festival activities, a variety of workshops, shopping tents, separate childcare services for toddlers, boys, and girls, as well as services for people with disabilities. The complexity of the festival was reflected not only in the activities held but also in the set-up of "The Land," which changed every year to meet the needs of a self-sustained community. To many participants, this was a magical, transformative place, although the controversial stance of restricting the space to womyn-born womyn only eventually led to its closure in 2015.

Finding aid online: http://as.lib.msu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1983