Wymen's Festival

Womyn's festivals were women-only music and arts gatherings that grew out of the lesbian feminist cultural movement of the 1970s. The best known was the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, or Michfest, founded in 1976 by Lisa Vogel with her sister Kristie Vogel and Mary Kindig, and held annually in rural Oceana County, Michigan until 2015. The alternative spelling womyn was meant to signal independence from words built around men. These festivals gave women and lesbians rare space to perform, organize, and build community. They also became sites of major conflict: from 1991 Michfest adopted a womyn-born womyn policy that excluded trans women, drawing years of protest and helping fuel wider debates about trans inclusion in feminist spaces.