Skip to content

COLUMN: Why women’s festivals?

A founder of the West Kootenay Women’s Festival looks at the past and the present
8256671_web1_Marcia-Braundy-P1010293
Marcia Braundy shares a history of the women’s festival. Submitted photo

Sylvia Tyson was one of the very few female musicians on festival celebration stages in British Columbia in the 1960s and early 1970s.

This was not something noticed by the men who organized those events. They just didn’t see who was not there. They saw themselves, and that was enough for them. But I noticed, because I am a woman, and I saw no reflection of my world up there.

This year at the Kaslo Jazz Festival the opening act was Bessie Wapp. She also was the MC for the upper stage. Thirty or more young and adult women danced beautiful forms on the main stage with Slava Doval. Premier Vancouver saxophonist Karen Graves backed up Laura Landsberg’s tribute to Aretha Franklin. Laura sang at the first Kaslo Jazz Festival in 1992. I was there, and it warmed my heart.

It was not always thus. In 1973, local festivals like Multifusion and the Vancouver Folk Festival did not have women performers at their events. It wasn’t a rule or a law, only a practice, based on years of a common understanding that men were the performers at those events. I knew that women played and sang with those men around the kitchen tables of the Slocan Valley and elsewhere in the Kootenays and around the country, so it got my goat that they weren’t present on the stages.

Volunteering for the Kootenay Women’s Council on IMAGES, Kootenay Women’s Newspaper, and with the Nelson Women’s Centre on local women’s health issues in those days, I suggested that a festival where only women performed and only women’s crafts were displayed, and only women led workshops might be in order. The women agreed. We got bits of funding from Secretary of State Women’s Programs back when the government felt that women’s place in society was a citizenship issue. Other bits of money came from other places, as did lots of volunteers, and we booked Pass Creek Park in Robson/Rasberry.

It was a homegrown festival, and you can find some of that music and my square dance calling under Women’s Festivals on the website KootenayFeminism.com.

The women performers made us all proud, and themselves too.

We had the foresight to audiotape the 1974 festival, a wonderful event where women had the opportunity to honour one another. The reel-to-reel tapes were a bit of a problem to digitize, because that technology is long gone and not even Selkirk had saved any hardware; but we finally found a way. The Pass Creek Festival was sponsored by the Kootenay Women’s Council, representing the Trail Status of Women, The Slocan Valley Women’s Consciousness Raising Group and Women’s Reader’s Theatre, The Nelson Women’s Centre and the Castlegar Status of Women group. That Kootenay Women’s Council was an organization where ideas were shared and Women’s Conferences were held at Selkirk College.

Men were welcomed at that festival to honour the women too, but some of them were drunk and gave them all a bad name. The following year, International Women’s Year, 1975, the seven-member organizing committee decided to have one day women-only and welcome men on the second day. It was a real eye opener and the differences ran deep. For many years there have been continuing discussions regarding women-only events, and when it would be time to invite the men to join us without taking over or getting drunk. We continue to try it both ways every now and then.

We received real funding from Secretary of State Women’s Program in 1975, and were able to invite Rita McNeill, an upcoming feminist singer-songwriter from her home of Big Pond, N.S. Her first album came out that year. In those early days, Rita sang a cappella, keeping her beat by slapping on the front of her thigh. The exquisite voice went on to great things on the CBC, but her wonderful feminist lyrics will live in our hearts lifelong. If I can manage it, Rita McNeill’s songs from that festival will be on KootenayFeminism.com in the near future. The following year and beyond, women burst onto the Canadian feminist music scene, with Ferron’s first album and Heather Bishop writing, singing and touring with Connie Kaldor, showing us our common experience and letting us feel the pain and joy of being women.

The Western Canadian Women’s Festival was in Kaslo that International Women’s Year (we were getting big for our britches!). That was the first year we brought to the surface the challenges of lesbian and straight women working together in the women’s movement. A couple of us had been in a workshop developed by some lesbian feminist activists from Mission during workshops at the B.C. Federation of Women conference in Vancouver. We brought Yvette Mimiuex, Yvonne Johnson and Nym Hughes up to share “Stepping Out of Line,” an eye-opening opportunity to expand our hearts and our work to include each other. Deena Romoff, a feminist activist from Spokane shared that work with me, Marcia Braundy, in many of the subsequent women’s festivals we had in the Kootenays: in Proctor and then for many years at the Vallican Whole Community Centre (music, videos and manuals on KootenayFeminism.com).

The workshops were consciousness raising, growth producing, political, spiritual, hands-on trades, body painting and many ways of fun and getting to know new things. We swam in the river and cooked and ate together, everyone pitching in and making wonder together. We had a literary café, with many of the local authors, local song writers, with contact improvisation and dances of universal peace to keep the physical flow. Women musicians and those who were on the stage for the first time performed and we all danced with joy together.

I wish all future women’s festivals those same joys and learnings, growing together to make the world a safe and welcoming place for women’s contributions from all types and diversities.

I thank the women who brought back the festival this year at Harrop, August 25 to 27, after a long hiatus. We may be many on the stage now, with honours and awards, but true equality of participation and contribution in public life, in a safe world, is still only on the horizon of those of us who care.