Long before Lilith--and after.

WHAT DOES THE 21ST CENTURY HOLD FOR WOMEN'S MUSIC FESTIVALS? AND WHY IT DOES MATTER

In the 21st century, women's music festivals will compete with multiple other entertainments to attract lesbian consumer dollars. This predicament reflects progress: There are more lesbian entertainment choices than ever before, including independent film festivals, cruises and travel expeditions, bed-and-breakfast getaways, clubs, and not-officially-lesbianbut-obviously-so galas such as the Dinah Shore Golf Classic.

However, what this aforementioned menu reflects is an increase of choices for affluent women. Since class remains an oddly taboo subject in a community ostensibly attentive to race and gender difference, festivals' real contributions go unremarked: They are still the most affordable entertainment value per hour of women-only space. The sliding scale, the work-exchange option bringing a young techie-in-training right onto her favorite singer's stage, flee child care--these are outstanding features, offering working women a full day of concerts for less cost than a single k.d. lang show. Don't like the food included in your ticket price? Bring along your own cuisine, your birthday cake, your jar of olives. Car trouble at the gate? A hundred women will pitch in to mend your air filter. Payment flexibility and community assistance make festivals uniquely user-friendly. These factors will continue to be festivals' competitive edge in the furore.

But as the 1990s draw to a close, it's no longer necessary to attend a festival to find radical women, and the Internet helps connect even the most isolated. Today's young women are boldly coming out in high school, assuming and acting on their civil rights. Lesbian separatism is not their solution, and 1970s folk music not their sound. In this changing artistic market, must festivals reconstruct what they offer in order to stay solvent, to attract new numbers? Most important, as we pass the 25-year mark, will we be honored and remembered for what we contributed, or vilified as outmoded by young feminism's next wave?

The '90s ridicule of '70s feminism demonstrates how each generation enjoys rejecting its predecessor. But when today's independent women artists mock or ignore the legacy of festival culture--the longest-running venue for independent women artists--we find sisters dissing sisters. That's more than a generational rejection--it's dishonesty. And it's a challenge to the collective memory of lesbian achievement in the late 20th century.

When Time magazine put new singer Jewel on a July 1997 cover with the subheading "The All-Female Lilith Festival Is Taking Rock's Hot New Sound on the Road," thousands of women already were on the road--en route to the 22nd annual Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Today's older lesbian artists continue to live between a rock and a hard place, their rightful legacy overlooked by mainstream periodicals, which endlessly recycle k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, and the Indigo Girls as proof of lesbian power in the entertainment industry. Using mail order and Web pages, women's music distribution companies Ladyslipper and Goldenrod work ceaselessly to overcome the limited visibility of less famous artists. Yet with mainstream fame now established as a lesbian possibility, the lesserknowns attract even less interest for having situated their achievements in the "underground" lesbian music network.

Festivals, lesbian feminism, and women's music are all far from dead in America But they are supported and sustained in no small measure by women age 35 and older, which, in a youth-focused market, is the same thing as being dead. The motherly or grandmotherly age of the 1970s pioneers brings out stunning condescension from younger women inheriting our dyke-rock legacy. "Why should I be held to festival policies written before I was born?" demanded an arrogant new crew member during a 1996 worker meeting at Michigan.

Yes, festivals require new blood. In fact, they are dependent upon attracting bold young women as future staff and visionaries. The appearance of new, young producers, like New York City's dynamic Mehuman Jonson, is a blessing. But let us also consider the viewpoint that it's OK for women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s to have a stunning institution where they are the majority, that not everything must be defined by the young.

Many of us will keep at it--renegade Amazons giving the best years of our lives to a festival culture rarely recognized, even in women's studies texts or queer-girl glossies. Yes, the emergence of festivals as institutions has been a significant, late-20th century movement. But that's not why we go.

We go for the walk in the woods, the experience of light and leaf and shadow on bare ribs, not felt since first grade. We go for the collective hush when a performer sings a love song, for the drambeat up the spine that kundalini enthusiasts never imagined, for the perfect spray of water drops across a prebreakfast cobweb on a beach chair. We go because the weight of the hammer, the call of the whippoorwill, the log falling apart and scattering flesh sparklight across faces, reminds us of a preindustrial era when time went by the season and not according to the Timex Indiglo. We go to hear the word lesbian spoken as often as possible into a microphone, to hear writers and role models we had only read about--even to ignore them in order to kiss our dates passionately throughout a scheduled presentation. We carefully pack clothes we'll remove immediately for the thrill of remaking ourselves as travelers to inner space--the inner space, as Elizabeth Ziff (of Betty) called Michigan in 1989, of "Wombstock."

Excerpted with permission from Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals (Alyson Publications), [C] 1999 by Bonnie J. Morris.

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