Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals (review)

Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals. By Bonnie J. Morris. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1999. [xxi, 370 p. ISBN 1-55583-477-9. $15.95 (pbk.).]

In Eden Built by Eves, Bonnie Morris surveys the twenty-five-year history of women's music festivals--temporary but annually recurring communities ("Eden") created by lesbians ("Eves"). Morris's qualifications for such an undertaking are personally and professionally substantial: she is a festival veteran and history professor. Having attended her first festival in 1981, she has since devoted her summer vacations to the festival circuit. She is honest about writing from the biased perspective of an insider who has attended festivals in the roles of anonymous "festiegoer" (paying attendee), stage performer, backup singer, emcee, workshop presenter, and coordinator. Throughout her years of festival attendance, Morris archived her own experiences and those of others by means of journal, camera, and tape recorder. Her training as a historian has enabled her to transform her personal archives into a well-documented history of women's music festivals and their culture. The importance of her contribution lies in the fact that previously published feminist histories do not reflect the experiences of a great many women; in contrast, some women will recognize themselves in this history, the first comprehensive exploration of the festivals.

Morris opens her account with a brief overview of the history of women and song --from Jewish women of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to women slaves in North America to working women involved in union organizing--and of the women's movement in the United States. She then focuses on the development of women's music festivals, introducing topics that are dealt with in greater depth later in the book: the social and emotional benefits of festivals, demands on performers, and contentious issues such as racism, classism, sadomasochism, and the presence of male children and transsexuals.

Details of the culture of women's music festivals are communicated directly by producers and sound technicians, performers, and festival attendees via interviews and entries contributed to Morris's journals. These first-person accounts of festival experience are invaluable resources for understanding the development and maintenance of a complex working culture and the range of meaning festivals hold for workers and attendees. Other primary sources include flyers, protest letters, cartoons, and song lyrics addressing (or lampooning) festival life, and transcribed comedy routines demonstrating typical festival humor and self-parody. Morris offers her own observations on subjects such as daily life during festivals, festival structure and hierarchy, the stereotyping of matriarchal communities by women as well as men, the role of the festival audience, the function of festivals as family gatherings, generational shift and change (in a chapter entitled "There's a Nursing Baby in the Mosh Pit"), and the current status of women's music and festivals. In addition to presenting primary sources and her own observations, Morris discusses important secondary sources such as the journals Paid My Dues (1975-80) and HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women's Music and Culture (1984-94), and she devotes almost an entire chapter to the saga of Camp Sister Spirit in Ovett, Mississippi. Morris's telling of the story of Wanda and Brenda Henson's efforts to establish a permanent festival retreat in the face of harassment from local and state officials includes the collected festival speeches of Wanda Henson and excerpts from local newspapers demonstrating the threatening resistance with which the Hensons were confronted.

Morris complements her prose with black-and-white photographs from the collections of Toni Armstrong Jr. and other women artists. She also provides helpful lists and appendixes: a list of past and present festivals in the United States, including founding year; a list of addresses for "current and ongoing" festivals (missing is the Iowa Women's Music Festival, which took place as recently as September 1999); a selected bibliography of monographs published from 1977 to 1998 (the...