See also Who we are and our history and a short history of the Morris Federation.
The Morris Federation over 50 years
An article by Shirley Dixon, April 2025.
When I was a young morris dancer, in the 1980s, it was not at all unusual to hear spectators say ‘I didn’t know women did it’, or even ‘I didn’t know women were allowed to do it’. Now people are taken aback if you tell them that morris used to be a male-only world. As with many things, it now seems bizarre that women were excluded, but it needed a fight to overturn the entrenched attitudes, and the Morris Federation led that fight.
The morris world in 1975
How did morris become a male preserve? Its distant history is very much lost in the mists of time. It seems to have been quite a high-status entertainment in the late Middle Ages, but since few people then could read or write, the only thing recorded about it was the bills! In the 17th century it became part of the culture wars between ‘Cavaliers’ and ‘Roundheads’, and the disapproving Puritans labelled it as ‘pagan’. Banned during the Commonwealth, it was revived when the monarchy was restored in 1660, but numbers of potential patrons dwindled as the centuries progressed, landowners taking a derisive attitude. At the end of the 19th century, only about four villages were regularly fielding a morris team – but interest was growing in ‘quaint’ traditions and revivals were staged for celebrations such as Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897. Cecil Sharp, a professional musician with an interest in folk song, saw dancers at Headington Quarry on Boxing Day 1899, and so could recommend them when Mary Neal, a philanthropist running a club for disadvantaged young women in London, asked whether he knew of any dances suitable for her club. It was the ‘Espérance Girls’ who made morris popular again, and they taught and demonstrated all over the country and even in the USA.
However, Sharp saw William Kimber of Headington as the ideal of morris, and wanted the dance to be disseminated as an art, not used, as Neal favoured, as a tool for social good. He gained predominance, founding the Folk Dance Society in 1911, and it was his vision of morris which the Society taught, backed by his extensive research into Cotswold and sword traditions but ignoring the variants which did not fit his theories. Morris was still being performed in towns of Cheshire and Lancashire, by teams of men, women and children, and there was dancing occasionally in the Welsh Borders, but to most people in the first half of the century, the word ‘morris’ meant Cotswold morris.
Those learning from the Folk Dance Society were largely women, since Sharp had succeeded in getting morris into the school curriculum, but there was always the attitude that it was really a men’s dance. The attitude had been growing through the 19th century that a woman’s place was in the home, and that the ideal woman was a delicate creature. The village morris encountered by Sharp and Neal was very much a man’s world, based around pubs (in which no respectable woman would be seen), and this was the world which the Morris Ring was founded in 1934 to recreate. No longer would morris be restricted to dance-halls and stage entertainment. It was taken out onto the streets again – but by male dancers.
Women join the dance
And that was very much still the situation encountered by women in the 1970s, when the fight for equality was really taking off. Morris had been taught in workshops at the Sidmouth Folk Festival since 1967, but in 1971, women were barred from the beginners’ workshop as ‘a distraction’. After protests, Roy Dommett, who was running the advanced workshop, arranged an impromptu session on North-West dances, and the next years saw official workshops for ‘Women’s ritual dancing’ and ‘Ladies morris’. Women who had taken part in the workshops began to found their own teams. One of these was Betty Reynolds, whose husband, ‘Tubby’, had started the Folk Dance Society at Bath University in 1967. The women of the Society were eager to take up morris, and Bath City Women was founded. They were among other interested women at the ‘Albert’s Out of Town’ festival organised by Tubby and Betty at the University in the spring of 1973, and a workshop was organised, teaching the Wheatley tradition. The women who had attended had also been founding teams, including in Cardiff, Cheltenham and Oxford University, and they jumped at the chance to get together again in the autumn, at “A Day of Traditional Festivity” at the Cheltenham Art College, organised by England’s Glory. It was at this event that Betty Reynolds and the Bath City Women took on the challenge of organising an association for female morris sides, to act as a channel of communication between sides, provide mutual support and facilitate the exchange of information, especially dance and music notation. During the discussion on a potential name, it was suggested, as a joke, that it should be the Women’s Morris Federation, with the acronym “WoMF”, which sounded rather comical when said aloud. The suggestion was accepted, but the acronym came to be written as ‘WMF’.
Progress was hampered by the fact that Bath City was a university side, members being distracted by industrial placements, university vacations and exams, but there was good response to publicity, and a weekend event incorporating the Inaugural Meeting of the Women’s Morris Federation was held in Bath, based at the University, in October 1975.
Founders of the Federation
The founders, Bath City Women, Cardiff Ladies, England’s Glory and Oxford University Ladies Ritual Dancing Club, were joined at that inaugural meeting by Bourne Bumpers (Bournemouth), Earley Ladies (Reading University), Jacquard Ladies (Nottingham), Maids of Barum (Barnstaple, Devon), New Esperance (London), Somerset Maids and The Merry Wives of Windsor (later Windsor Morris), all of whom joined the Federation by the end of the year, and two teams, Holden Goldens (Wolverhampton) and Magog (Horsham, Sussex), who joined later. Teams who did not attend the meeting but joined in 1975 were Knots of May (Lewes, Sussex), Blackheath Ladies (later Meridian, from Blackheath, Kent), The Nutting Girls (Swansea) and Stag Hill Ladies (Surrey University). A contingent from Chelmsford had also been at the 1973 meeting at Cheltenham, but hadn’t formed a side at the time, and Chelmsford Morris didn’t join WMF until 1981 – as a mixed side.
Many women’s sides had male musicians, and the number of mixed teams was increasing, so the concept of a single-sex Federation very soon began to seem inappropriate. At the AGM in 1977 there was a proposal that the constitution should drop any references to ‘women’. However, there was a lot of hostility to WMF from men in the morris world, and a threat had been voiced that if membership was open to men’s teams, a lot of them could join and destroy it. It was only gradually that the Federation opened up, in 1980 to mixed and joint teams and in 1982 to men’s – although the name was changed to ‘Morris Federation’ only in 1983!
The Federation’s work
These were not the only issues to cause contention at early meetings. Some members wanted the Federation to insist on a high standard of performance as a condition of membership, but the prevailing view was that WMF should not dictate how members should conduct themselves. The Committee was keen to encourage high standards, however, organising a vibrant programme of workshops including on the basics of dancing, on performance and on the role of the foreman as well as ‘instructionals’ on particular dances. They also joined with Open Morris to support Roy Dommett’s series of Advanced Cotswold Weekends, which ran from 1986 to 2003.
The committee has always responded to enquiries from the press, and to reports which give an inaccurate or misleading picture of morris. As folk became very ‘uncool’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the committee sought ways of improving the image of morris. Things had to get a lot more political in the 1990s when the government was planning to ‘abolish May Day’ by moving the May Day Bank Holiday to some other time of year. The committee organised protests culminating in massed dancing in London and petitions handed to the Prime Minister by a Jack-in-the-Green and a chimney sweep, among others.
The Licensing Act
Then in the first years of the 21st century a new Public Entertainment Licensing Act was under discussion, which would have required applying for a licence for every public performance. The three morris organisations worked together to get morris ‘and related activities’ exempted from the Act, and the victory was celebrated at a massed dance-out in Trafalgar Square in London on 2nd October 2003.
The birth of the Joint Morris Organisations
The campaign against the Licensing Act was not the first time the Federation had worked closely with the Morris Ring and Open Morris. Relations between the three had been improving in the later years of the 20th century, the committees finding they had many aims in common. The three organisations had worked together as early as 1987 on a survey of morris injuries, and four conferences had been jointly organised in the 1990s. Regular meetings of the ‘Joint Morris Organisations’ are now held to discuss approaches to common problems, and a joint National Day of Dance is run every year.
Lockdowns and the cessation of full-face black makeup
The lockdowns of 2020-2021 to control the spread of Covid-19 meant that no public performances were possible, nor practising together until restrictions were gradually lifted, from the spring of 2021. The Federation’s Health and Safety Advisor put together advice for the teams all desperate to start dancing together as soon as possible. As some compensation for the lack of a normal morris life, a busy programme of talks and workshops on ‘Zoom’ was organised, which of course meant that the Federation was reaching out internationally. The success of the programme encouraged the committee to continue it after the lockdowns were over. Between November 2020 and December 2024, the Federation ran 84 online events.
The re-ignition of ‘Black Lives Matter’ after the killing of George Floyd in the USA in May 2020 lent urgency to the need to steer the Federation through the process of making blackened faces an inappropriate costume for member teams. The questionable origins of the practice were little known, but most teams who wore full face black makeup could see that it could be taken to be offensive, and changed to using masks or other colours.
Celebrating 50 years
As the Federation celebrates its 50th anniversary, morris dancers are in a very different world from that challenged by its founders. The majority of teams now dance other traditions than Cotswold, and the number of women dancing is now equal to the number of men. The need to improve the public image of the morris population remains, as the average age of participants continues to increase
In 2023 the Federation gained a grant from Arts Council England to take morris into selected schools, and is hoping to build on the very positive outcomes. Here’s to the next 50 years!
An article by Shirley Dixon, April 2025
Last updated: May 2025
