A conversation with Jude Kelly founder and director of the Women of the World (WOW) Foundation, was interesting, informative, and fascinating. What began in 2010 as a three day celebration at London’s Southbank Centre where Kelly was artistic director for 12 years has grown to 30 locations across six continents.
The Foundation is again staging a global festival this month to mark Women’s Day, though of necessity this year it is digital. WOW offers a number of high profile guest speakers and addresses the issues of a broad range of generations from grandmothers to the ‘under 10 feminists!’
Kelly has directed over 100 theatre and opera productions, is the recipient of two Olivier awards, a BASCA Gold Badge Award for contribution to music and a Southbank award for opera. She has founded a number of arts institutions and has commissioned and supported the work of thousands of artists across all disciplines.
Did something specific inspire her to begin the Festival and launch the Women of the World Foundation?
She says she came from quite a modest background, and as a girl growing up in Liverpool, the prospects of becoming a theater director, or an arts commissioner were an unlikely prospect. Nevertheless, she persevered, finally running the Southbank Centre, which was the largest cultural organization in Europe.
“I was obviously grateful,” she says, “in so many ways, I felt as if I got there because women before me, and men, had got the vote for girls, got education for girls, and done all kinds of things for girls and women.”
But presiding over the huge organization, she found herself, inevitably, putting on works, classical music, rock, pop, choreography, film, that was largely the creativity of men.
“That’s the history. And it’s the contemporary life too,” she says, but it provoked a pivotal thought, “We’re not telling the right stories. We’re not allowing the stories of women to be central. There’s always the central story … and then there’s the women’s stuff.”
“I thought this was contributing to what had become, certainly in the UK – and I think it was true in Canada at the time as well, a sense of, ‘Well, feminism’s over. We’ve done it, really.’ This was in the early 2000s, before Malala was shot, before Boko Haram, before the Me Too movement.”
“And I just suddenly thought, we’re not equal. We’re not equal in any part of the world. And yet we’re conning ourselves. Particularly, I would say white, literate, solvent women are conning themselves that they are equal because it’s better for your pride or ego to say you are. At least it makes an easier life and you don’t have to be in a struggle and you don’t have to feel humiliated at the idea of being a second class citizen. And I just thought we’re really selling women around the world short. It’s unfair and it’s corrupt to imply that somehow we’ve got there. We haven’t. We haven’t at all.”
Kelly wanted to find a way of re-embracing the struggle for equality. She recognizes the fact that actually what makes people have stamina and determination and popular excitement is feeling happy and ebullient.
“And that’s what gathers you,” she says, “stamina. So, I really believe in festivals. Festivals are opportunities for great egalitarianism. Anybody can come. You can choose your time. You can spend your money in your own way. You can buy drinks. You can bump into friends. And you can be more experimental in festivals, as we know from music festivals.”
Kelly decided to create a festival that celebrated all aspects of girls’ and women’s lives in the Southbank Centre where she was then the artistic director. The timing was perfect – the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day in the UK.
She didn’t expect it to become a global movement, she had no idea that it would ever have more than just one outing, but it was amazing the number of different kinds of people who came to it. And not just women, but boys and men too. And the prevalent feeling was a yearning to learn more. Much more.
“At the time, intersectionality, a phrase that was coined 35 years ago by Kimberlé Crenshaw, it wasn’t on anybody’s lips. People were not discussing patriarchal structures. In the 11 years since I’ve been doing WOW, the confidence and language around equity justice has transformed. People were not discussing indigenous and first nation women and talking about how to be shoulder to shoulder. They were not coming out and saying, ‘Look, I’ve got white entitlement. What can I do about it?’ It was very different. It was very apolitical somehow.”
That attitude didn’t sit well with Kelly, who told me, “I wanted to say to people, ‘Look, it should matter to you whether women are allowed to play football. It should matter to you whether there are enough women in medical research, because if not, women’s health will certainly not be the forefront. It should matter to you.”
“All of these different things are connected. And that’s why if you do a festival, you can cover all subjects, the politics of Afro hair alongside, ‘Why do I have to be made to feel like I have to have a baby?’ I really wanted to say to women, ‘We’ve got to stop being separate and understand that, when you have a system of injustice, it affects every single piece of your life, even if you’ve got a comfortable life and you like it.’”
So, she conceived the festival, and effectively what happened was women around the world have not just agreed with the concept, but are learning from it, and love the idea that it’s a celebration.
“It’s a celebration of how far women have got, bearing in mind we’ve been told that we can’t do this stuff. You’re told you can’t play sport, but hey, we’ve got international women’s cricket teams. You’re told that you don’t know much about money, but hey, women are on the stock exchange.”
Kelly liked the idea of celebrating how much women have achieved despite everything – believing this would give them the tools to change existing structures.
So, she began the festival, “I can’t be a woman with as much power as I now have and then just sit on my backside and go, ‘Look at me. That’s good, isn’t it?'” she says with a laugh.
The WOW festivals have definitely been a major part of her creative life now for quite a long time.
Interestingly, she has actually just commissioned and will be directing, 10 short plays by women about money. She is very interested in women’s relationship to money.
“It’s very skewed,” she says, but hopes the model that she’s developing for UK writers will extrapolate to WOW in other countries. “The aim is to have a creative circuit from all of these WOWs. Whether in Bangladesh or Taiwan or Australia, they can all connect. The WOW in Turkey. You’d be amazed – or I’m sure you wouldn’t be amazed, but if you scratch the surface, the subjects that women need to talk about are the same all over the world.”
Participants at the festival comprise a very broad base, says Kelly.
“It’s not an academic conference. It’s not a symposium, because it’s a festival and we have marketplaces and we have people doing nails where you can have iconic women put on your nails. There’s music. There’s pop-up poetry. There are people doing weightlifting displays in the foyers. So, it’s very eclectic. And we deliberately, before we create any festival, we do these things called think-ins, where we invite literally hundreds of people to come together and ask, ‘Well, what’s happened in your life that you would want to see reflected in the festival? Is that menopause? Is it fibroids? Is it the fact that you wanted to be a mountain climber but your brother got all the equipment? What is it?’ And so, the more you have this massive smorgasbord of stuff, the more people go, “Oh, I can see myself inside that festival.”
Each WOW promotes their own festival. Finding and building their own audience, they vary enormously.
“So, for example, in Karachi, the very first day of the very first festival, 9,000 people walked through the door. That’s incredible. But, wait for it, in Rio, when we did the first WOW Rio, before the weekend we had 92,000 people. Whereas when we did a WOW in Katherine, which is a very small indigenous community in northwest Australia, which is literally a town with two streets, obviously that was like the whole town, and that was about 300 people. So, it’s scalable.”
There’s no scientific method to recruiting people for WOW, admits Kelly, “it’s not like we have a central charity and we’re paying people. It’s usually partnership organizations or really people self-select. And then to be honest, you sort of go, ‘Well, are they sane, humorous, and capable?’ And with support, they know how they can do this, because we’re not trying to bring in WOW UK into Ontario, or into somewhere else. We’re trying to grow it from the place that it’s in and build female leadership.
“And, of course, there is fantastic relationship all over the world, but this idea of cultural activity, like making a festival happen. We’re trying to find people who understand the idea of celebration and festivity. And sometimes they’re quite deeply involved in female politics, and sometimes they’re not. Increasingly, women are. Increasingly. There is a much greater competence and knowledge about equity around gender, as there is about race. It’s changed a lot in the last few years.
“The festival is very clear in saying, and basically what I’ve always said is, if you identify as a woman or you know one, it’ll be for you. It’s just that broad. I don’t want to tell people who should or shouldn’t be welcomed. I want people to be drawn to the idea of gender equality and go, “Well, what do I need to find out about?”
Are men welcome? “Absolutely. Yeah, of course. Gender is men too.” Says Kelly, “Well, funnily enough, men self-select as well.”
“In different parts of the world, you get more men than others. So, for example, a lot of men come to the festival in Pakistan, which is really fascinating. A lot. And in the UK, maybe about 10 percent of the audience are men. I’d like it to be more. And by and large, they are very, very respectful. I mean, they listen a lot. They don’t dominate. And they bring their daughters and they are often brought by their partners. And we’ve never, ever had any pushback, even though … I mean, we do some, just a couple of closed sessions, but mainly everything is completely open. And we’ve never had women saying, ‘Men shouldn’t be here.’ I suppose it’s because the policy is, well, they will be.”
We had to ask about the “Under 10 feminists,” a concept we found intriguing.
Turned out this was a very personal subject for Kelly.
The under 10 feminists were there right from the beginning, she said. “And I can be very personal about it. My daughter started this. My daughter (Caroline Bird) is a poet and she’s quite a well-known poet in Britain. She just won the Forward Prize for Poetry. But when she was a teenager, she came out when she got to 13. And she often said that, if she hadn’t as an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old and a 10-year-old been listening to me and her dad talking about the politics of equality, she wouldn’t maybe have had the equipment to help protect herself, in terms of the arguments that she needed to make to people who demanded to know, “What do you mean you’re a lesbian?” All that sort of stuff that teenagers deal with when they need to strike out.
“So, it was in discussions with her that we thought actually by as tiny as seven, you are being told in the playground what girls can and can’t do. By the time you’re seven, you’re checking in your dreams and in fact, we know that between the ages of about four and eight, girls and boys dream the same level of dream, in terms of ambition. After that, the girls’ dreams start getting more constrained. They’re doing a project on this actually, a research project called the Dream Project, looking into why that is. But my guess is it’s probably quickly around the imagery that girls get about what’s suitable for them and what’s not.
“So, this under 10 feminist corner is a way of getting girls to talk about what they perceive to be the imagery that they’re supposed to be heading for, and what they really want to do, and do they have the language of permission?”
Children’s mental health is one of the topics discussed at WOW, and I admitted, to my embarrassment, that this was not a topic to which I had ever given much consideration – perhaps because I had no children – and was this true of other people without children?
“No. I have a theory, which is that there’ll come a period of time when we’ll suddenly realize that children are not just not adults, but they are a third group.” Said Kelly, “So at the moment, up until recently, and we’re still living with it, men thought women were just not as good as them in all kinds of ways. Special, but different. And that produced this paternalistic as well as patriarchal idea.
“And I think that’s how we think of children. We think that children have fewer dimensions than us somehow, because we think that they are not ready yet, that they’re waiting for readiness. Whereas, they are actually totally themselves at four, or totally themselves at five, and therefore their mental health, in terms of identity and all of those things, starts happening immediately. And we do know of course that children deal very poorly if they have trauma when they’re little and if they’re neglected. So, we’re very aware of all of those things.
“But I think that the sense of who am I, and the worry that you’re not fitting in, and the worry that things aren’t right for yourself, etc., that begins so early in a child. And I don’t think we take them seriously. We haven’t. When you say, ‘I haven’t got children, so I perhaps haven’t thought about it,’ I think there is an important thing there.”
Kelly says the issue of how to catch the interest of people who really aren’t interested in a subject, intrigues her. It may not their thing to care about it, she says, but it affects all of us.
“Part of the reason why racial injustice is so rife is because people think, ‘Well, it’s not my problem. I’m not stopped by the police.’ And even if you think, ‘Well, it’s a pity,’ you don’t actually feel compelled to do anything about it, so you’re complicit in it. And I think that we have to get, especially women, to stop segregating out those people who have children and those who don’t have children into thinking, one side is more expert than another, that it’s relevant to one side and not another – which is not necessarily true – because actually what we’re talking about is the next generation of people, and that belongs to all of us. That’s about our society.”
“I think that the feminist movement has found it very problematic, this whole idea of children, because until recently gay women couldn’t have children. Now they can. My daughter has a one-and-a-half-year old son, so I’m his Grandmum. So suddenly the question of parenting can be part of gay life too. So that makes a difference. But also, we were so desperate to get out of the home and be allowed to be free to do our things that we almost had to despise the home and project back onto it that it was dull and boring and menial, which indeed it often is, but also nobody’s paying for it, are they? So it clearly has no value.
“I think the feminist movement has really made it difficult for children to surface as a really potent part of our argument for change, because we’ve said, ‘Well, that’s for mothers to sort out.’ And those of us who aren’t mothers, or even if they are, like I am a mother, that wasn’t my source of concern publicly. I wasn’t projecting motherhood into my public life. I was projecting my career.
“This is a long answer to your question about mental health, but not that I think that children should be women’s responsibility. And that’s another struggle, isn’t it? But I think we have to take on board the fact that women are landed, at the moment, with the responsibility of children, and we’re trying to find new solutions. And I think we’ve all got to work together on that, not just mothers.”
Kelly referred to a situation just that morning while talking to one of the WOW leaders in Bangladesh, who found her family adamantly against her attending a meeting because of unrest in the streets. The point Kelly made is, that here’s a woman of 30. She’s a professor. But her family weren’t saying, “We’d rather you didn’t (go out).” They were saying, “You can’t go.”
She did go. But it is an example of the fact that, when you’re in lockdown as a woman in Pakistan or in Bangladesh, all of a sudden you’re back into the landscape of domestic duty and the patriarchal hierarchy of the house, and that even being a professor doesn’t take away that problem.
“And I think that in lockdown in Canada, there have been thousands of women who must’ve been shocked to discover that, even though they were a high-flying media executive, under lockdown, they were actually the main person doing the homeschooling and the main person cooking the meals. And they must’ve been a bit shocked.” Said Kelly.
I agreed and asked about the lack of Canadian presence in WOW.
Kelly said she has had conversations with Howard Jang, the VP for the Banff Centre, about creating a forum for addressing women’s leadership globally in order to project the possibility of creating a WOW in Canada.
Nothing has yet been decided, but it is something she hopes to accomplish.
“That’s something I’d love to do. Because Canada is a place with a huge history of the liberation movement, but also a huge history of complexity around first nations and around all the stuff that we’re all still dealing with. So, Canada’s a great place to do a WOW in.”
No argument here. I look forward to attending a Canadian WOW festival sometime in the foreseeable future.
Jude Kelly is Founder of WOW – Women of the World Foundation and Festivals. The 11th edition of WOW UK festival runs online until 21 March.