Some of them, only some of them now. Though I'm fully aware just how horribly bad it was at one time.
I had some interesting conversations with one of the team in my role as as folk festival organiser, which is how I know that some of them have a much greater awareness of the history, and greater acceptance of women dancers, than others.
There were some men (don't know from which teams, but I know it did happen) who refused to share historical evidence of women dancing.
With the Internet, it's hard to argue with the flood of old photos now available.
Of course, the current acrimonious debate is about blackface morris. There are a couple of shocking abuses of history there - borrowing historical evidence from one form of morris, to justify blacking up in traditions that have no excuse at all.
But, of course, when modern teams began blacking up, the history was no widely known. They saw some old photos, thought 'that looks cool and different' and went with it - and it got a great public reaction too.
Now, most of them have gone for coloured face paint instead, but the hold outs abuse history more and more in an attempt to justify what they are doing.
My morris history facebook group (which bans all arguments about blackface) gained 50 members this week, as people flee the atmosphere in other facebook morris groups.
Another interesting shift to observe, is a much wider acceptance of carnival morris, which was almost totally unknown in the folk morris community until recently, in spite of being actively danced by large numbers of little girls.
no subject
I had some interesting conversations with one of the team in my role as as folk festival organiser, which is how I know that some of them have a much greater awareness of the history, and greater acceptance of women dancers, than others.
There were some men (don't know from which teams, but I know it did happen) who refused to share historical evidence of women dancing.
With the Internet, it's hard to argue with the flood of old photos now available.
Of course, the current acrimonious debate is about blackface morris. There are a couple of shocking abuses of history there - borrowing historical evidence from one form of morris, to justify blacking up in traditions that have no excuse at all.
But, of course, when modern teams began blacking up, the history was no widely known. They saw some old photos, thought 'that looks cool and different' and went with it - and it got a great public reaction too.
Now, most of them have gone for coloured face paint instead, but the hold outs abuse history more and more in an attempt to justify what they are doing.
My morris history facebook group (which bans all arguments about blackface) gained 50 members this week, as people flee the atmosphere in other facebook morris groups.
Another interesting shift to observe, is a much wider acceptance of carnival morris, which was almost totally unknown in the folk morris community until recently, in spite of being actively danced by large numbers of little girls.
I must write more about that some day. My own posts are very out of date - https://watervole.dreamwidth.org/tag/carnival+morris