From the top:

"1. Am I correct in inferring that song-leaders for kalinda were, at one point, always or mostly women? If so, when did this change?"

Note: Protestants don't really do Easter (carnival, kalinda, goombay &c). They come out to play around Christmas & New Years (waits, junkanoo, mummers.)

With a very broad brush:

Early period: Slave era French Catholic carnival was celebrated as fête de la quémande and that never really died out. Rural Béké & Acadians still celebrate Courir de Mardi Gras the old way. Gender is for role reversal en masque so... anybody can sing lead. Everybody knows who the (co)capitans are anyway.

The songs may be in the nature of cariso and some younger "crews" do get rowdy at times but there is a communal meal to follow so murder and arson are right off the program. One assumes slaves celebrated in a mash-up of their respective owners' and individual tribal customs.

Middle Era: After emancipation things got ugly pretty quick. Street gangs took over the urban holiday processions. The roles of chanter & chorus (& first aid, ammunition bearer &c) fell to women while the men took to stick fighting, rock and bottle throwing. Riot grrrls and riot songs. People died.

Like New Orleans' Bourbon Street Mardi Gras, things slowly gentrified and commercialized. By the turn of the century they'd settled down to the classic road march and calypso tent era. The rough elements, male & female, got cleaned up and good old patriarchal chauvinism settled in.

Late Era: c.1900's Trinidad that meant the top jobs invariably went to upper/middle class males, Catholic, Protestant, whatevs. Universal adult suffrage didn't arrive until 1946; the first calypso "Queen" in the 1970s.

The 78rpm record that frames our perspective of French Catholic Carnival music was pretty much useless for the hours long call and reply road marches. One can squeeze a tent calypso down to the 3-4 minute standard with no effort at all. And that's how we remember the Carnival "chantwell" today – a male calypsonian fronting a small European style orchestra.

More to follow...