Crusade To End Violence Against Women

The Vagina Monologues awakened Ensler to the pervasiveness of violence against women. After each performance, women would line up “to tell their vagina stories.” But what shocked Ensler most was how many of the women who approached her were the survivors of sexual violence.

“Ninety percent of them were telling me that they had been raped, ravaged or [victims of incest],” she says. “And I began to feel like a war photographer, taking pictures of these horrible scenes, and not doing anything about them.”

It was with these women in mind that Ensler decided to devote her life to eradicating violence against women. A survivor of physical and sexual abuse, Ensler understands how it feels to live with a history of violence. “My life has not been about thriving. It’s been about surviving. My father gave me bloody noses and threw me against the wall and I will never recover. I will lead a good life, but I’ll never fully recover,” she says.

And yet, though she says the scars of the abuse she suffered will always be with her, Ensler’s decision to dedicate her life to ending violence was a turning point. With the V-Day movement, she found purpose, a community, and fulfillment. “All of a sudden, I got happy,” she says.

Now Ensler criss-crosses the globe looking for Vagina Warriors. “As I’ve been traveling around the world, I’ve run into a lot of violence against women and suffering, whether it’s squatters in Cairo who are being beaten or women in Beverly Hills who are abused,” she says.

“But what really interests me is not the bad news,” she says. “I’m interested in the good news, that there’s this new species of women who have experienced violence and who, instead of thinking from a patriarchal place, pause, feel their grief, feel their suffering and transform it in themselves, in order to ease the pain and suffering of others.”

Ensler says she knows Vagina Warriors when she sees them because of their clarity of purpose, their strength and fearlessness. Ensler is fond of talking about her hero, a Kenyan Vagina Warrior named Agnes Pareyio.

“I met Agnes three years ago, and she taught me the concept of the Vagina Warrior,” she says. “Agnes was genitally mutilated when she was a little girl. Her vagina was ripped open, but so was her soul. She said she was going to put a stop to this, so she walked through the Rift Valley in Kenya carrying a plastic model of a woman’s torso with removable vagina pieces, teaching boys and girls about genital mutilation.”

Agnes saved 1500 girls from being cut on her journey. When Ensler learned about her work, she gave Agnes a jeep, allowing her to save 4,500 more girls from being genitally mutilated. V-Day then raised $60,000 to buy Agnes a house, which now serves as a safe zone and school for 50 Kenyan women.

The Potential For Young Women

Eve Ensler has met with women activists in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. She has communed with the survivors of sexual abuse in Israel and Palestine, Watts and Beverly Hills. She has advised Parliamentarians and prison inmates. But Ensler holds a special place in her heart for the women on college campuses who produce her plays and have provided the foundation for the V-Day movement.

“I absolutely live for college women,” she says. “Everyone knows the age that they stopped at. I’m definitely somewhere between 14 and 18.”

But more than simply identifying with youth, Ensler admires young women who challenge the status-quo and defy the roles that society presses upon them. “Teenage girls have the Vagina Warrior mentality, when you don’t care whether people like you, or better, when you go against how you’re supposed to behave for people to like you. That’s what I want to inject into the rest of society. If more women were fully manifest, they would be loud and pierced forever just as they are in their college years,” she says.

Still, Ensler, believes that even daring college women can fall prey to an eagerness to please, overweening self-consciousness or insecurity. She cautions women against obsessing about their bodies. “When you ask whether you look fat, and I know you all do, what you’re really asking is, ‘Do I have the right to exist?’ If you just didn’t ask that question for one day, you could radically change your life.”