A week before Christmas break, Eve Ensler swept through campus, darting from packed lecture halls to intimate lunch discussions to recruit “Vagina Warriors” for her revolution. Ensler, whose exuberance magnifies her small frame, has become a celebrity, a preacher of the Vagina Gospel, a crusader against violence and a spokesperson for sisterhood, peace and outrageousness.

Immediately recognizable by her trademark bangs, Ensler laughs as she says, “I’m still surprised when I’m in a shoe store and someone yells, ‘There’s that vagina lady!’”

But Ensler wears her vagina identity as a badge of honor, using it as a passport to far-flung regions across the world where women are fighting fearlessly for dignity and safety.

Her movement began in a small, dark theater off Broadway five years ago, but it has evolved into an international phenomenon, as women from Harvard to Masai villages in Kenya come together every Valentine’s Day to give voice to their vaginas and call for an end to violence.

The Vagina Phenomenon

Ensler penetrated the public consciousness in 1998 with The Vagina Monologues, a collection of women’s descriptions of and reflections about their vaginas. The work emerged from a conversation Ensler had with a friend. While discussing menopause, Ensler’s friend, a self-proclaimed feminist, complained about how much she hated her vagina. Distressed to hear a woman, a feminist no less, speak this way about her vagina, Ensler began asking her friends to share impressions of their vaginas.

“I was sucked down the vagina trail. I was on the vagina trail for years. Everyone wanted to talk about their vaginas,” Ensler says.

Ensler collected testimonials from a vast array of women and strung them together to create her one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues. The play became a theatrical sensation, attracting packed audiences and garnering star-studded casts. It spread to 2,000 cities across the world and has become a staple on college campus. It will be produced at a record 700 universities this year.

Through The Vagina Monologues, Ensler has given birth to a movement. Beyond catapulting the word vagina into the popular domain, she has created a non-profit called V-Day, which seeks to end violence against women. For many, the holiday formerly known as Valentine’s Day has become V-Day, “Vagina Day” or “Victory Over Violence Against Women Day.” Every V-Day women and “vagina friendly men” perform the monologues to stimulate awareness and raise money for innovative anti-violence programs.

Kathy H. Lee ’04, who has produced and performed in The Vagina Monologues at Harvard, says that the V-Day movement “represents both a public and private decision to love and honor women.”

“Besides the money that goes toward ending the larger problem of violence against women, V-Day also attempts to earn cultural change by ritualizing the celebration of womanhood on a personal and global level,” she says.

Lee adds that the Vagina Monologues resonates strongly at Harvard because of the recent rash of sexual assaults on and around campus.

“This year, with the spree of assaults upon women, the campus needed a place to gather and reclaim what should rightfully be ours, the freedom to walk through the streets without fear,” she says.

It is precisely the commitment to women’s freedom from attacks and fear that propels Eve Ensler. Tomorrow, Ensler hopes to lead an mass of 100,000 people to Juarez, Mexico, where hundreds of women have vanished mysteriously only to reappear as dismembered corpses. “They are abducted, I know horrendous sex crimes are done to them, and all that is left is bones, as discarded as a Coca-Cola bottle,” she says.

She says she intends to deliver a clear message to the Juarez community, the Mexican government and the world at large that violence against women must stop.

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.”

Ensler, who is on the South Beach Diet, prescribes a No-Self Hatred Diet for today’s young women. “Women are spending all of their time fixing their bodies, and men are running the world. It’s much more interesting to create foreign policy,” she says.

Ensler warns that women cannot do important and outstanding things in this society without being disliked. “You have to make a decision about whether you want to be good or great. You can’t be great and still be good.” Ensler worked hard to stop caring about what other people think of her and her work. “It’s taken me 50 years to find my own moral compass,” she says.  

It was only after The Vagina Monologues, after saying vagina 128 times a performance, 8 performances a week, that she really began to feel comfortable with herself.

“I landed in my vagina after that,” she says. “And I was home.”

—Staff writer Jessica E. Gould can be reached at gould@fas.harvard.edu.