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.