V-Day Blog Archive

Lawmakers Speak Out For Women

By Wren Propp

Whenever she spoke publicly about her own time as a domestic violence victim 27 years ago, former state lawmaker Patricia Trujillo Knauer felt the silence of her peers the most.

Fellow lawmakers, both men and women, “looked at it like we had a disease … But all of us have been a part of it,” she said.

Knauer, deputy secretary for Gov. Bill Richardson’s Aging and LongTerm Services agency, was one of four female leaders who kicked off a national campaign Sunday in Santa Fe on ending violence against women called “V is for Vote.”

About 40 people attended the event.

Organized by Eve Ensler, founder of the V-Day movement to end violence toward women and girls and author of “The Vagina Monologues,” the national campaign is focused on raising voters’ awareness of violence against women and girls and getting the issue on the top of candidates’ agendas.

“Violence against women and girls should be up there with health-care reform and education … It should be said in the same breath,” said Ensler, who is planning similar events throughout the United States.

In Santa Fe in particular, encouraging Latina and Hispanic women to vote and speak out against gender-related violence is a “tough nut to crack,” even though they live in a state where the incidence of domestic
violence and rape is among the highest in the nation, said Lilia Olivas Whitener, a local children’s advocate and educator who works with parents on family issues.

“We feel we are not entitled to speak out because we were born feeling not entitled, like the Anglo women have,” she said.

Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, considered the
highest-ranking elected Hispanic woman in state government in the United States, said her national role is bittersweet, because so few others have achieved what she has.

“I like being the highest-ranking elected Latina; it’s great, but it’s sad, too,” she said.

Santa Fe Municipal Judge Frances Gallegos said much of her motivation in her early life was to disprove the machismo tenet she grew up with- that women were not as good as men- and that’s why she joined the military at 17 and had a tour of duty in Vietnam.

Gallegos and the other women speaking at the forum said teaching children about ending domestic violence and encouraging women to vote would help end violence against women.

For example, of the 55,000 registered voters in Santa Fe, nearly 54 percent are women, and yet only 14,000 or so voters go to the polls, Gallegos said.

“If we got women to vote, we could rule the world,” she said.

Danielle Holland, a 22-year-old College of Santa Fe graduate and an intern with the campaign, said many of her once-apathetic friends are eager to register to vote.

The current administration, she said after the forum concluded, “is changing all of the legal language in regards to abortion … What our mothers fought for is being totally chipped away.”

Holland believes that male candidates probably won’t embrace ending violence against women and girls.

“That’s why we should encourage women to run,” she said.

Ensler noted that in the six years since the first V-Day event, the movement has grown to 1,000 events globally with performances, speeches, protests and fund-raising events.

Many of the V-Day events, including performances of her play, occur on or around Valintine’s Day.

She’s hoping both women and men who speak out against gender-related violence will organize groups of 10 friends who register to vote, discuss presidential candidates and then go to the polls together.

Presidential hopefuls should also take on the V-Day agenda, she said. While V-Day hasn’t endorsed any candidates, when V-Day organizers approached Howard Dean, one of several Democratic candidates for the party’s presidential nod, he “asked us to teach him” about the impact violence against women and girls has on society.

Copyright 2004 Albuquerque Journal

Panel: Women Can Enhance Safety by Voting

By Doug Mattson

Patsy Trujillo Knauer,Rebecca Vigil-Giron, Eve Ensler, Lilia Olivas Whitener and Judge Frances Gallegos held a panel on women’s voting rights at Tipton Hall at The College of Santa Fe.

Abused women and women of lower socioeconomic class are less likely to vote. But if they did vote, panelists said Sunday, addressing violence against women would take greater priority.

And a greater female voting presence could even spur a White House Cabinet position dedicated to the issue, moderator Eve Ensler said. Ensler, playwright of the internationally famous The Vagina Monologues, pointed to United Nations research that showed one in three women have been battered or raped worldwide.

“That is an epidemic,” Ensler told an audience of about 30 people Sunday in Tipton Hall at the College of Santa Fe. “That is homeland security. Why don’t we have homeland security?”

Such questions led to a discussion on how to mobilize women voters. There are more women than men registered to vote in New Mexico, but they wind up voting less often, New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron said. Women can easily register at stores while shopping, she said, but breaking free to vote is often hard because of family obligations — or because they are victims of abuse.

Vigil-Giron was on the panel with Patsy Trujillo-Knauer, deputy secretary of aging and long-term services and a former legislator; Frances Gallegos, Santa Fe Municipal Court judge; and Lilia Olivas Whitener, an activist on Hispanic family issues. They shared their experiences growing up in a male-dominated society and discussed the obstacles that women might have in voting.

The event was part of V-Day, which was inspired by Ensler’s play and began as a project to end worldwide violence against women and girls. As election politics heat up, the “V” has come to stand for “vote.”

“If women are protected and feel secure, then they can take part in their community,” said Cecile Lipworth, V-Day worldwide campaign managing director.

Barbara Goldman, Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center executive director, said there’s a connection between violence against women and their lack of presence at the polls.

“All kinds of violence take a toll on people’s psyche and souls and you become less of a person than what you could have been,” Goldman said.

“You feel powerless, and you feel nothing about you counts, and that includes the world politic,” she said.

Most in attendance Sunday were women, and most were registered to vote. But Ensler said her goal was to mobilize the group into a collection of “V Posses” to help other women vote. Ideas on ways to do that included renting shuttle buses and visiting businesses such women might frequent.

Actress Jane Fonda was scheduled to be on the panel but was in Los Angles for Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, where her son, actor Troy Garity, was a nominee.

Fonda might be on hand when V-Day events resume tonight with the showing of the documentary Until the Violence Stops at 7:30 p.m. at The Lensic Theater.

The film follows the impact of V-Day around the world; it recently was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

Sundance Film Follows Play’s Rise from Theater to Worldwide Movement

By Vince Horiuchi

There was a time when Jane Fonda had trouble saying that “V” word.

“I was asked to perform ‘The Vagina Monologues’ about 3 1/2 years ago in Atlanta and I asked to have the play sent to me,” she said. “I started reading it, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, I have enough problems with controversy. I don’t think I need to say the V-word onstage.’ So I passed.”

But thanks to a persistent friend, she saw writer/activist Eve Ensler’s performance of her famous one-woman show in New York. Fonda was floored by its frank stories about how women perceive their bodies, sexuality and self-esteem — acknowledging that seeing the play had greater impact than just reading it.

“It was one of the most memorable and empowering experiences of my life,” Fonda told The Salt Lake Tribune in a telephone conversation from New Mexico. “I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard in the theater or cried so hard.”

Needless to say, Fonda ended up appearing in the play. Like millions of other women, it touched her on “some very somatic level.”

That is an example of how “The Vagina Monologues” escalated from a humble off-Broadway performance to a worldwide social movement against violence launched by Ensler. She calls her organization “V-Day.”

Using “The Vagina Monologues” as a fund-raising tool, V-Day has raised more than $20 million to help anti-violence programs worldwide. The cause has attracted other actors, including Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Isabella Rosselini and Oprah Winfrey.

A new documentary called “Until the Violence Stops” follows the growing movement around the globe and has its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Yarrow Hotel Theater in Park City. Ensler and Fonda, who is a member of V-Day’s V-Counsel, will attend. Both women and their roles in the movement are featured in the documentary, which is directed by Abby Epstein.

Ensler wrote the play “The Vagina Monologues” after conducting interviews with more than 200 women about their sexuality, their bodies and their stories of violence and sexual abuse. The play has been performed several times in Salt Lake City.

“I was talking to a friend about menopause, and we got on to the subject of our vagina, and I was sort of wondering what other women thought. So I just started talking to friends, and one thing led to another,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune in a phone conversation from Manhattan.

The power of Ensler’s play comes from talking about issues that for centuries have been taboo.

“It’s a very moving monologue that talks about how the vagina is like a miracle,” said the Oscar-winning Fonda. “It can open to receive love or to let a baby out. It can close like a wound and heal itself. It can bring life.

“If the penis could do what the vagina could do, there would be a monument to it in Washington, D.C.,” she added. “But instead, vaginas are cut up and sewed and raped and denigrated and insulted, and we are made ashamed of it.”

V-Day focus: Last month, Fonda spent a day in Guatemala, where she said no one has been prosecuted for the murders of more than 700 women in the past two years by “death squads.” That country likely will be the focus of V-Day in February 2005.

This February, V-Day supporters, which Ensler calls Vagina Warriors, will focus their attention on Juarez, Mexico, where the murders of more than 300 women and girls have have never been investigated, Ensler said. That month, which marks the sixth anniversary of the V-Day organization, 2,500 performances of “The Vagina Monologues” will be given in 1,050 locations around the world.

“It’s incredible when you think that six years ago, we were in one theater in New York City,” Ensler said, “and now we’re talking about 2,500 performances. You see the urgency of this issue.”

Utah benefit: As part of V-Day events last February, proceeds from a local performance of “The Vagina Monologues” at the Rose Wagner Theater in Salt Lake City generated $10,000 for the Rape Recovery Center. Additional money also went to The University of Utah’s Women’s Resource Center and the YWCA, which runs a
shelter for abused women.

“Anything that is bringing attention to the violence against women in our community is a good thing,” said Jaimee Roberts, executive director of the Rape Recovery Center in Salt Lake City.

“It takes the shroud of secrecy off of the issue of sexual assault and rape,” she added. “It’s always historically something we can’t talk about, so women can’t reach out for help as easily. What Eve . . . and others are doing is saying the shame should not be placed on the person who is hurt but should be placed on the person who does the harm.”

Tale of a movement: “Until the Violence Stops,” which will premiere on the Lifetime cable television network Feb. 17, chronicles the growth of the movement in 2002 through five international communities. It begins with V-Day events at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, where benefit performances of the monologues were held.
Also included are Ukiah, Calif., the Philippines, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and Kenya, where a V-Day Safe House for girls was opened.

“One out of every three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — that’s a U.N. statistic. We’re talking about a global epidemic that is systematically undermining women,” Ensler said. “What we all need to do is stop everything we’re doing right this minute and focus our attention on saving,
honoring, holding women sacred if we really want the species to survive.”

Fonda said that during her travels around the world for V-Day, she has been moved by hundreds of stories of women who have been victimized in some way by cultures that undercut them. But Ensler’s play has sparked a new way of thinking, she said.

“You hear about these things, and you begin to love this precious part of you instead of hating it,” she said.

“The hope is these women are becoming empowered by this play, and they’re starting to get organized,” she added. “And word is getting out.”

Setting the Stage for Women: Return of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ Raises Funds to Help Women’s Shelter

By Michelle Brutlag, Courier & Press staff writer

This year, Steve Small can throw around words like “vagina” without pause – or blush.

As the returning director of Evansville’s benefit performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” Small said he’s definitely more comfortable with the subject matter after coaching women for last year’s performance.

The show, a collection of monologues written by Eve Ensler and performed nationally, is based on Ensler’s interviews with more than 200 women about their experience as women. The performance is a tribute to female sexuality and strength, but also addresses the atrocities some women around the world face.

After listening Thursday to only a few women audition for roles in this year’s Feb. 21 show, Small knew that casting this year’s show would be much more difficult.

Part of the problem, he said, would be imagining anyone in the roles other than the women who performed last year.

“We can never re-create the first time,” he said. “I anticipate some people will be back from last year … Anyone’s got a chance. They’re all open. There may be some repeats, some will be different.”

Auditions continue today and Saturday. The show again is a benefit for the local domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy group Albion Fellows Bacon Center.

Melanie Ruppel, a peer advocate at Albion, said she saw the show last year and loved it. She was inspired to audition for a role Thursday.

“As people left (The Victory last year), it was so uplifting,” she said. “People talked about it for days afterward.”

She tried several monologues for Small and Julia Kathary, Albion’s residential services coordinator, and said she feels good about being funny or somber.

Being in the show was another way for Ruppel to give back to Albion, an organization she called “an essential evil” – evil because it’s essential to have an organization that helps women deal with the lasting repercussions of sexual assault and domestic violence.

As a stage crew member in high school, Ruppel said she was used to being behind the scenes, but said she was very comfortable with the subject matter.

“I’m comfortable in my own skin, and what better way to express myself?” she said.

She said she hopes men come to the performance so they can become more comfortable with the subject as well.

“Vagina is an awesome word in itself. It’s so empowering to say,” she said.

Some of last year’s monologues will remain in the show, some will not, and a few new ones have been added. Lisa Coulter read about the auditions in the paper, and thought she’d come Downtown to try her hand at reading for a part.

“I always got in to acting, it’s something I always wanted to try,” she said.

Some women came to audition because they enjoyed performing in the show last year.

Jenni White, who earned a standing ovation last year with her portrayal of a lesbian in the monologue “The Woman Who Loved to Make Other Women Happy,” brought her son, 6-week-old Zion Jacob Cosby to her audition. White, who said she and her husband had struggled for several years to conceive, said she became pregnant the night of “The Vagina Monologues” performance. “I look at it as a whole new experience,” White said. “The material is so powerful, the show could be done every year and have the same benefit for the community.”

Small said he will inform the women of the casting choices sometime next week. He will hold a workshop afterward and conduct several one-on-one coaching sessions and a dress rehearsal.

The show is supposed to feel unrehearsed. Last year’s performance raised $20,000 for Albion.

Jane Fonda Visits Guatemala to Put Spotlight on Murders of Women in Guatemala

December 8, 2003
V-Day News alert

V-Day activist and V-Counsel member, Actress Jane Fonda visits Guatemala to put spotlight on murders of women in Guatemala

Jane Fonda, a member of V-Day’s esteemed V-Counsel has just returned from a 24-hour visit to Guatemala where she traveled with independent media journalist, Marielos Monzon. Monzon invited Fonda to visit the country to meet with women’s organizations and human rights activists to help raise the profile of the murders of women in the country after Fonda presented her the ” Courage In Media” Award in New York last month.

Monzon, 32, was honored by IWMF for exceptional bravery in reporting the news and having risked her life to report the truth about war, political corruption, human rights abuses and genocide. She reports on the human rights violations that continue seven years after the end of a brutal civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people were disappeared. Beginning in 1998, she has received continuous death threats against her and her two children, yet she continues reporting.

According to the BBC, since 2001, more than 700 women and young girls have been killed in apparently motiveless attacks. So far this year, the official count of women’s bodies found is 270. In the past six months there have been five sets of double murders, with the tortured corpses of the young girls found together.

While in Guatemala, Fonda met with 22 women’s organizations and human rights activists including Helen Mack, who continues the work of her murdered sister to uncover the active paramilitary death squads, the gangs (maras), and the ongoing murders of women.

According to the Associated Press, most were victims of gang violence, rapes and other crime. Guatemala has suffered from spiraling crime, especially gang violence, since the end of its 36-year civil war in 1996.

Fonda vowed to return to Guatemala with an army of V-Day activists to raise the international profile on the Guatemala murders in 2005 and building upon V-Day’s 2004 Spotlight on the Missing and Murdered Women in Juarez, Mexico.

The V-Day Guatemala trip is currently being planned. Details will be announced as soons as they are available.

On February 14, 2004, V-Day will mount a March in Juarez, Mexico where V-Day Founder Eve Ensler and activists and women from all over the world will converge on Juarez to demand justice and also to honor and celebrate the women of Juarez and their families.

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/1203/02fonda.html
December 1, 2003
Jane Fonda promises activists will protest Guatemalan deaths
The Associated Press

GUATEMALA CITY — Jane Fonda promised Monday to bring a small “army” of women activists to Guatemala to denounce the murders of about 700 women in the past three years in this crime-plagued Central American nation.

The 66-year-old actress was visiting Guatemala City on behalf of the nonprofit organization V-Day. The group is led by “Vagina Monologues” playwright Eve Ensler and campaigns around the world to halt violence against women.

Fonda vowed to organize an “army to stand beside Guatemalan women to say to the world what is going on here.” Fonda said she would return after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2004 with a group of activists, mainly from the V-Day organization, to pressure the Guatemalan government do something about the killings.

The bodies of about 700 women have been found in Guatemala since 2000. Some 270 bodies have been found so far this year, Fonda said.

Most were victims of gang violence, rapes and other crime. Guatemala has suffered from spiraling crime, especially gang violence, since the end of its 36-year civil war in 1996.

Fonda said domestic violence is also a problem with 20,000 complaints filed annually in Guatemala.

“You have even more women killed than in Ciudad Juarez,” Fonda said, referring to the Mexican border city where a series of unsolved murders of women over the past decade has drawn international protests.

At least 263 women have been killed since 1993 in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas. Officials say about 100 of those were sexually abused, killed and left in the desert.

Fonda met with Wendy Berger, wife of the presidential candidate Oscar Berger, as well as with rival candidate Alvaro Colom and his wife Sandra Torres. The presidential runoff election is on Dec. 28.

To read the BBC article, “Murderers prey on Guatemalan women”, December 6, 2003, click here:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3294659.stm)

Concerns Spread Over Juarez Murders

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20031124_1166.html

The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO Nov. 24 – A pink blouse, a frilly yellow child’s frock and other pastel-colored clothing dangle from the ceiling. Beneath the dresses, shoes lie haphazardly among dead flower petals.

In artist Adrian Arias’ homage to the women of Juarez, Mexico, the hanging clothes are a reminder of hundreds of missing or murdered girls. The scattered shoes recall those found in the desert where their raped, mutilated and beaten bodies were often abandoned.

The slayings of more than 250 women in the city just across the border from El Paso, Texas, began a decade ago. But recently, growing outrage over the killings has spread to places far from Juarez, including the San Francisco cultural center where Arias’ haunting tableau is on display through Wednesday.

“There’s a lot of silence around this problem,” said Arias, a 42-year-old videographer, artist and poet.

“This has been going on for the past 10 years and there hasn’t been anything done to resolve the problem. As an artist, I feel I need to do something to be near the families who miss their sisters, their daughters, their friends.”

In recent months, protesters have called attention to the murders by carrying signs that read “Not one more” and “Justice for our daughters” outside Mexican consulates in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Austin, El Paso and other cities around the world.

Last month, a congressional delegation led by U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., visited sites where the victims’ bodies were found and spoke with their families.

And in February and March, benefit performances of “The Vagina Monologues” around the world will each donate up to 10 percent of proceeds to help families of Juarez victims. The shows, coordinated by nonprofit V-Day, will feature a new monologue about the killings by playwright Eve Ensler and provide information about them to audience members.

“I feel really, really compelled now to do everything I can to stop what’s happening there, and to get America to stop it,” Ensler said, adding that she’s had trouble sleeping since returning from a recent trip to Juarez to research a magazine story.

V-Day Nairobi 2003 Event Saves a Shelter

Home for Battered Women Re-Opened
June 24, 2003

Women’s Rights Awareness Programme (Wrap) has re-opened its One Stop Emergency Shelter for battered and violated women and children that was closed down last August. Wrap Director Ann Ngugi said the home for battered women was established in 1994 but was closed down last year due to lack of funds.

“We had inadequate funds for the One Stop’s running costs like rent, electricity, telephone, water, food and security,” said Ngugi.

She said since then, Wrap has been operating the main shelter at the risk of clients being pursued by their perpetrators. Ngugi said their efforts to re-open the home came after they received a donation of Sh513,146.65 from the organisers of V-Day, Nairobi 2003, through the proceeds of the benefit performance of The Vagina Monologue. – The East African Standard

[This article has also appeared in The East African Standard (Nairobi).]

This Is Most Fragile Time for Afghanistan

After her most recent trip to Afghanistan, playwright and women’s activist Eve Ensler pleads for the U.S. to keep its promises to stabilize the country, which she likens to a patient at a dangerous point of recovery.

I have just returned from Afghanistan. This was my third trip. I write now because the situation is urgent. Afghanistan today reminds me of a person who has been seriously ill. She is just beginning to recover, the fever has broken and there are those early moments where she suddenly feels alive. We know this is the most dangerous time. The energy is part of the fever itself, a kind of delirium, but the patient thrilled with the possibility of living, if not protected can go wild with activity. This exertion can have deadly consequences. In the case of Afghanistan this somewhat frenzied, disorganized activity comes not just from a momentary recovery-a ceasing of bombs falling but from a deep panic that the recovery is short lived and not guaranteed and so everything must be done now or it will disappear forever.

I would say this is the most fragile time I have experienced in Afghanistan.

Under the Taliban it was a tortured, ruinously oppressed country, but women in particular knew what to prepare for, they knew how to defend themselves against the madness, they could identify their enemies, they were braced for violence. They had learned how to maneuver in clandestine ways. Now for example, the situation is less clear, there is the pretense of liberation, although the ongoing threat of violence can be felt.

For example, at our recent women’s leadership training conference women, who were visionary about the future, felt compelled to still wear burqas. On March 8, there were huge events celebrating International Women’s day. One event at the Afghan Women’s Union unveiled a statue symbolizing women’s freedom and power. Hundreds attended. A day later the statue was stolen. The Women’s Minister who in theory is the symbolic representative of Afghan women cannot move anywhere in the country without bodyguards. Although women are now working to create new businesses, build schools, open hospitals, the majority of the people in Afghanistan still live without heat, electricity or running water.

Having spent time in recent months with Afghan women in Kabul, as well as women and men in Amman, Cairo, Ramallah, Islamabad, and Peshawar, I can say that the Muslim world is highly suspect of the intentions of the U.S. government. They are watching Afghanistan. It is the test case. If the U.S. does not deliver security, substantial aid and reconstruction, we may never recover the trust of the Muslim world. If we turn our backs on Afghanistan, if we do not fulfill our promises, there is a good chance that the patient will never recover nor will she fulfill her dream of a free, safe and prospering Afghanistan. Terrorists are born in the cracks of broken promises.

– Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler, playwright of “The Vagina Monologues,” is the Founder and Artistic Director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

This commentary appeared on Women¹s eNews (http://womensenews.org) on April 30, 2003

Reaching Out – Profile of Jerri Lynn Fields

It’s a Tuesday in early April, and Jerri Lynn Fields is busy — really busy.

First there’s the Afghanistan problem. How does one get $325,000 into a country without a functioning banking system?

Then comes a conversation with an activist in India about a women’s rights event planned next year in that country. Next are the e–mails to the Croatian defense minister, followed by an hour–long interview with a member of the press.

If that’s not enough, Fields still needs to pack for a trip to Ireland, and perhaps do some reading about possible rape camps discovered in Myanmar. Then maybe, just maybe, she’ll get to spend some quality time with her husband.

Fields is executive director of V–Day, a global movement to end violence against women founded by Eve Ensler, creator of “The Vagina Monologues.” In little more than a year on the job, she has traveled to 13 countries, worked with Jane Fonda, met Secretary of State Colin Powell, made memories for a lifetime and witnessed some things she would rather forget.

It’s a pretty good gig for a girl from Stronghurst, Ill.

“Sometimes,” Fields says, “I just can’t believe I get paid to do this.”

Institutionalized violence

To understand the battle V–Day is fighting, consider the statistics. One in three women worldwide has been beaten, raped or abused. In South Africa, a woman is raped every 35 seconds. Two million young girls are introduced into the global commercial–sex market annually. Two Pakistani women are burned daily by fire or acid in domestic violence incidents. In America, a woman is battered every 15 seconds — four a minute, 240 an hour, 5,760 each day.

Centuries–old traditions of abuse continue in many corners of the world. In areas of Central Asia, the Middle East and South America, wives and mothers are murdered in so–called honor killings while government officials turn a blind eye.

Before a teenage Masai girl in Kenya can marry, the elder women in the village carve away her clitoris and labia, sometimes with a piece of broken glass. The circumcision, known in the West as female genital mutilation, makes sexual intercourse excruciating, so men see it as a way to keep their wives faithful.

“Violence against women has become institutionalized,” Fields says. “If you walk out right now and look at three women, you need to just accept that one of them has probably had something terrible happen to them. That’s an epidemic.”

Fields was herself the victim of an assault, although she gives no details about the ordeal. She admits the assault affects the way she thinks and works, but denies it led to her current career.

“As someone who has experienced violence, I don’t think I’m extraordinary,” she says. “If the statistics are right, I’m ordinary.”

As far as her mother is concerned, Fields was born an activist.

“I feel like Jerri always had a cause, always tried to fight for somebody that maybe wasn’t as fortunate,” says Janice Fields, who remains in the area with her husband, Larry.

That doesn’t mean Mom and Dad imagined their daughter would head a global women’s rights organization.

“Actually, we thought she was going to be a teacher,” Janice Fields says.

Just a bureaucrat

Teaching was just what the younger Fields had in mind when she graduated from Southern High School in 1983. But by the time she had her English degree from Western Illinois University four years later, her outlook had changed.

Rather than going into the classroom, Fields spent another two years at WIU and got a master’s degree in college student personnel administration. That led to a job at DePaul University and a new life in Chicago.

Before long, Fields got her first promotion, then her second. But the further up the DePaul ladder she climbed, the less she enjoyed her work.

“I was becoming a bureaucrat,” she laments now.

Frustration led her to answer a help wanted ad for Horizons Community Services, the largest gay and lesbian service agency in the Midwest. She eventually served as the agency’s director of youth services, anti–violence project director and director of programs.

Leaving Horizon, Fields was named executive director of Rape Victim Advocates, a rape crisis center in Chicago. It was during her three years there that she met Ensler, the woman behind V–Day.

The year was 2000, and “The Vagina Monologues” was a national phenomenon, featured everywhere from Newsweek to CNN.

At the same time, Fields was struggling to keep Rape Victim Advocates operational on donations topping out at $50.

“I needed to have people push the envelope and do something special — give us a lot of money,” she says. “We needed to raise the bar.”

She called Ensler and asked her to do a benefit performance of “The Vagina Monologues” during a tour stop in Chicago.

It worked. The city’s elites paid up to $500 apiece to hear Ensler read three of the monologues and talk about violence against women.

Fields met another important person in her life during her years in the Windy City — husband David Burgess. The couple has been married two years.

Burgess is a information services guy from Michigan. It was his job transfer that took Fields to New York and V–Day.

Fields and Ensler had stayed in touch electronically since their first meeting. Once in New York, Fields kept right on sending e–mails. After eight months, Ensler offered her a job as V–Day development and communications director. That was in December 2001. Fields became the organization’s second executive director four months later.

“Working with Jerri Lynn Fields has been one of the greatest pleasures of my career,” Ensler says now. “She is fun, organized, a workaholic and completely devoted to the cause.”

Fields is equally effusive about her boss: “She’s my friend, she’s my mentor, she’s brilliant and she’s passionate and all of those things make me want to do whatever I can to further the cause of V–Day.”

Still shocking

To grasp the scope of Fields’ job, it’s important to know a little V–Day history.

While touring with “The Vagina Monologues” in the mid–1990s, Ensler often met women wanting to share their stories of abuse. With those stories as her rallying cry, the playwright formed V–Day in 1997 with a group of New York activists. The ‘V’ stands for Valentine’s, victory over violence and vagina.

The first V–Day event, a benefit production of “The Vagina Monologues,” took place in New York City on Feb. 14, 1998. The show featured Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Calista Flockhart.

In its first six years, V–Day raised $14 million, distributing 85 percent of the money to women’s groups around the world.

Then there’s the V–Day College Initiative. Students nationwide stage “The Vagina Monologues.” The proceeds stay in the community for groups protecting women. In total, there will be more than 1,200 productions of the monologues this year.

V–Day does all this without an office. Staffers work out of their homes. It’s Fields’ job to keep the whole, happy mess running smoothly.

That’s one half of her duties. The other half is fund–raising.

That could mean mining for new benefactors or chumming with V–Day’s impressive list of corporate sponsors, including Lifetime Television, Procter & Gamble, Hearst Magazines and Marie Claire.

“Fund–raising is a big part of what I do,” Fields says. “I need to raise money so that this V–Day movement can grow and we can give money to women’s groups.”

The giving is her favorite part. After all, that’s where all those trips come in.

Fields and Ensler just completed nearly two months of travel on what they call the “V–Season Tour,” attending V–Day events worldwide and looking for new causes to support.

The last leg of the trip took the pair to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia and France.

Ensler has been working in Afghanistan since 1999 when, during the height of the Taliban’s authority, members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan snuck her into the country under a burkha. This was Fields’ first trip to the war–torn country. She estimates three of every four women in the capital Kabul still wear burkhas. They fear the Taliban will be return to power next week and execute them for showing their faces.

1 percent

“It was bittersweet,” Fields says of her five days in Kabul. “The women there feel like something good has happened, but it’s not over.”

The Croatian defense minister is a woman, one of four females to head defense departments in European countries. Fields and Ensler visited her to pitch V–Day’s 1–percent campaign, which encourages nations to dedicate 1 percent of their defense budgets to protecting women.

The campaign has been better received abroad than in the United States, where 1 percent of the defense budget equals nearly $4 billion.

“We’re hearing so much about Homeland Security,” Fields says. “We’re being told to fear people from somewhere else, but for those of us who work in violence against women, we know that one of the most dangerous places for women to be is in their own home, their communities.”

The most moving moment of the trip, and perhaps of Fields’ life, was the V–Day celebration in Pakistan.

Armed guards patrolled the theater entrance as some of the country’s top actresses performed “The Vagina Monologues” in defiance of a fatwa, or religious edict, issued by a Muslim cleric proclaiming the show violated Islamic law.

Ensler wrote one of the monologues, titled “My Vagina is My Village,” after interviewing Bosnian women held in rape camps during the country’s civil war. In language both lyrical and clinical, a young girl describes the torture she endured: “The soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me. So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know whether they’re going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain.”

The Pakistani actress sobbed while reading the piece. So did the other actresses on stage and the 200 people, mostly women, who had braved possible retribution to sit in the audience.

As she watched, tears spilling down her face, Fields’ mind was awakened to how such atrocities bind all women together. When an Afghan woman is beaten, a Masai teen circumcised or a Bosnia girl raped, it is a wound to humanity, she said.

“When I came back from this trip, what I felt like for the first time in my life was that I was a citizen of the world as opposed to a citizen to a country with borders and an affinity to only those who look like me,” Fields says. “If I can’t be connected in that way, then nothing is ever going to change and we’re all going to continue to live divided.”

V–Day’s mission to end all violence against women can seem almost arrogant, certainly impossible. Fields doesn’t care. She’s too idealistic to stop fighting now.

“In Pakistan, when you meet a woman who takes off her scarf to show you her melted face because her husband threw acid on her, that’s a heinous form of violence,” she says. “I still get shocked everyday.”

by Kiley Miller – kmiller@thehawkeye.com

Original article can be viewed at The Hawk Eye.

Spreading the V Word

Performances of the V-Monologues raise awareness about women’s rights. Amra Ahmed attends V-Day in the capital The V-Day performance (produced by AMAL) in Islamabad to mark the international violence against women campaign 2003, AMAL, an NGO working on gender rights, reproductive heath, HIV/AIDS, and human development, produced the play V-Monologues in Islamabad. The Vagina Monologues was first performed by the author Eve Ensler in New York over 6 years ago and has since been staged by as diverse a cast as Oscar award winning actors, students on college campuses and grassroots organisations throughout the world.

V-Day as the event was called, is part of V-World – a global movement which aims to stop violence against women and girls. In 1997 Eve Ensler met with a group of women activists and formed the idea of holding V-Days. Performances of the V-Monologues raise money and consciousness for local women’s groups that are working to end all forms of violence towards women. Over these past 5 years, Ensler has contributed a sum in excess of $14 million towards women’s organisations. This year alone there have been 1,052 V-Day performances worldwide.

Pakistan is a country that badly needed a V-Day to raise awareness about violence against women. Only last week, national papers reported horrific stories of the gang rape of a 50 year old woman, sanctioned by a jirga; the rape of a 12 year old girl and the brutal disfiguring of a female Union Council Member.

V-Day is a fierce catalyst aiming to break taboos and shake societal inertia in the fight to stop worldwide violence against women, including rape, battery, incest and genital mutilation. Shocking, provocative, raw and disconcerting in turn, these true stories were read out by 8 dynamic and courageous women in the capital. Sameeta Ahmed, an artist and teacher, also had her work hanging as a backdrop to the stage. Ayeshah Alam, actor, producer, director is well known for serious tele films – she has in the past dealt with the topic of rape and societal stigmatisation of minorities. Nadia Fragiacomo,an Italian development consultant gave a sensitive and heart rending performance. Samina Pirzada seemed to be truly moved during her performance – never one to shy away from provocative topics, her past films have touched on subjects such as marital rape. Bilquis Tahira, a writer of short stories, was inspired to participate in the event in order to expose the issue of violence against women. Nadia Jamil was the star of the show, the youngest, and the most natural on stage. She was uninhibited with the material, evoking tears and laughter from the audience. Nighat Rizvi,the producer of the show and co founder of AMAL, is a gender trainer and activist and has worked on television and on stage. She was the moving spirit behind the V-Day production. Eve Ensler, the author of these remarkable writings, started this incredible movement rising above her own personal experiences with violence. Ensler read the end passage about birth, drawing a stunning conclusion about womanhood and the essence of life and motherhood.

V-Day events have been named as amongst the 100 best charities in the world, raising over $7 million in 2002 alone. V-Day events have been hosted in such far flung places as the National Theatre in Guatemala, the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Folies Bergeres in Paris, the Appolo Theatre in Harlem and at the Help Institute in Selangor Malaysia. Eve Ensler says “V-World is a state of mind. It is a place you could never touch in me no matter how many times you banged my head or whipped my legs. V-World is the garden where the missing girls appear, their mothers and fathers waiting for them. V-World is the centre of us. It is the longing and it is remembering. V-World is what it smells like when they let you go, when you are not waiting to be hit, when you perspire from the sun instead of from worry.”

V-Day is about telling stories about real women from all over the world. It’s about us, it’s about me, and maybe, it’s about you.

– The Friday Times