2000

The year 2000 marked a widening of V-Day’s college work: the initiative added major sponsors, introduced a New York workshop for student organizers, and reached schools beyond the United States and Canada. At the same time, the book’s account places that expansion beside the unequal conditions affecting women’s lives and the continuing reluctance of media and businesses to name the subject at the center of The Vagina Monologues. The year’s significance lies in this contrast between growing public reach and the barriers that remained around speech, resources, and recognition.

The College Initiative Expands

After the earlier college campaign, V-Day continued the effort in 2000 with three distinguishing features: new sponsorship, an empowerment workshop, and a wider international presence. Self, which had supported a smaller event in 1999 and featured it in its February issue, became sponsor of the entire initiative. Planned Parenthood Federation of America joined as the primary sponsor of the special event, the Empowerment Workshop.

On November 6, 1999, students from one hundred participating schools travelled to New York for the workshop, led by Eve Ensler. She taught them how to mount productions of The Vagina Monologues at their own schools. The date and the hands-on focus give the initiative a practical shape: it was not only a set of performances, but also a transfer of production knowledge intended to let students carry the work back to their campuses.

The participants’ response suggests that the workshop itself became a significant part of the campaign. At later V-Day events, many students who had travelled to New York named it among their favorite experiences in the initiative. The account connects the favorable response to the gathering and its training, rather than treating the workshop as a mere prelude to campus performances.

Wider Reach and Measured Impact

The 1999 College Initiative had drawn participants from the United States and Canada. In 2000, participants came from other parts of the world as well. One hundred and fifty schools took part, from San Francisco State University in California and Cornish College of the Arts in Washington State to Oxford University in England and Friedrich Schiller Universität in Germany. The range of institutions marks a shift from a North American program toward a more geographically dispersed one.

Figures reported by participating schools estimated that about 65,000 people attended V-Day 2000 College Initiative events. The book further estimates that the events and their associated publicity introduced more than 15 million people around the world to The Vagina Monologues and V-Day. These figures distinguish direct attendance from the broader reach of publicity: the initiative’s audience extended far beyond those who entered a campus venue.

The campus campaign was part of a larger pattern of activity in the same year. V-Day was celebrated in Los Angeles, in twelve other cities worldwide, and at 150 colleges. More than $785,000 went to local, national, and international organizations working to end violence against women. Together, the school participation, public exposure, and distribution of funds show how the year’s expansion connected performance with awareness-raising and material support.

Whose Experiences Become Public

The book’s account of the initiative sits within a larger effort to make women’s different experiences speakable. In describing the interviews that became the monologues, Eve Ensler recounts speaking with more than two hundred women: older and younger women, married and single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, and women from numerous racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Women were initially shy or reluctant, but once they began talking they continued. This range presents women’s testimony not as a single, uniform account, but as a body of voices shaped by age, work, sexuality, and identity.

That plurality matters because the book also describes how economic circumstances affect access to safety and care. It reports ten years of involvement with women without homes, including women who had become friends with the narrator and women for whom the narrator ran recovery groups after rape. Poor women’s sexual violence, the account states, often goes unreported; lack of access to therapy and other forms of healing can compound its effects. The consequences it names include damage to self-esteem and pathways toward drug use, prostitution, AIDS, and, in many cases, death. These are presented as structural outcomes associated with poverty and limited support, not as an inevitable fate for every woman.

Against that broader pattern, the book identifies one different outcome: a woman met another woman in a shelter, they fell in love, and their relationship enabled them to leave the shelter system and build a life together. The account’s contrast preserves both the seriousness of the conditions described and the possibility of an altered outcome through connection. It does not make this individual story a substitute for the broader barriers facing poor women.

Publicity and the Limits of Naming

The project’s growing reach did not remove resistance to its central vocabulary. The book records corporate difficulty in raising money for V-Day and notes that even companies selling vaginal products refused to associate themselves with the word “vagina.” The contradiction is pointed: the subject could be present in commercial life while its direct name remained unacceptable to businesses seeking to avoid association with it.

Media responses offer another measure of that tension. Kathie Lee Gifford chanted the word with Calista Flockhart and a studio audience on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, while David Letterman tried to say it and could not. Barbara Walters said on The View that she had been embarrassed by The Vagina Monologues and had considered it strident, then later recanted. CNN aired a ten-minute special on the work without mentioning the word. These different reactions range from public repetition to avoidance, showing that increased exposure did not produce a consistent willingness to speak plainly.

The same friction appears in the book’s account of V-Day 1998, which was a critical and financial success despite resistance from potential sponsors and advertisers; the New York Times had initially refused a paid advertisement because it considered the logo too suggestive, then accepted an altered version. The earlier episode provides context for 2000’s broader reach: the campaign could attract large audiences and support while the vocabulary and imagery attached to it continued to encounter institutional limits.

Significance of the Year

As a historical marker in the book, 2000 joins campus-level instruction to an international network of performances and beneficiaries. The workshop gave students a method for organizing productions; the participation of 150 schools and attendance estimate of about 65,000 indicate the scale of direct engagement; and the reported $785,000 in grants links that engagement to organizations addressing violence against women.

The year’s account also resists equating reach with resolution. Millions encountered V-Day and The Vagina Monologues through events and publicity, yet businesses still avoided the word, media coverage could omit it, and the book’s discussion of poverty shows how access to reporting and healing remained unequal. In that juxtaposition, 2000 represents substantial growth without suggesting that visibility alone ended the silences or material disparities the project sought to confront.