Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem is the foreword writer for The Vagina Monologues and one of its public supporters. Her contribution links a personal history of linguistic silence about women’s bodies to the book’s larger project of bringing private experience into public speech, while her presence at the first V-Day benefit connects that project to collective action.

Foreword and bodily knowledge

Steinem opens by recalling a family vocabulary that referred to female anatomy only indirectly and in hushed tones. She had not heard the word “clitoris” and did not learn until later that the organ’s function is pleasure. The omission left her without accurate names for part of her body, even as she learned to speak, spell, and care for herself. In her account, this silence had consequences beyond vocabulary: it left girls exposed to shame and to the assumption that men, as lovers or physicians, knew more about women’s bodies than women themselves.

The foreword presents naming as a form of self-knowledge rather than a merely technical correction. Steinem sets the absence of accurate language against the possibility of women speaking about their own experiences, and situates that shift within feminist efforts to make concealed experiences public. She sees the play and book as part of a wider creative response in which truth-telling can turn anger into action against violence.

The interviews and the work’s public life

Steinem recalls seeing Eve Ensler perform intimate narratives drawn from more than two hundred interviews and shaped into theatrical poetry. She recognizes in the performance a continuing journey of truth-telling, connecting the work to feminist struggles already underway rather than treating it as an isolated theatrical event. The interviews’ breadth matters to that understanding: Ensler spoke with women of different ages, relationships, occupations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and sexual orientations. The resulting work gives public form to experiences that its foreword identifies as too often left unspoken.

Steinem’s association with the work also extended beyond the foreword. She was among the named performers at the first V-Day, held on February 14, 1998, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the venue. Her participation placed her within an event that brought the theatrical project into a large public gathering organized around its message.

Support and significance

Eve Ensler later thanked Steinem for her words and for having been there before her. The acknowledgment describes both a specific contribution to the book and a broader history of feminist support: Steinem’s foreword helps frame the work’s challenge to silence, while her presence at the inaugural benefit demonstrates her participation in its public life. Her role is therefore not that of a character in a continuous plot, but of a writer and advocate whose personal account of what cannot be named gives the collected testimonies a historical and political context.