Karen Obel

Karen Obel is the director of the V-Day College Initiative, which invited colleges and universities to stage The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day and return the proceeds to local organizations working to stop violence against women. Her account presents the project not as a performance campaign alone, but as a demanding effort to make an often-unacknowledged social problem visible and connect that visibility to community action.

Entry into V-Day

Obel introduces her account by saying that she did not find V-Day; it found her. At the time, she had served for just over a year on the board of directors of Feminist.com. A board meeting to which Eve Ensler had been invited became the point of connection between Obel’s existing organizational work and the V-Day project. The account’s opening frames her involvement as an encounter that developed into sustained responsibility, rather than a campaign she had set out to create alone.

That distinction matters to the shape of Obel’s story. She recalls joining an existing board and meeting around a project brought forward through the network, then describes taking on the work of directing the college initiative. Her role therefore moves from participant in a feminist organization’s board meeting to the person responsible for carrying a new program into colleges and universities.

The College Initiative

The initiative grew from the V-Day Benefit Committee’s decision that its 1999 goal should be to get its message out at the local level. The committee’s premise was that addressing a social problem begins by making people aware that it exists. Its proposal translated that premise into a specific structure: colleges and universities would mount productions of The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day, with proceeds returned to organizations in their own communities that were working to stop violence against women.

Obel volunteered to direct the project. She had high hopes, but did not know how colleges would receive the invitation or what the initiative could realistically achieve. That uncertainty is part of the account’s emphasis: the undertaking began with a clear method and purpose, but its scale and effect were not yet assured. Obel began researching colleges and universities in the United States online, moving from the committee’s broad local-outreach aim toward the practical work of finding institutions that might take part.

The design joined a widely staged play to locally directed support. Rather than treating a production as the end in itself, the initiative made its proceeds serve organizations already working in the surrounding community. Valentine’s Day supplied a shared occasion for campus performances; the local destination of the money linked that occasion to ongoing work against violence. In this structure, awareness and material support were related but distinct aims.

Work, Reach, and Strain

Directing the initiative proved more demanding and more rewarding than Obel had expected. For two years, she received between twenty-five and seventy-five emails a day about the project and responded to every one. The range is a concrete measure of the work’s continuing demands: the initiative was not simply announced and left to unfold, but required sustained correspondence with people seeking information or engaging with the program.

The daily volume also gives a human scale to the project’s expansion. Each message called for a response from its director, and Obel describes answering them all as part of her responsibility. Her account holds the burden and reward together rather than presenting growth as effortless. The initiative’s practical reach was built through repeated exchanges, making communication itself a central part of how the program operated.

Women’s Experiences and Community

The initiative’s organizing purpose sits within a wider emphasis on listening to women whose experiences are too often obscured. In the book’s account of the interviews behind the monologues, more than two hundred women are represented across differences of age, relationship status, sexual orientation, occupation, race, and religion. Women were initially reluctant to talk, but, once they began, they had much to say. That movement from hesitation to sustained speech parallels the initiative’s effort to make the subject publicly discussable, though the interviews and the college program are distinct parts of the book’s account.

The book also describes Obel’s work over ten years with women without homes, whom she calls friends, and her leadership of recovery groups for women who have been raped. Its discussion of poor women’s experiences stresses that sexual violence can go unreported and that class can limit access to therapy and other means of healing. It describes repeated abuse as having serious effects on self-esteem and identifies drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and death among the outcomes some women face. This context gives local support a material importance: raising awareness is not presented as a substitute for care or resources.

A contrasting outcome appears in the account of one woman who met another woman in a shelter and fell in love with her. Through their relationship, they left the shelter system and established a home. The book presents this story as an exception to the destructive pattern it has described, not as evidence that the underlying barriers disappear. Its placement underscores the significance of connection and a changed living situation while keeping the unequal conditions surrounding women’s experiences in view.

Significance and Institutional Setting

Obel’s account links the College Initiative’s stated objective to the work required to make it function: a committee identified local awareness as its goal, Obel volunteered to direct the program, and sustained correspondence carried the effort forward over two years. Its model gave campuses a way to participate while directing proceeds beyond the performance itself, toward community organizations addressing violence against women.

The institutional setting also matters to how such performances were received. The book describes a student population that was 45 percent Black and Hispanic, with more than 65 percent of students coming from families with annual incomes below $35,000; many were the first in their families to attend college. The account notes that students had generally had little exposure to feminist literature and thought. These details locate the initiative among students with varied backgrounds and different degrees of prior access to feminist ideas, rather than treating a campus audience as uniform.

As director, Obel stands at the point where a national campaign becomes local work: recruiting institutions, responding to a steady stream of inquiries, and keeping the initiative’s proceeds connected to organizations in their communities. Her story is consequently both an account of organizational labor and a record of a method for turning public attention into support. The project’s importance lies in that connection between speaking about violence and directing resources toward efforts to stop it.