1997

1997 is the hinge between listening and collective action in the book. That year, interviews with women took shape as the monologues, and a meeting with activist women led to the formation of V-Day, joining the work of naming women’s experiences to an organized response to violence against them.

Interviews and the Monologues

The book describes the interviews as a deliberate way to learn about women’s experiences. The narrator spoke with more than two hundred women, including older and younger women, married and single women, lesbians, professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, and women of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Their differences made the project a gathering of particular voices rather than a single account presumed to represent everyone.

At first, the women were reluctant and shy. Once they began speaking, however, they did not want to stop. The interviews became the monologues: a creative form built from women’s testimony and from the change that occurred when experiences previously difficult to discuss could be voiced. The project’s method therefore linked authorship to listening, rather than treating women as subjects to be explained by someone else.

From Listening to Organizing

In 1997, the narrator met with a group of activist women, many associated with Feminist.com, and together they formed V-Day. The meeting moved the book’s concern beyond representation: testimony and performance were connected to a collective effort directed against violence against women.

The account presents this organizing as groundwork rather than a single symbolic gesture. The group formed the organization in 1997; its first V-Day followed on February 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day. The chronology makes 1997 the year of formation and preparation, distinct from the public event that came next.

Significance

The year’s two developments—the interviews becoming monologues and the activists forming V-Day—share an underlying movement from silence toward public speech and action. The interviews gathered accounts across differences of age, sexuality, occupation, race, and background; the organizing effort gave the work a collective purpose beyond the stage. In this chronology, 1997 matters not simply as a date but as the point when a practice of listening began to take institutional form.