1998

1998 is the year V-Day moved from an idea conceived by activist women into a public event and an expanding campaign. Its first benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues, held on February 14 at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom, brought a large audience together, raised more than $100,000, and launched a movement against violence toward women. The year’s significance extends beyond that single night: it connects the play’s account of women’s bodies and silenced knowledge to a developing model of performance, fundraising, and community action.

From an idea to a first event

The V-Day Benefit Committee’s first project was the 1998 event, planned as the opening of a series intended to raise both money and awareness. The committee drew in women through personal invitations and further invitations from those already involved, creating a widening network rather than a closed organizing circle. The first event took the form of a celebrity benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City.

The date gave the event an immediately recognizable public frame: it took place on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1998. The account presents the gathering not simply as a theatrical engagement but as the birth of V-Day. The performance gave the organizing group a visible occasion through which the play’s concerns could reach an audience and the movement could take a public name and purpose.

The night at the Hammerstein Ballroom

The event’s scale was apparent even outside the theater. The performance had sold out, while hundreds of people still clamored to get in. The crowd’s presence made the benefit feel larger than a ticketed production: people who could not enter nevertheless gathered around an event they wanted to be part of. The book emphasizes the unusual breadth of that response, presenting the first V-Day as a public occasion that attracted interest beyond the theater’s seats.

Inside, the audience included men and women, students and businesspeople, mothers and activists. Their responses moved among laughter, gasps, silence, tears, and cheers as they received the performances. These changing reactions matter to the account because the performance did not communicate through the text alone; its message took shape in a room of people listening and responding together. The variety of the audience also suggests that the event sought to make violence against women a subject of public attention across different social roles, rather than confining it to a specialized activist gathering.

Fundraising and movement-building

The event raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. Those outcomes joined two aims already built into the committee’s plan: generating resources and increasing awareness. The benefit was therefore both a performance and a practical organizing instrument. Its success offered a basis for continuing to hold events, while the crowd’s response showed the organizers that the play could serve as a meeting point for people who wanted to take part in the cause.

The book places this achievement within a broader progression from personal testimony toward organized public action. Its account of bodily knowledge describes how silence around female anatomy can leave girls exposed to shame and to the assumption that men, including lovers or physicians, know more about women’s bodies than women themselves. Against that background, the play’s public performance makes speech and listening part of the movement’s work. The first event did not by itself resolve the conditions it addressed; it established a way to make those conditions visible and connect an audience to efforts against violence.

The model carries forward

The 1998 benefit became the starting point for later V-Day activity. The book describes subsequent events, including a 1999 production at the Old Vic in London, and the development of a college initiative intended to bring performances to local communities. The logic of that initiative was explicit: awareness was treated as a first step toward addressing a social problem, and colleges and universities were invited to stage the play on Valentine’s Day, with proceeds returned to community organizations working to stop violence against women.

That later model retained the shared play but allowed each campus event to take a different form. Some were staged readings; others became larger theatrical and social occasions. Schools could add post-performance dialogues, sexual-assault counselors, fundraisers, parties, music, art, or dance. A 2000 event at Washington University in St. Louis also showed how the initiative could encounter opposition: fraternity members posted antagonistic flyers and threatened disruption, but the student director invited them to attend the production. The account’s longer view thus presents 1998 not as an isolated benefit but as the beginning of a repeatable structure in which performance could lead to discussion, local support, and further action.

The book’s closing appeal condenses the movement’s stated mission: V-Day seeks to end violence against women by increasing awareness through events and media and by raising funds for organizations working for women’s safety. In that account, 1998 matters because it supplied the first public demonstration of how a play could become a catalyst: an audience gathered, money was raised, and a continuing movement began.