1999

1999 marked a decisive shift in V-Day’s development: a movement that had begun with a benefit performance moved toward organized, locally rooted participation. The College Initiative asked colleges and universities to stage The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day and send the proceeds to community organizations working to stop violence against women. The play remained the common center, but the work of organizing, performing, and supporting local services became part of the event’s meaning.

From Awareness to Campus Action

The initiative grew from the V-Day Benefit Committee’s conviction that public awareness was a necessary first step toward addressing violence against women. For 1999, the committee chose to carry its message to the local level and invited colleges and universities to mount productions on Valentine’s Day. Their proceeds would return to their own communities through organizations working to stop violence against women. The organizer who describes the effort volunteered to direct the project, hoping that the play could make the movement present beyond a single benefit stage.

The scale of participation exceeded what the organizers initially expected, though not without disappointment. Targeted letters, the V-Day website, and word of mouth helped bring more than sixty-five schools in the United States and Canada into the 1999 College Initiative. The account’s initial response to that total is disappointment; its subsequent judgment is that securing participation at all was significant. The devotion of those who took part made the initiative a major achievement for V-Day, while extensive media coverage brought V-Day and The Vagina Monologues to more than 20,000 people in North America.

A Shared Play, Distinct Local Events

The same play did not produce identical events. Participating schools ranged across different kinds of communities, and their productions took forms suited to their settings: some were intimate staged readings, while others became elaborate theatrical and social gatherings. Many paired the performance with additional information, resources, and activities. Post-show Vagina Dialogues, sexual-assault counselors on site, fund-raisers, parties, music, art, and dance extended the event beyond the stage and gave audiences different ways to encounter its subject.

Some campuses made the initiative visible through striking public gestures. At Arizona State University, organizers built a forty-foot inflatable vagina around the entrance. In another Arizona-related example, a participant reported raising $3,332, divided among the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Arizona Sexual Assault Network, and Decolores, described as the state’s only bilingual domestic-violence shelter. At the 4 p.m. show, the audience gave the production a standing ovation. Before the performance, a visual statistic represented the claim that one in three women is raped by age eighteen: every third person entering received a sticker, and one-third of the audience stood. The gesture translated a statistic into a visible feature of the gathering and linked the performance to the local organizations receiving its proceeds.

Audience, Resistance, and Response

The first V-Day benefit had demonstrated that a performance could convene people well beyond a conventional theater audience. At the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, the 1998 celebrity benefit sold out, yet hundreds of people remained outside hoping to enter. Inside, men and women, students and businesspeople, mothers and activists responded with laughter, gasps, silence, tears, and cheers. That range of reactions helps explain the initiative’s reliance on performance: the audience encountered the message together, in a public setting, rather than only as an abstract statement.

Campus events also met opposition. During the 2000 Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, fraternity members posted antagonistic flyers and threatened to disrupt the event. The student director responded by inviting the men to the production. The account presents that invitation as a turn from an intimidating possibility toward a constructive encounter: rather than allowing the threat to define the event, the student director made attendance the response. The episode shows that carrying the performance into local institutions could expose the initiative to conflict as well as support.

A Movement Extending Beyond One Day

The 1999 College Initiative formed part of a larger expansion. V-Day began with a 1998 benefit at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, which raised $150,000. In 1999, a V-Day event at London’s Old Vic Theatre raised $275,000 for organizations addressing violence. More than sixty American colleges and universities also held V-Days, raising money and awareness. The following year, V-Day took place in Los Angeles, twelve other cities worldwide, and 150 colleges; more than $785,000 was given to local organizations. These later figures place the 1999 campus effort in a growing pattern of performances connected to fundraising and community work.

The initiative’s significance lies in how it joined a common cultural event to local capacity. The play supplied a shared point of entry, but the schools’ distinct productions, accompanying resources, fundraising, and relationships with community organizations made participation concrete. Its message was not confined to the theater: media coverage widened its reach, while proceeds and campus-based activities linked attention to groups working to improve women’s safety. By turning Valentine’s Day performances into a repeatable local model, the 1999 initiative helped V-Day develop from a single celebrated event into a movement that could be taken up in many places.