Ensler, Eve

Eve Ensler (born May 25, 1953) is an American feminist, dramatist, journalist, filmmaker, actor, and activist who is best known as the author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, a global movement that campaigns to prevent violence against girls and women. Her other plays include Conviction, Necessary[Page 479]Targets, Lemonade, and The Depot. She also has authored and edited several books about issues facing the lives of girls and women, such as The Good Body (2004), A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer (2007), and I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World (2010). Ensler has a written for the magazines Glamour and Marie Claire, as well as contributing to The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Utne Reader. She also contributes a regular column to O Magazine.

Ensler grew up in Scarsdale, New York. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was a company executive. Ensler has recounted that she was sexually and physically abused by her father during her childhood and that this abuse triggered her to self-medicate with alcohol throughout her teens and early twenties. Despite these issues, she attended Middle-bury College, where she studied poetry and drama. Ensler graduated in 1975. Three years later, she married Richard McDermott and adopted his teenage son, Dylan. Although Ensler's marriage ended in 1988, she sustained a mutually supportive relationship with her adopted son, who is now a successful actor.

Ensler began work on The Vagina Monologues in 1996 after interviewing over 200 women about their experiences of sex, relationships, and violence. These interviews inspired her to focus on the complex ways in which women relate to their bodies. The Vagina Monologues explores this theme through a collection of monologues that touch on the subjects of sex, menstruation, birth, masturbation, rape, and body image. The play opened at the HERE Arts Center in New York, with Ensler performing all the monologues herself, before transferring to the off-Broadway Westside Theatre. It has since been translated into 45 languages and been performed in over 130 countries. The extensive roll-call of actors who have performed in The Vagina Monologues includes Cynthia Nixon, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep, Whoopi Goldberg, Winona Ryder, Salma Hayek, Jane Fonda, and Sandra Oh.

In 1998, Ensler launched the V-Day campaign, promoting creative events-including performances of The Vagina Monologues-as catalysts to generate awareness of violence against girls and women and to raise money on behalf of antiviolence organizations. Causes highlighted by V-Day activism include campaigns against female genital mutilation, rape, and sexual trafficking. In 2003, a V-Day delegation visited Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan. The V-Day documentary film Until the Violence Stops premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. In 2008, V-Day marked its 10-year anniversary with over 4,000 benefits around the world, as well as a special “V to the Tenth” celebration at the New Orleans Arena and Louisiana Superdome, which was attended by more than 30,000 people. In its first decade of activism, V-Day has raised a total of more than $70 million in funding. The “V” in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine, and Vagina.

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