A Speech by Gloria Steinem

I want to just begin by talking a little bit—I’ve been thinking about Women and Power and Elizabeth and I have been thinking about Women and Power and what those two words mean together and why right now in 2004 are we doing a conference are we doing a gathering—are we doing a calling to meaning about Women and Power?

Let’s just look at the concrete realities, a few of them, because there’s so many it literally bogs down and we could all go home and get in our beds. But, let’s just begin with where we are in this country right now.

The last four years have been a time of war and empire building. A time when preventative strikes have actually come to being the consciousness and are allowed to be in our consciousness. Patriotism. Imperialism. Heightened nationalism. This rising fundamentalism in this country, but also all around the world. Corporate fundamentalism. Fundamentalism in a way where the creation of fear at the basis of that fundamentalism has literally expressed itself in alerts we have on a daily basis or weekly basis. Violence towards women around the world is escalating. UN statistics are that one in every three women on the planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. There’s been an incredible loss of women’s rights in the last years under the Bush policies. Global planning, which condemns 98,000 women yearly to death in makeshift abortions. Trafficking against women has risen incredibly around the world. If you look at just the senate and congress alone, only 14 percent is women. In the direction to the new administrative law in Iraq, it was suggested as a baseline figure that there would be 25 percent women in the new law and we don’t have 14 -- we had barely 14 percent in this country. Poverty as we know is escalating and having just been in San Francisco and having spent a lot of time recently walking the streets, there are so many poor people back on the streets. And poor women we know are affected really dramatically with the erosion of programs that helped obviously impact women often more than they do men. Cuts to childcare, early learning, after school programs. At least 300,000 children will be knocked off childcare assistance under this administration’s budget. I could go on and on. But, I want to say that in particularly, something that bothers me is what’s happened to the so-called promise of the freedom of women in Afghanistan. I’m—I remember early on in the war on Afghanistan that women were kind of carted out and they were shown to all of us and women in this country got behind that war because they believe that women in Afghanistan would be free. It’s one of the only wars that women ever really rallied behind because we saw our sisters there being lifted out of the incredibly devastating conditions. In fact—and you will hear it from two of our speakers, the conditions of women in Afghanistan are deplorable, deplorable.

And I’m not going to go through them all tonight, but I want to—I want you just to know the majority of women in Afghanistan are still wearing burkas not because of choice, but because of fear. There is an incredible rise of sexual abuse and violence, the rate of self-mutilation and suicide is completely high and the conditions in terms of women being safe on the streets or in schools is very, very high risk. So that this illusion of liberation has not occurred. This is also true of Iraq and I’m very honored to say that we have tonight with us one of the great leaders of women in Iraq. I think she is in the room. Are you here? Will you stand?

She got here today and she literally has been living as Malaya Joya has been living under such risks that both of them have bodyguards, both of them are forced to be carrying guns, or have people around them who are carrying guns because they have stood up in their country saying the women in their countries are under such risk and that was such an incredibly, courageous, powerful thing to do. We are more than privileged to have them here tonight and I will talk a little bit more about both of them later.

I want to also say that if we just look at the state of the earth, the other night I saw—the other day I was reading this article in the paper and there were two words that sum the condition of the earth to me and that is emaciated polar bears. I don’t know why I can’t get this image out of my head. Because the polar bears in Alaska can’t find any food to eat and they are emaciated. And polar bears aren’t meant to be emaciated. They are meant to be big and puffy and fierce. And there’s something about the desecration of the earth under these current policies and eroding of the sky and the seas and the air and— that is so absolutely, fundamentally connected to desecration of women. They are one in the same. I obviously could go on with the rest of the conference and talk about the desecration of what is occurring. But what is more important than the outcomes is the underlying paradigms that has manifested these outcomes. And I think we are hopefully addressing in this conference is the old paradigm and the emergence of the new paradigm. I want to talk a little bit about the old paradigm and dimensions and characteristics of it so we are all in kind of a sense of general agreement. I’ll begin by saying recently the paradigm has seem to manifest itself in a kind of unabashed shameless representation with both homophobic, racist, machismo. Words like girlie man, people being accused of being sensitive...

I actually heard Dick Cheney say the other day when he was talking about carrying the terrorist; he said the next thing you’re going to tell me is he is going to negotiate. As if negotiate had become a word like plutonium. I was waiting for him to say, after that you’re going to tell me there’s going to be peace.

Paradigm is one of my favorite words because it feels both mystical and practical. It’s a word that makes me think of women. They are both mystical and practical.

The definition of it is a set of assumptions. Concepts, values, and practices that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in intellectual discipline, one that serves as a pattern or a model.

Power as it is now represented it seems to me is mainly power over.

One country over other countries, one family against all families, one tribe against others, one individual against the world. There is an assumption that there is always a hidden enemy somewhere, someone who is out to get you and you must marshal the forces of your country, your tribe, your family, your spirit to fight off this imagined enemy. We have patriotism, nationalism, capitalism all driving towards fundamentalism to serve these imagined enemies and to get power over the mind, spirit, and body. This power in order to fulfill itself must be void of these things—complexity, ambiguity, and mystery.

There are absolutes, basic unalterable givens—good and evil, right and wrong, winner and loser. Hierarchy is at the center of this view. The chosen, the not chosen, the ones who matter, the ones who don’t matter. It exists on the principle and the strategy that some are gooder, smarter, thinner, more beautiful, richer, and more entitled. It is based on exclusion. There are only a very few at the top—and I’m telling you very few and the rest of us who are at the middle or the bottom.

In this world of hierarchy and absolutes there is one voice, one party line, one sound byte. Dialogue, decent, question has to be eradicated. Fear is the underlining mechanism of this paradigm.

It is what’s used to keep everybody in place. I have to say I’ve never lived in a time where people have used more fear inducing tactics, whether they are red alerts or whether they are creating other, and this is always a racist proposition. Because the creation of other always involves someone becoming other. Separate. Them. Them who will come to get us. I’m here to say that there is no other.

That is an illusion.

In the paradigm there is no time or space for feelings. That’s an absolute. Grief, joy, rest, or being. And there is absolutely no place for death or the contemplation of death. Absolute power actually has a way over death. Death does not exist in the paradigm. There are heroes, there are martyrs, but no one really dies. For example, we have not seen one dead body in Iraq.

But people have died there. There is an illusion of the power is equal to this immortality.

This world is highly—this paradigm is highly suspicious if not down right fearful of sexuality. Because sex brings one into mess, the mystical, and the complicated world that cannot thankfully be controlled.

In this paradigm it is legitimate to use whatever you need to get and keep whatever you want. Money or power, whatever it is.

Consistent is a valued trait, a code word for control. Never question, never divert, never get lost, never not know, never change.

It is better to be consistently wrong than to admit that you might not know what you’re doing. In this paradigm it is not only legitimate, but encouraged to use the earth, to use women, to use workers at any expense if it moves your agenda forward.

This conference is an attempt to imagine and invite and outline a new paradigm. In this new power—in this world power would be equal to be able. To include. To inspire. To provoke. To enlighten. To lift up. To become with.

To let go.

It would be a power of looseness, not holding, but sharing and expanding.

It would be power in the service of. In this paradigm it would be clear, for example, that we cannot bomb people into freedom and democracy and trust.

We would openly acknowledge that terrorists are made, not born. That violence and humiliation, whether it be occupying people’s home lands or putting troops in other people’s holy lands or stripping people naked and forcing them to masturbate while in prisons or who allow millions to starve while you’re eating steak, that humiliation takes many forms and this shame often becomes violence.

This is not to justify terrorism, state or individual. It is more a desire to look at the causes, the why’s of terrorism.

In the new paradigm, the why of things would actually be more crucial than revenge. In the new paradigm power would not be about conquering. It would be about collaborating. It would not be about invading. It would be inviting. Not occupying, but offering, inspiring, and serving. I recently heard Gorbachev talking about the meeting at Rikievic why he thought it would be a turning point in deescalating the arms race. And what he said was so simple and so beautiful. He said Reagan and I had a conversation. We got to know each other. And although at the end of that conversation we didn’t even agree with each other, we knew each other. And that knowing changed the dynamics of everything. That was such a simple idea. But it seems so far away from where we are right now. The ability to change and be changed and evolve will be part of the new paradigm. Not being hard matter. The ability to see things as a whole independent world and know that cause and effect are interrelated.

I want to tell a story about my prison group, a group of women I work with and a writing group at Bedford Hills facility. They have been my greatest teachers and they are some of the most enlightened women I’ve ever met.

When I went to Bedford seven or eight years ago I formed this group and there were 15 women in my group and most of them had done violent crimes, which usually meant murder. When I first started this group this group was 15 killers in a world. And then what gradually began to happen is they became 15 women. Feisty, funny, bitchy, outrageous, sad, sorrowful, loving women. And then what began to happen is they started to be the representers of thousands and millions of other women in the world. Women who were raped and abandoned, and raped again. Women who were poor and had no resources. Women who felt outraged by injustice and racism and poverty. Women who had no place to express this outrage. These women were the manifesters. They were the ones who acted out, who expressed the unspoken, but they weren’t acting on their own. They weren’t separate from me, from us. They were not evildoers. That’s just too easy, too pat. They were the ones who couldn’t bear the pain anymore, that couldn’t tolerate the humiliation anymore, that couldn’t find an alternative anymore. I could have been them easily. They could have been me given different circumstances and resources. So what I’m saying is not that what they did was okay. I’m saying that I’m accountable for what they did. I’m responsible for what they did. That this organism called humanity is interdependent and we are accountable for everyone and everything. And that includes terrorists, be they state terrorists or individual terrorists. They reflect all of us.

In the new paradigm there would be time to feel. And to grieve. You want to say something about grief? I think grief is probably the most important feeling and the most— the one feeling we feel the least and we have the least time for in this country particularly. I really believe that after September 11 had we grieved, had we really grieved, it would have allowed a wisdom that would have informed our actions in a different way. I don’t think bombing would have been the result.

In talking about the paradigm, I believe that women will be the carriers of this new paradigm, the deliverers, the leaders, provokers, the healers, the heart of this new paradigm. Not because women are incapable of cruelty and unkindness. We all know we are capable of great cruelty and unkindness. But because I believe that women hold this paradigm in their souls, in their history, in their beings, in their wombs, in their vaginas. And because we have been so outside of this current paradigm, that we have been allowed to cook it out there inside ourselves. I also want to say that I believe many men are currently holding this paradigm in their bodies. And that they have held it and worked with their lives to manifest it and it is not just a thing that women hold or can hold on our own. Men are fully capable of holding it.

This conference, however, is dedicated to women. And addressing how we are going to birth this well being and allow it to come to flourish in the world.

It seems, to me, in thinking about women and why we haven’t come into our power that there are two things going on. I think we’re very, very afraid to hold power as it currently exists. Why wouldn’t we? I just described how awful it is. Why would we want to hold power and dominate and control and make people afraid and erase people? It’s not particularly attractive. So I think we do one of two things. We either stop playing or we morph ourselves into the system and we become just like the people in the paradigm in order to keep power in the system. And I want to suggest a third way. It is the way of transforming the paradigm by forming a relationship to the paradigm where you hold and continue to hold the paradigm in your body all the time.

Not running away. And not morphing into it, but holding the paradigm in relationship to it. I think it’s hard. I think it’s very hard

I want to talk a few minutes about my journey with vaginas. I don’t know how it all happened. But I do know before the Vagina Monologues, I was a way, way, way, downtown, downtown, playwright, and I was very much in my own world, writing my own plays for a few hundred people who would come every so often to hear them. And I was perfectly happy on one level being there because I knew I could hold on to myself. And I could hold on to my vision and I could hold on to my values and I knew someone wasn’t going to come and move me from my center. And I believed on some level that I couldn’t go any further or I would be moved off my center. And what happened was I started to talk about vaginas and they began to move me into the center of that old paradigm.

And at first I was terrified and I realize now one of the things that terrified me was actually giving up my outside status.

I had a great commitment to that position and identity. I knew who I was. I had—you know, I had developed it. I had created it. I had made something out of being an outside victim, couldn’t have power—I liked that place. And as I started to move into it, I began to get terrified that I would lose my way, I would lose my heart, I would lose my spirit, I would lose my politics.

But I suddenly realized over the course of it that that wasn’t necessarily true. That in fact when I began to do the work of the Vagina Monologues, this really beautiful thing started to happen. It was as if there was this river. And the river was pulling me towards it. And when I allowed—I know I’m going to talk in an abstract way, but it’s the only way I can describe it and then I’ll be more concrete. I could feel the river in my body and I could feel the river in my world and when I was in the river and moving with the river everything was right. There were moments I would literally have to paddle on the river and moments I had to hold on because it was really intense in the river. But that was all okay. When it got wrong was when I wanted to stop the boat to either have people look at me in the river or grab hold of the boat and say I’m somebody in the river. I need credit for the boat in the river. Or when I started to distrust river was taking me in a wrong direction and I wanted to get out of the river. And what I began to realize is that we are fully capable women, being the powerful, fierce, brilliant people we are, of holding who we are and what we see and what we believe in the face of anything. The illusion is that we can’t do that. And the way to do that is first to know what you know, to see what you see, and then to say what you say wherever you need to say it. If you don’t see what you see, if you don’t know what you know, and if you don’t say what you say, then you begin to get lost and morphed into the paradigm and you lose your direction and you lose your voice and you lose the way.

I want to just say that—I have a lot more to say about that, but I want to say that one of the things I’ve learned, the mechanisms of being able to hold on to myself had to do with developing a community, a network of support.

I think it is impossible for us to move into the old paradigm and hold our voices and hold ourselves and hold our vision and hold our values if we are not surrounded by tons of other people who are doing the same, who we are in constant daily dialogue with because it is so easy to get overwhelmed, erased, done in, and eradicated by all the terms and language people will come up with. I cannot tell you how many times people say I’m naive, I’m emotional, I’m hysterical. We can just go down the layers of language that is used to undermine the value and beauty and fierceness of what we know. I want to also say that the second thing I found is that by creating a community—what happened with the Vagina Monologues is that a community of women started to come to the play and respond to the play and speak to the play and I became responsible to a community of women.

As soon as I became responsible, I became a service of, and I, Eve, that other thing, went away. And there was something about hooking ourselves and our power and the journey to the connection of all of us that frees us from the worry of being destroyed or deconstructed because we’re all connected to this project, which is the unfolding of the new paradigm. I want to say I think most of us here tonight are here to strengthen our vision, our confidence, our network to be able to stand up and hold the new paradigm. I want to share a little piece I wrote about girlie men because I really think we should all get buttons that say I’m a girlie man and proud. Let’s say. I’m a manly girl, I’m a girlie man, and I’m proud.

Here is what they mean by girlie man.

A girlie man feels what someone else is feeling. They’re willing to ask questions and not know everything.

Rather than seeking revenge, they seek solutions.

They can change their mind.

They’re not hard matter, although they can get hard.

They actually evolve. They take time, not control.

They come to know people, rather than destroy them.

They see themselves in everyone and everyone in them.

They don’t think sensitive is a dirty word. They know that intimacy is far more difficult and terrifying than violence. They don’t apologize for not wanting to fight or kill or bomb.

They build community.

They consider the future. They like clothes. They crave ice cream. They like to be hugged and kissed.

Bring on the girlie men.

I want to say something about the women and men who are here today.

I think that in order to manifest this paradigm, we have to be willing to give our lives for it. It can’t be a half committed project. And I think part of that involves knowing that whatever this thing that is really desperate to emerge within us, we have to be willing to breathe for it, to melt for it in the face of everything. We have to be willing to lose the privileges of patriarchy. We have to be willing to give up the old paradigm. And I think the women speaking at this conference this weekend, all of them are women who have been willing to sacrifice this paradigm in whatever facets they are working in. But I want to say the women in this audience are women who have been struggling to manifest this paradigm in whatever facet of life they are working in. Each one of us in our small humble large way—whether we, for example, know the names of every person who works in our office, whether we take time out in our day to let people cry, whether we know that how we treat people is equal to where we’re going and how much money we make.

I want to single out a few people so we can have a model or idea of people in the world who have allowed themselves to move into the power paradigm as it now is while holding the new paradigm in their beings. One of them is a woman named Audotti Roy, who I’m sure is a woman you all know.

I had the privilege of meeting her in India a few months ago. She has been an incredible leader for me. She is a woman who an extraordinary writer, who has written a gorgeous novel and rather than taking her fame and her success and going off with her bundle, she chose to use her celebrity hood to stand up and fight for the workers of the world and to fight off empire.

Yanar Mohammed, who we have here tonight, is a very successful architect in Canada. Her life was made. She was doing fantastically. When the Iraqi war began, her heart could not be in Canada and she went back to her home land where she has since stood up on a daily basis to say that you cannot imprison, rape, abduct, or kill or destroy the women of Iraq ever and is facing daily assaults and attacks on her life. She has gone in with her wisdom, her brilliance, and heart and left privilege to hold what she knows in the face of everything.

Milala Joya is a 25-year-old social worker who was invited to be at the Loya Jerga, which is the body, which creates the constitution of Afghanistan. It was an incredible privilege to be there and to be in the room would have been a huge enough honor. However, when all the men were gathered, she stood up at 25 years old and said the majority of men on this Jerga, on this council, are war lords. They have killed people, they have raped women, and they need to be held accountable before we can move forward with justice. She not only risked not only losing her position, but she risked her life. She has had three assassinations on her life and her house has been bombed.

I want to talk about a woman named Charmane Means who is a U.S. major who refused direct orders to shut down the television station in Iraq because she said she had not joined the army to suppress free speech.

And I want to talk to you about Agnes because I feel every year I have to update Agnes. For those of you who don’t know Agnes, she walked through the valley many years. She had been female genitally mutilated as a girl and she made the decision she didn’t want what happened to her to happen to other girls. So rather than getting an AK-47 or razor to do it to other girls, she went out and began to teach the girls in her village and the boys in her village why cutting off someone’s clitoris wouldn’t be a good thing. She had in this box a torso and she taught women in villages what a mutilated and a healthy vagina looked like. As she walked, began to walk through the valley, she saved 1500 girls from being cut.

When I met Agnes five years ago I said to her what could V-Day do for you and she said well, Eve, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster. So we bought her a Jeep. In that year she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. Then we said what else could we do for you, Agnes? How could we help you? She said well, if you give me money I could build a house and girls could run away and save their clitoris and they could be educated, wouldn’t be forced into marriage.

So we gave her money and she built a house. I want to tell you what happened to her during the time she built the house.

The entire community turned against her. She had no friends. She was criticized, ridiculed, put down in the community. She was called a foreigner. She said she was ruining women. She was called unfaithful. She was called an other. But she kept going because she was a vagina warier.

And she kept going and bit a house and we all went in April 2 years ago.

And people came from all over Kenya. They walked for miles and miles—women and men and children, hundreds and hundreds of people came to the opening of her house. And she told me this beautiful story, that before she opened the house, everyone ridiculed her, she was destroyed, but she kept going. And in Kenya, that part of the world, goats and cows are the most prized possessions. They are like the Mercedes Benz. And two days before the house opened two different people brought her two goats. And she said I knew then that female genital mutilation would end in Africa. So she built her house and people came and she became a celebrated woman in her community. I’m here to tell you that three months ago Agnes got elected deputy mayor of Norah. She didn’t do it with guns. She didn’t do it with bombing. She didn’t do it with unkindness. She didn’t do it with revengeful attacks. She did it with love. She did it because she connected her own experience to the experience of the women and girls around her, and she brought them and herself into reality.

I want to say something. The hardest thing I’ve had to overcome as a woman in the world is the fear of not being liked. I want more than anything in the world for people to like me. And I think it’s true for every woman that walks this earth.

But I want to tell you something. We have a choice to make, whether we’re going to be good or great. Being good means that everyone is going to like you.

Everyone is going to think you’re good. That you’re quiet and you’re still and you’re behaved and you’re thin and you’re in a chair and don’t make a mess and you do what you told and you don’t have sex. I don’t know what it is, but it goes on. Being great means that you listen to the voice and the stirrings in your soul and you stand up and you face attack and you face criticism, but you know that what you’re manifesting is more important than being liked.

I want to introduce four gorgeous women who are here tonight who are going to talk to us openly about a moment in each of their lives where they either said what they needed to say, saw what they needed to say—they saw what they saw or they knew what they knew. And then I’m going to—hopefully we will have time for you to turn to whoever is next to you and share one experience in your life where you heard the stirrings and the callings of your soul and you acted on the basis of it without fear. So the first person I want to call—these are all women who are part of our scholarship program. And these women are fierce and brilliant—they are the future.

The first woman is Manuela. She is of the next wave of women and power. She is an environmental justice activist.

Please welcome her.

Is she here?

Hello?

All right. We’ll come back to her.

Is she here? No. Okay. We’ll come back.

The next woman is Nicole Burrows, founder of the core visionary Women’s Empowerment. Please welcome Nicole. Is she here? Are they here?

Why don’t you one of you introduce yourself and just start it off.

Turn and face people.

>> I’m going to stand because I want to see everybody. So my name is Selima. And I am what a Muslim feminist looks like. The moment that I knew what I knew was in June of this year when seven Muslim women from around the country marched on a mosque where we had traditionally been banned for years. Muslim women have traditionally been banned in mosques and community, in terms of leadership, in Iraq and American and women have taken on in this country transforming that. And after we marched in June, I knew that as women emerge and the global dialogue on spirituality leadership, we are transforming the world because we transformed our world that day. My vision for the world is that Muslim women, be they in Iraq or Nigeria or in New Jersey, know powerful, free, and fully self-expressed lives. And my work will continue. After we left that march in June people called us all over and said come to our town next. So we’re going there. And I’m also editing the first anthology—the first true American generation of Muslim women in this country.

EVE ENSLER: Thank you. Wonderful.

>> Okay. My name is Vatasi. I am an activist researcher born in India and living and working in Germany. My focus is the empowerment of women, women all over the world. Grass roots women, leadership women, rich women, poor women, centered women. What I know is that women know what they know. What I know is that women are playing a major world in transforming the world.

As a researcher, I’m humble enough to know that women’s knowledge is not mind oriented. It’s not intellectual knowledge. It’s wisdom. Women’s knowledge is in fact wisdom that comes from deep of the heart.

My vision is that women transform the world with all their creativity, care, power—not power over, but power within and power with others. It’s flowing like water and it’s taking the right decision at the right moment. And it’s about being good—not good—it’s not being about being good, but about being truthful. Truthful to ourselves, with all our intuition. And I do this—I try to transform this vision by strengthening the women in empowerment workshops, sitting with women at the grass roots, discussing their own situation. And trying to find out from themselves how they think they could change their own situation. So it’s about lecturing and it’s about workshops, seminars. It’s about reclaiming and regaining the power and wisdom that we’ve been talking about. And it’s about combining hearts and the minds of us. Thank you.

(Applause.)

EVE ENSLER: Is there one more? Okay. I want to say before I stop and you all turn to each other, that there’s one story—I was thinking about incorporation of this.

When I was in my early 20s, I was very reckless. I was crazy. And I was driving down a road way too fast and I was coming around a corner and I accidentally hit a woman on a motorcycle and she fell off. And I jumped out of the car and I was completely freaked out and I went running towards her with all my heart. And running towards me was a man who had been riding a motorcycle next to her. And he was running to kill me.

And as he approached me, he was about to grab my neck, I said, “You can kill me, but why don’t we see if she’s okay first.”

And I always think of this story as an example of the old paradigm. Because rather than checking out whether she was okay, he went to kill me. And I think that moment between him running to kill me is the moment we have to expand all across. Because that’s the moment where the new paradigm is going to emerge. And I want to say that if I have any intention for this conference—and I think I speak for Elizabeth, I want all of us this weekend to hear where that paradigm is emerging in us. To cherish it, to flame it, to invite it, and then to see ourselves as people who will leave here and never go to sleep again and we will awaken women and men all across this planet.

I thank each and every one of you for coming here tonight.

This keynote speech was delivered by Gloria Steinem at the annual Women & Power: Our Time to Lead Conference organized by Omega Institute and V-Day in September 2004. To order the CD of this speech or to purchase other CDs from this event, please click here.

Omega Institute is the nation's largest holistic education provider, highly regarded for its pioneering work in holistic health, meditation, yoga, transformational psychology, bodywork, spirituality, world music, and art. Founded in 1977, Omega fulfills its mission to provide learning environments that awaken the best in the human spirit through its broad-based curriculum and unique community spirit. www.eomega.org

V-Day, an international movement, distributes funds to grassroots, national, and international organizations that work to end violence against women and girls. In its first seven years, the V-Day movement has raised more than $25 million. Recent events include Confronting Violence, a conference of South Asian women leaders in India; the 2004 International March on Juarez, Mexico, with Amnesty International, to honor the missing and murdered women; the documentary Until The Violence Stops; V-Day delegation trips to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan; the Afghan Women's Summit; the Stop Rape Contest; and the Indian Country Project; as well as the ongoing presentation by local activists and college students of V-Day benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues. In February March 2004, more than 2,300 V-Day benefits took place in 1100 communities around the world. www.vday.org