In 1994, a play called The Vagina Monologues, written by playwright and activist V (formerly Eve Ensler), broke ground, offering to the world a piece of art like nothing it had seen before. Based on dozens of interviews V conducted with women, the play addressed women’s sexuality and the social stigma surrounding rape and abuse, creating a new conversation about and with women. The Vagina Monologues ran Off-Broadway for five years in New York and then toured the United States. After every performance, V found women waiting to share their own stories of survival, leading her to see that The Vagina Monologues could be more than a moving work of art on violence; she divined that the performances could be a mechanism for moving people to act to end violence.