49 pages • 1 hour read
The Vagina Monologues
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Foreword-PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the source text’s graphic depictions of rape, sexual assault, suicide and suicidal ideation, and domestic and systemic violence against women.
The foreword to the 20th edition of The Vagina Monologues, written by Jacqueline Woodson, summarizes the impact of the play since its original production on both Jacqueline and generations of women across the world. Jacqueline writes that when she first read The Vagina Monologues, she had just had her first child and felt that, though she had seen the play years before, something was different because she had a daughter. She writes of the generational impact the play has made, noting that when she first got her period, she wanted it to go away, but when her daughter got her first one, she called for a celebration.
Introduction Summary: “Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition”
V reflects on the original production of The Vagina Monologues and her fear that she would experience violence because she says “vagina” so frequently in the play. Instead, she received positive and overwhelming reception from audiences in Manhattan, who came to her to share their own experiences with rape, assault, and violence. To her surprise, the show became a global phenomenon, and V reflects on her memories of the impact the play continues to make across the world.
She remembers a show in Oklahoma City, where a woman stood up in the middle of the show to announce, for the first time, that she was raped by her stepfather. The audience consoled and supported her before V continued with the play. Then, she remembers attending an underground performance of The Vagina Monologues in Pakistan, where the play was banned. Men and women attended the showing, and she remembers the women crying and laughing at the performance.
V reflects on an experience in Bosnia when the performers read “My Vagina Was My Village,” a monologue on the sexual violence women endured during the Bosnian War, and the audience cried, screamed, and consoled one another. In Michigan, V remembers a state representative who could not use the word “vagina,” so V and other women, including legislators, performed The Vagina Monologues on the steps in front of the statehouse, where thousands of women showed up in support.
She also shares about the V-Day movement, borne out of The Vagina Monologues, and the impact activists have made in efforts to combat rape culture and violence against women, including raising over $100 million to fund hotlines and shelters for survivors of rape and violence. However, V writes, despite these efforts, the patriarchy is still alive, and violence against women persists. She ends with a call to action for women to break their silence, keep sharing and telling stories to build community, and speak out against the systems that perpetrate sexual violence against women.
Preface Summary
The Preface begins with the word “vagina.” V shares that she says “vagina” over and over again to combat the silence, secrecy, and shame that surrounds female sexual experiences and the bodies of women. “Vagina,” writes V, is the only word that describes the area best, and evoking the word helps address the estrangement she feels from her own body and vagina. This is especially because, after her own experience with rape, she disconnected from her vagina—her “second heart.”
The word “vagina” is censored when television and radio stations announce the name of the production, though the word itself is not pornographic—it’s an anatomical term. Still, even women do not refer to their vaginas as such and instead use nicknames. However, V says “vagina” because “500,000 women are raped every year in the United States” (xxiv), and sexual violence happens in staggering amounts across the globe. Saying “vagina” enables women to talk about the pain and assault they experience to work to curb this violence.
Saying “vagina” repeatedly begins to create a sense of passion and empowerment, even if it’s scary and shameful at first. Soon, saying “vagina” connects women to their own vaginas—and to each other. It becomes less of a big deal. The Vagina Monologues is the place to begin this practice, to say “vagina” freely and share stories with other women to let go of myths and fear. Saying “vagina,” V says, “sets us free” (xxvii).
Foreword-Preface Analysis
The Foreword and Introduction, which are specific to the 20th anniversary edition of The Vagina Monologues, detail the ways that a once-small off-Broadway production in New York has nudged the world toward change in the decades since its original production, supporting The Power of Art as Activism, a key theme of the text. Aside from bringing the word “vagina” out of the shadows and onto statehouse steps and other public venues, the efforts of V, and the women and men who’ve come to produce the play and participate in V-Day and One Billion Rising, have turned art into concrete action by raising money and awareness to bring women out of sexual and physical violence.
Though the author notes there is much work left to do, V’s initial idea to build Feminine Community and Empowerment around vaginas has changed the way some women think about their bodies, the violence women experience (and the circumstances that lead to higher rates and different forms of it), and how women think about each other. In The Vagina Monologues, storytelling and speaking truth equate to stronger communities and constitute an act of resistance in the face of fear, silence, and shame.
The Preface establishes the author’s use of the word “vagina” to describe women’s anatomy in general, though in a clinical sense, “vagina” refers only to the internal canal of the female reproductive system. V acknowledges that it’s an imperfect descriptor but that “we haven’t come up with a word that’s more inclusive, that really describes the area and all its parts” (xxi). She notes that she also uses the term because people rarely say it—or have been punished for doing so—citing myriad nicknames people assign their anatomy instead. In this way, the author establishes her intent to challenge social boundaries, including standards of propriety, through the play.
Noting in the Preface that she uses the term “vagina” 128 times per show, the author also establishes the role of repetition, a motif that will recur throughout the Monologues and is intended to contrast with the silence surrounding women’s anatomy, particularly when the play was first produced. While not explicitly taboo, “vagina” is a word used typically in clinical or otherwise private ways. V’s premise is that such treatment compounds the silence surrounding violence against and the violation of women.
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