All females should empower themselves and fight for issues which have gone ignored by greater society, active members of several women’s groups and organizers of this weekend’s ‘Vagina Monologues’ said last night at a forum for discussion of the performances in the Kenmore Classroom Building.
The intimate forum of roughly a dozen women featured representatives and speakers from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, the Transition House and Boston University Women’s Center. Members of campus performance group Athena’s Players, who organized three performances of the monologues this weekend, also spoke during the event.
The session started at 7 p.m. and lasted nearly three hours, as discussion participants brought up a wide variety of issues concerning women, including domestic abuse, all forms of assault and gender inequality.
BARCC representative Lilly Green said women’s issues should be important to all women.
‘The plight of one woman is the plight of all women,’ Green said.
Several people said not enough national attention is focused on women’s issues. Politicians use international women’s issues to distract from the closer-to-home domestic women’s rights issues which women continue to face.
‘There is no doubt that we’ve made some serious strides in this country, but we’ve still got a ways to go,’ Green said.
Domestic abuse, another issue participants said is a major domestic problem, is real and more prevalent than most people think, according to participants.
‘There is a nine times greater danger of attack in a person’s own home than anywhere else,’ Transition House representative Linda McMaster said. ‘One in four American women will be attacked at some point in her life.’
Nonetheless, she said, little action is being taken to remedy the problem.
Some also said BU itself does not pay enough attention to women’s issues. Participants also talked about the lack of women in top Boston University positions and one participant even said she had never had a female professor, which she said was ridiculous because of the student body’s huge female majority.
Even with the ‘Vagina Monologues’ increasing awareness of women’s issues, they attacked the fact that the university does not have a rape crisis center for the university’s population of more than 30,000 students.
Organizers of the weekend’s ‘Vagina Monologues’ performances said they had hoped to use the performances to help raise awareness of major women’s issues. The three weekend performances cumulatively attracted nearly 1,000 university students, but event planners said the impressive turnout from a usually inactive student body did not generate the active response they had hoped for.
‘We really hoped for more of a buzz,’ said Sarah Schmidt, one of the show’s producers. ‘We wanted people to see the show and want to do something.’
Discussion participants said while the monologues’ attention-grabbing title may have accidentally drawn in people less interested in women’s issues and the real content of the show, organizers wanted people to leave the performance thinking about empowerment and inspired to take action. The play’s humor is only a seasoning to the gravity of the issues it resurrects for discussion, they said.