Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

In this passionate talk, Eve Ensler declares that there is a girl cell in us all -- a cell that we have all been taught to suppress. She tells heartfelt stories of girls around the world who have overcome shocking adversity and violence to reveal the astonishing strength of being a girl.

Inspired by intimate conversations with friends, Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues. The play recounts tender, funny, gripping and horrifying stories she gathered from hundreds of women about their bodies, their sexual experiences, and yes, their vaginas. Since its first staging in 1996, it has been translated into more than 45 languages, performed in more than 120 countries and re-created as an HBO film.

The Vagina Monologues' success allowed Ensler to create V-Day,, a movement to stop violence against women and girls, which has so far raised $70 million to prevent violence and protect abused women. Ensler has also drawn praise for The Good Body, a play that cuts to women's obsession with their appearance, and her film What I Want My Words To Do To You, that portrays a writing group she leads at a correctional facility for women. Today, she continues to find new projects and push the envelope, with a new book about the secret lives of girls to be released in February 2010 and a film project in conjunction with National Geographic about women caught in the Bosnian war also on the horizon.