When Yetta Young began acting and producing The Vagina Monologues in 2001, she noticed “there weren’t a lot African Americans in the audience.” She thought the message of Eve Ensler’s play, which highlights the problem of violence against women and girls, wasn't reaching African Americans. Questions of inclusion aren't new to feminism. Women of color often resist calling themselves feminists, even if they identify strongly with the traditional causes of feminism: gender equality, access to contraception, and protection for women who are victims of sexual violence.

Ensler first performed The Vagina Monologues in 1996 in New York City. The play itself began as interviews with women from all different backgrounds about how they perceive their vaginas. Some of the monologues are funny, some are sensual, and others are violent. The first "V-Day" benefit was performed in 1998, raising $250,000 for anti-domestic violence groups. Ensler founded an organization, called V-Day, charged with raising awareness about violence against women. Since then, The Vagina Monologues has been performed all around the world. This year, there will be more than 3,500 productions in 70 different countries. The production has raised millions of dollars for local domestic violence groups and taken on projects for women in war-torn areas of Africa and the Middle East.

But feminists haven't always greeted The Vagina Monologues warmly. As Ashwini Hardikar pointed out in Campus Progress last year, “the show’s monologues are delivered almost exclusively through the lens of a white, upper-class, Western female perspective.” Some of the monologues Ensler added to the production, which appear in the back of her newly-released 10th anniversary version of the book, are the most violent and hardest to read. There are clues in the text that indicate the more violent roles are supposed to be played women of color: a Native American, a woman in Ukraine, a Latina, a female wearing a burqa, and a male-to-female transgender individual. Because so few women of color audition for the roles, Hardikar said, “The message to audiences was clear: Only privileged women enjoy their vaginas.”

In response to these criticisms, Young started a tour of the Vagina Monologues that is cast entirely with women of color—and extremely high profile women at that: Star Jones and Sherri Shepherd, former and current member of “The View”; Vanessa Williams of “Soul Food”; and Denise Dowse, who starred in Ray and Coach Carter. The tour begins at the Lincoln Theater in Washington D.C. this Saturday and will make stops in Nashville and Detroit.

Young, a Fisk University graduate, said that the performance with an all-black cast in Washington last year was received well by the District’s largely African American population. “You could see that the women were walking out just excited,” she said. “You could tell in their faces that a change had taken place right before their eyes and I wanted to have that experience again.”

Young’s production might be more accessible to the African American community because she takes the racial question out of the picture, allowing all the roles—from celebratory monologues about the sexuality of a vagina to tragic monologues about rape and female genital mutilation—to be played by women of color. Now the message is that women of color enjoy their vaginas, too.

Prominent feminists from the last few decades haven’t always been the most diverse group of people, and there have been fissures within the feminist community because of this. Women of color sometimes feel the feminist movement exists to advance the roles of wealthy and middle-class white women, and that civil rights issues are neglected as a result. Not only do feminists sometimes struggle with including women of color, they also sometimes abandon a group of people that could be their greatest allies in advancing feminism: men.

Young has smartly reached out to Men Can Stop Rape (MCSR), a group that works with young men in the D.C. area to address masculinity and violence, to co-sponsor her D.C. production. “Evident from the name of our organization, ending violence against women is high on our priority list,” said MCSR Communications Director Pat McGann. “Everything that V-Day [and] The Vagina Monologues stand for is close to our hearts.”

But making sure the message of The Vagina Monologues reaches men—especially young men—might not be as easy as partnering with MCSR. Although MCSR sponsors a club for younger males called Men of Strength, even McGann was unsure if any of the young men would be attending the performance. Without extending the invitation to young men to view the performance, The Vagina Monologues risks resonating only with women, even if it extends the invitation to women of color.

This production of The Vagina Monologues seeks to include those who have been on the outside of this discussion: women of color and men. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s a start. As McGann said, “If there’s ever going to be an end to violence against women, men and women have to work together and make it happen and we’re stronger together than we are apart.”

Kay Steiger is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.