7. Kenya, 2009: No sex without peace: Women unite in a nationwide bedroom strike.

Aristophanes never intended the Lysistrata story to be taken literally. His play was a satire, a way of pressing for an end to the death and destruction of the long-running Peloponnesian War in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The story played with an obviously unthinkable idea: that women, by withholding their consent to sex, could do something to end a brutal conflict.

Two thousand years later, Lysistrata has achieved a real-life momentum of its own.

In Kenya in 2009, many feared a renewal of the post-election violence that had brought the country to the brink of catastrophe a year earlier. The relationship between the two main political rivals, Prime Minister Raile Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki, remained dangerously tense. Women’s groups, fearing another descent into violence, urged men to settle their differences and, as they put it, “begin to serve the nation they represent.” To emphasize the point, they announced a sex strike.

They were perhaps inspired by a similar action taken in Sudan in 2002, when thousands of women in the South took up the practice of “sexual abandoning” to compel men to end the twenty-year civil war in which an estimated two million people had died.

Rukia Subow, chair of one of the groups in Kenya, argued, “We have seen that sex is the answer. It does not know tribe, it does not have a party, and it happens in the lowest households.”

The strike gained widespread support—even the prime minister’s wife, Ida Odinga, declared that she supported it “body and soul.” Women’s groups welcomed the success of the action—“Kenyans began talking about issues that are affecting them. And it got the politicians talking.” The women even persuaded some sex workers to join the strike.

It ended with a joint prayer session. The prime minister and the president finally agreed to talk.

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

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