"I'd make a comment at a meeting and nobody would even acknowledge me. Then some man would say the same thing and they'd all nod." -- Charlotte Bunch
Charlotte Bunch (born October 13, 1944, North Carolina) is an American activist, author and organizer in women's and human rights movements. A pioneering strategist and organizer, Charlotte Bunch is one of the foremost advocates of international attention to women's issues, and the inclusion of gender and sexual orientation on the global human rights agenda.
"America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.""As a human rights issue, the effort to end violence against women becomes a government's obligation, not just a good idea.""Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues.""Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.""People learn to lead because they care about something.""Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.""There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal.""We need women leaders. But we need them to have a vision for something.""What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.""Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond."
Bunch grew up in Artesia, New Mexico. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University in 1966 with a B.A. in History and Political Science. Her studies focused on education and social change. Her college years were marked by numerous extracurricular activities, including work with the Young Women's Christian Association; the Methodist student movement; a poverty program in Oakland, California; and various civil rights groups. In the summer following her graduation, she was a youth delegate to the World Council of Churches Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, Switzerland, and attended a meeting on China sponsored by the World Student Christian Federation. That autumn she began a one-year term in Washington, D.C., as president of the University Christian Movement, an ecumenical organization concerned with social change. The following year she served as student intern exploring the interaction of education and politics and undertaking graduate research at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C..
Moving to Cleveland in 1968, Bunch helped to organize both the local women's liberation movement and the first national women's liberation conference, held in Chicago in November 1968. She worked on the staff of the campus ministry at Case Western Reserve University before returning to Washington in 1969 as a visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Continuing her active involvement in the women's liberation movement, she helped to develop a women's studies curriculum that was taught at the Washington Area Free University. Her work on the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam led to a trip to North Vietnam and Laos in 1970 and to participation in the International Conference of North American and Indochinese Women held in Canada in 1971.
Since 1971, Bunch has worked primarily to develop a lesbian/feminist ideology nationally and internationally, and to establish a lesbian/feminist community in Washington. She continued as a fellow at IPS until 1977, and has taught a variety of courses on feminism at a number of colleges and universities. She has lectured widely, been a participant or facilitator at a number of international workshops and conferences, and served from 1979 to 1980 as consultant to the secretariat for the World Conference for the United Nations Decade on Women.
A Board of Governor’s Distinguished Service Professor in Women's and Gender Studies, Bunch founded Washington D.C. publications, Women's Liberation and Quest: A Feminist Quarterly.
The Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL)
In 1989, she founded the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Douglass College, Rutgers University, of which she remains the Founding Director and Senior Scholar. She was succeeded as Executive Director by Radhika Balakrishnan in September 2009. Under Bunch's leadership, the Center for Women's Global Leadership became one of the leading organizations in the global movement for women’s human rights. Based at Rutgers on the Douglass College Campus (which recently transitioned to a residential campus from its former distinction as the Rutgers women's college), CWGL is part of the Office of International Programs in the School of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Institute for Women's Leadership (IWL)...a consortium of women's programs at Rutgers University created to study and promote how and why women lead, and to develop programs that prepare women of all ages to lead effectively. The member units of IWL are the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), the Center for Women and Work, the Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL), Douglass Residential College, the Institute for Research on Women (IRW), the Institute for Women and Art (IWA), the Office for the Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics, and the Women's and Gender Studies Department.
CWGL's programs promote the leadership of women and advance feminist perspectives in policy-making processes in local, national and international arenas. Since 1990, CWGL has fostered women's leadership in the area of human rights through women's global leadership institutes, strategic planning activities, international mobilization campaigns, UN monitoring, global education endeavors, publications, and a resource center.
CWGL was instrumental in pushing the United Nations and the international community to view women’s rights as a human rights issue. In her 1990 article, “Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” Charlotte Bunch introduced a new concept into the global women’s rights movement, arguing for a human rights approach to women’s rights. CWGL was created around this innovative theoretical and activist paradigm, with a particular focus on violence against women as one of the most pervasive manifestations of women’s marginalized status around the world. CWGL played a leading role in the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights, an international civil society coalition advocating for gender-based discrimination and persecution to be taken seriously by the international community as human rights abuses. The campaign revealed the gendered dimensions of human rights abuses and denounced the invisibility of violations against women in mainstream approaches to human rights. Recently CWGL has been an instrumental component of the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign, working towards the establishment of a new United Nations Gender Entity that really works for equality for all of the world's women. Bunch has been a major voice for this campaign. The gender entity was finally created after four years of advocacy on July 2, 2010, and deemed UN WOMEN.
CWGL 20th Anniversary Symposium and Tribute to Charlotte Bunch
At its 20th Anniversary Symposium on March 6, 2010, following panel discussions on body, economy, and movement, CWGL organized a tribute to its founder, Charlotte Bunch, who transitioned on September 1, 2009 from her role as Executive Director to working with CWGL in her new capacity as Founding Director and Senior Scholar. Attendees watched a short preview of the upcoming documentary film Passionate Politics: The Life & Work of Charlotte Bunch, which chronicles Bunch’s lifelong personal and political commitment to women’s human rights.
CWGL launched the Charlotte Bunch Women’s Human Rights Strategic Opportunities Fund in recognition of her contributions to the global women’s human rights movement.
Professional History
In October 1996 Bunch was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In December 1999 she was selected by United States President Bill Clinton as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights. She received the "Women Who Make a Difference Award" from the National Council for Research on Women in 2000 and was honored as one of the "21 Leaders for the 21st Century" by Women's Enews in 2002 and also received the “Board of Trustees Awards for Excellence in Research” in 2006 at Rutgers University.
She has served on the boards of numerous organizations and is currently a member of the Advisory Committee for the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Division, and on the Boards of the Global Fund for Women and the International Council on Human Rights Policy. She has been a consultant to many United Nations bodies and recently served on the Advisory Committee for the Secretary General’s 2006 Report to the General Assembly on Violence against Women.
She is the author of numerous essays and has edited or co-edited nine anthologies including the Center’s reports on the UN Beijing Plus 5 Review and the World Conference Against Racism. Her books include two classics: Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action and Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights.
The papers of Charlotte Bunch can be found at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute.
Charlotte Bunch also teaches courses at Rutgers University at the New Brunswick Campus on gender and human rights.
2008 Rutgers College Class of 1962 Presidential Public Service Award
2007 Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws University of Connecticut
2006 Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
2004 New Jersey Honorary United Nations Day Chair Appointed by the Governor of New Jersey
2002 Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor Recipient Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
2002 Women Who Make a Difference Award International Women's Forum
2002 21 Leaders for the 21st Century Women's Enews
2001 Spirit of American Women Award Girls Incorporated of Central New York
2000 Women Who Make a Difference Award National Council for Research on Women
1999 Church Women United Human Rights Award Church Women United
1999 Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights Former President William Jefferson Clinton
1998 The Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program Recognition Award to the Center for Women's Global Leadership by the Department of Urban Planning and Policy Development, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey
1997 award in recognition of its "international educational and organizing work fighting violence against women" to the Center for Women's Global Leadership by the Center for Anti-Violence Education1996 Induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame
1993 Feminist of the Year to the Center for Women's Global Leadership by the Feminist Majority Foundation
1992 Resourceful Women Award
1987 The Jessie Bernard Wise Woman Award Center for Women Policy Studies
Professor Bunch's work focuses on the application of feminist theory to public policy questions, particularly at the global level. Her current investigations center on developing an analysis and understanding of human rights that incorporates women's lives more fully and utilizes the question of violence against women as a way of exploring the parameters of their issues both theoretically and practically. Her other public policy work has focused on issues of gender and international development.
She is the author of several books and articles. Her writings include Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1987); "Preambulo: Abriendo las Copuertas," in Declaracion Universal de Derecho Humanos: Texto Y Comentarios Inusuales, edited by Alda Facio (San Jose, Costa Rica: ILANUD Programa Mujer, Justiciaa y Genero, 2001); and "Taking Stock: Women's Human Rights Five Years After Beijing" in Holding On to the Promise: Women's Human Rights and the Beijing + 5 Review, edited by Cynthia Meillon and Charlotte Bunch (NJ: Center for Women's Global Leadership, 2001).
