Charlotte Anne Bunch—internationally renowned activist, author, teacher and organizer for women's human rights—was born on October 13, 1944, in West Jefferson, North Carolina, to Charles Pardue Bunch and Marjorie Adelaide (King) Bunch. Later that year when she was 6 weeks old, the family moved to Artesia, New Mexico, where she lived until she left to go to college. Charlotte was the third of four children - 3 girls and 1 boy. Her father was a family doctor and her mother was a social worker and housewife. The family was active in the local Methodist Church and civic activities. While not politically active, Pardue and Marg, were very active in the life of the community, and Marjorie was the first women president of the local school board.
Charlotte was bright, adventuresome and determined as a child. She was impressed by the stories of missionaries who spoke at her church and at times aspired to be a missionary as the most exciting role she saw for women, who wanted to travel and do good. Reading the book Girl’s Stories of Great Women opened her eyes to other women, such as Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose lives of service and adventure made a difference in the world.
Charlotte’s life was transformed in the fall of 1962 when she left the conservative small town in the Southwestern U.S. to study at the Women’s College of Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. North Carolina was in the segregated South and the Duke campus was relatively accommodationist and conservative, but she met some key liberal role models there. Not knowing anyone at Duke, Bunch connected early with Sara Evans, daughter of a university chaplain, who became a trusted friend and colleague. They both became active in the YWCA campus program which provided opportunities for learning and building relationships with other women students and talking about social issues, like racism as Duke was just integrating its undergraduate colleges.
The Civil Rights Movement was blossoming in the South at this time and the Methodist Student Movement (MSM) on the Duke campus was emerging as a voice for racial justice. Given her Methodist background, Charlotte participated in MSM activities and was initially both intimidated by and drawn to the activist discourse. Bunch gradually began to participate in Civil Rights demonstrations— first at a pray-in outside a segregated church and later at a protest against a police beating of a Black student she had met through MSM. In the spring and summer of 1963, Charlotte participated in study and mission trips to New York City and Philadelphia where she learned about organizing against poverty and racism in the urban North. That summer ended with the historic March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirring “I Have a Dream” speech. Bunch also read The Feminist Mystique by Betty Friedan as part of her YWCA group, and decided what kind of the life she did not want as a woman.
As she began her second year at Duke, Charlotte embraced and moved into the role of political activist. Bunch remembers a highlight being her participation in the Ecumenical Student Quadrennial Conference in Athens, Ohio during Christmas break. While Duke and MSM had exposed her to social injustice in the U.S., the Ecumenical Student Conference expanded her horizons with global perspectives. An array of activists, theorists and theologians from around the world, including anti-Apartheid Black South Africans and East European Christian Marxists, challenged and motivated the students. This conference had a deep impact on Charlotte’s life—a number of other participants became her activist colleagues in the years to come, and there she met Jim Weeks from Berkeley CA, whom she would later marry.
Back at the Duke campus, Charlotte was elected president of the statewide MSM that spring. At the National Methodist Student Movement conference that June, Bunch was also elected to the National Council of the MSM. That summer she also traveled to Japan where she participated in a YMCA work-study camp, entitled “Our Responsibility in a Changing Asia.” As one of a few Westerners participating, Charlotte recalls experiencing a paradigm shift in learning to think globally through the lens of different cultures. This trip deepened Charlotte’s interest in Asia and her opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam.
The Civil Rights Movement—and the backlash against it—was the focus of the MSM Quadrennial Student Conference Charlotte attended in December 1964. She responded to the call to join in the Montgomery to Selma March the next spring. She and an integrated group of MSM colleagues went to Montgomery where they were asked to help arrange housing in African American homes for the marchers who would be arriving. This proved to be a rich learning experience in interracial organizing.
Indicative of her growing feminist consciousness, Charlotte and Sara Evans proposed that they become co-presidents of the YWCA in 1965, rather than compete against each other in the campus wide election for president. They won as a team and the campus paper mockingly gave them a “sisterhood of the year” award. This not only modeled a more collegial style of leadership, but also raised their profiles on the Duke campus. As the student protests against the Vietnam War grew, they knew they had to speak out about it, and Bunch traveled to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1965 for the first mass anti-war demonstrations.
As Charlotte returned to the Duke campus to begin her final year, a major shift was happening in the ecumenical student movement nationally. At that time, most of the Christian student groups, like MSM, were organized along denominational lines. The Protestant groups joined in coalition as the National Student Christian Federation (NSCF), but that body did little direct action. In September 1965, NSCF made the decision to transform itself into a truly ecumenical movement. Charlotte was elected NSCF Vice-President, and so in the following months spent considerable time developing this new organization called the University Christian Movement (UCM).
Charlotte majored in history and political science at Duke, and as her senior year progressed, she considered next steps, including graduate school. Her academic advisor (one of very few women professors) counseled that she would have to curtail her political activities in order to succeed in a Ph.D. program, and then she could resume organizing when that was completed. However, it was 1966, Charlotte believed that it was a revolutionary time in the country and world, and that she wanted to continue her political activities more, and so she chose not to apply to graduate school. She graduated from Duke magna cum laude on 6-6-1966. One month later she was in Geneva, Switzerland, to speak on behalf of youth delegates to the World Council of Churches Conference on Church and Society, where she helped lead a street demonstration against war and poverty.
That summer Charlotte moved to Washington, D.C. to live with Jim Weeks and two other couples in an intentional Christian community/commune seeking to address poverty and justice issues in a low-income Black neighborhood. That experiment was well-intended but short-lived as D.C. was one of many cities where black communities erupted in rebellious riots and white allies realized they needed to address racism more inside white communities. Charlotte and Jim were married in the spring of 1967 and moved into their own apartment on the same street.
The organizing work Bunch had been doing with the NSCF culminated in the formation of the University Christian Movement (UCM) in September 1966. This had been the long-awaited dream of Bunch and other organizers: to launch a broadly-based movement for social change that would span the scope of Christianity and even other religious traditions; that would involve not only students, but also the whole range of persons in university settings; and would function independently of sponsoring churches. Charlotte was elected the first president of UCM, and so spent the 1966-67 academic year traveling the U.S., speaking on campuses and encouraging involvement with UCM. Bunch continued on as a field staff with UCM after her year as president. In the fall of 1967, she also took a research/student position working with Arthur Waskow at the progressive think-tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
At IPS she was introduced to an exciting world of creative political thinkers with a focus on national public policies who sought to bridge policy and advocacy. It was a heady and stimulating environment, but Charlotte was also surprised by the overt sexism she experienced there. In her previous work in progressive Christian circles and in campus organizing, Bunch had usually felt affirmed as a woman who was a spokesperson and leader. However, at IPS she found herself and other women often discounted and marginalized. In response, Bunch began exploring feminism and became part of a radical women’s discussion group in D.C. that met weekly. Even as her attention was shifting from Christian university organizing to feminist organizing, she attended the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) quadrennial General Assembly in Finland in the summer of 1968. That gathering provided another opportunity to expand her international connections as she was elected to its Executive Committee (EC) for a four-year term. In this capacity, she traveled to annual EC meetings in Beirut, Tokyo, Geneva, and Ethiopia, which included political meetings with local activists.
By the fall of 1968, Bunch was very involved in the growing D.C. Women’s Liberation Movement—attending meetings, protests and teach-ins. She helped to organize the first national women’s liberation conference outside Chicago in November 1968, where she experienced divisive debates between women still identified with New Left socialist ideas and women who saw themselves as autonomous, and sometimes hostile, to the Left. The atmosphere exhausted and disturbed Charlotte so much that she fell ill and had to call her husband to drive her home after the conference ended.
Home for Jim Weeks was now Cleveland where he had started graduate school at Case Western Reserve University. Charlotte joined him there and took a campus ministry part-time job focused on outreach to women and became active in organizing a women’s liberation group in Cleveland. Meanwhile Bunch had approached the staff of Motive magazine—the progressive Methodist student monthly publication—about producing an issue on women’s issues. She helped produce the March-April 1969 double issue focused on women’s liberation, which sold out quickly. The widespread distribution of this issue strengthened ties between progressive Christians and feminist concerns while also bringing criticism from many institutional church leaders.
Also in March 1969, the leadership of UCM—facing the internal turmoil over political ideology typical of progressive groups at the time—decided to disband the national organization. Bunch was on the margins of UCM by this time, but deeply regretted the failure of this experiment. She continued on the executive committee of the WCSF, where she encouraged more engagement with feminism, including a publication of articles about women’s status around the world and women’s rights becoming part of the agenda at the WCSF General Assembly in Ethiopia in 1972. Charlotte’s term on the executive committee ended at that time as did her formal engagement with the church.
In the fall of 1969, Charlotte had been invited back to IPS as a junior fellow and she returned to living in D.C. in a mixed sex commune. In the spring of 1970, Bunch was part of a delegation from the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam that visited and dialogued with leaders and groups in North Vietnam. She frequently sought to link her feminism to other issues and to a global context and helped found a “Women Against Imperialism” group in D.C. that brought Indochinese women to Canada to meet with North American feminists.
However, Charlotte was spending most of her time by then in the women’s liberation movement whose focus was on the feminist movement in the U.S. In this context, she began exploring issues of sexuality, including her own. She met Rita Mae Brown, with whom she came out as a lesbian in early 1971, and left her marriage. With other lesbians in D.C., she began to openly challenge heterosexism in the D.C. women’s liberation movement.
By the summer of 1971, 12 of those women dramatically separated from the D.C. women’s movement and formed The Furies, a radical lesbian collective and commune in Washington, D.C., that espoused a revolutionary political ideology. They produced the Furies newspaper and other projects which sought to develop a lesbian feminist theoretical critique of heterosexism and to build a lesbian movement to challenge it. While the collective disbanded within a year, the newspaper continued for another year and its impact continued long thereafter.
Again, Charlotte drew on her connections with Motive magazine to produce a lesbian-feminist issue and a gay men’s issue in 1972 in order to spread the ideas of the growing lesbian and gay movements to a wider audience. By this time the Methodist Church had cut off its support of Motive and these issues were published independently, following which the magazine ceased to exist. This also ended Bunch’s involvement in progressive Christian organizing. She observed: "I have no interest in a God or a religion that thinks I am deformed, a sin or inferior."
In 1974, Bunch who was now a tenured fellow at IPS, started a new feminist publication out of IPS called Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. It was founded by a diverse group of feminists, lesbian and straight, from New Left and other movements, with varying class backgrounds but primarily white, who sought to write political analysis from the perspective of movements and activists. Quest involved and addressed academics, but its base was the movement and its mission was to bring those perspectives fully into the written debates of the time in a spirit of collaboration and intersectionality, in order to produce more strategic thinking and effective actions for the growing women’s movement. Quest produced 20 issues over nine years and was primarily focused on the US, but Charlotte edited a special issue on International Feminism in 1978 as she increasingly understood her vocation to be organizing for feminism, including lesbian issues, globally as well as nationally.
During the second half of the 1970’s, Bunch sought to bring the local and the global together in her work. She was part of a network to bring lesbian presence and issues to the UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City in July 1975. She saw it as an opportunity to raise the profile of lesbian rights as part of feminism internationally, and helped raise money to send outspoken lesbians to the conference, but did not attend herself. She also spoke to this issue at a 1976 NGO hearing in New York City that was part of preparations for an International Feminist Tribunal on Crimes Against Women held in Brussels in 1977.
In the U.S., Bunch served on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGTF) in the 1970’s and was on the first LGBT delegation to the White House in March 1977, where she presented on issues of discrimination in immigration policy. Charlotte was also a leader of the NGTF lesbian visibility project for the National Women’s Conference held in Houston in November of 1977, which was the only U.S. government sponsored event for the UN Decade for Women. Lesbians throughout the U.S. organized to be elected to almost half of the state delegations to the Houston event, and working with NOW and other feminists, succeeded in getting a “Sexual Preference” plank supporting lesbian rights added to the 26 planks of the conference recommendations, and thus, establishing that this issue was central to feminism.
In 1979, Charlotte left IPS and moved to New York City in order to focus her work on issues of feminism globally with more access to the United Nations and other Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) who worked on international issues, such as the International Women’s Tribune Centre. She was a consultant to the secretariat of the World Conference for the United Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen in 1980, and also helped organize an International Feminist Networking section of the NGO Forum, which included a session on lesbian rights.
Over the next seven years, Bunch worked as a consultant to a variety of groups working on feminist issues nationally and globally, including the creation of several projects with this focus, and always sought to ensure that lesbians perspectives were part of the work. The persistent organizing efforts of Bunch and other feminists led to increased visibility of lesbian and feminist voices from diverse parts of the world at the World Conference and NGO Forum held at the end of the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi in 1985. Charlotte was part of a team organizing a feminist film forum with discussion groups after, as well as many workshops and panels in Nairobi. A highlight of that gathering was the open lesbian discussion groups gathered on the lawn of the venue at 5:00 everyday, and a Lesbian Press Conference where lesbians from the global South as well as the North, spoke openly to the world media about their situations.
In 1987, Bunch was invited to be a Visiting Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers: the State University of New Jersey for two years with a focus on women’s leadership globally. During this time and based on her previous work, Bunch founded the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Rutgers to work at the intersection of gender, feminism, and human rights in 1979. She served as CWGL executive director for 20 years, where she organized annual women’s global leadership institutes, one of which launched the 16 Days of Activism against Gender based Violence Campaign (November 25-December 10) in 1991. This campaign is now observed by civil society groups in over 150 countries as well sponsored by several UN agencies. such as UNICEF, UNAIDS, and UNFPA as well as UNWomen.
During the 1990’s, CWGL led a Global Campaign for “women’s rights are human rights,” that played a major role in bringing a feminist analysis to human rights practice and led to the inclusion of women’s issues, such as gender violence and reproductive rights on the human rights agenda at the UN and within most human rights organizations. Charlotte has insisted in these efforts that lesbian rights be seen as an integral part of women’s rights and has supported the inter-related sexual rights or SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) agenda that has made considerable progress within the UN as a human rights issue during this time.
After stepping down as Executive Director in 2009, Bunch continued to teach “Gender and Human Rights” and “Women’s Leadership” as a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor at Rutgers. She was also active in continuing a number of projects at CWGL. In particular, Charlotte and CWGL were at the forefront of the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign, an international network of more than 300 women’s and human rights groups that advocated for the United Nations to create a higher level and more powerful gender equality entity. Launched in March 2007 and following an intense period of organizing, the campaign succeeded in July 2010 with the establishment of UN Women.
Bunch has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including Ms Foundation for Women, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Council for Research on Women, Global Fund for Women, Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, International Council on Human Rights Policy, Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), and the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights. She has written numerous influential essays, edited nine anthologies and authored Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action (St Martin’s Press, 1987) and Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights (UNIFEM & CWGL, !994) .
Among the numerous awards she has received, Bunch was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in October 1996. In December 1999, she was selected by President Bill Clinton as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights. In 2000, she received the Women Who Make a Difference Award from the National Council for Research on Women. She was honored as one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century by Women's eNews in 2002. And in 2006, she received the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research at Rutgers University. She was part of the ‘1000 Women Peace Makers’ Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 2010.
Since her retirement from Rutgers in 2024, Bunch has remained active in various women’s human rights endeavors.
(This biographical statement was written by Mark Bowman from the sources below and was edited by Bunch.)
Biography Date: February 2025
A wide variety of her speeches and interviews are available on Youtube.