THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Charlotte Bunch

“I think it’s so important for women facing the backlashes of today, to know that they are part of a long line of women, not only in the US, but around the world who have done this fight, who are still doing this fight, and that their backlash is a sign of success. And so, yes, you have to fight back. If you didn’t have backlash, you wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, October 2024

CB:  I’m Charlotte Anne Bunch, and I was born October 13th, 1944, in western North Carolina, in the mountains where my father was a rural doctor. They moved when I was a baby, six weeks old, actually, to Artesia, New Mexico, which is where I grew up.

They moved there because my father had very bad asthma. He was serving during World War II as a rural doctor in areas that needed doctors, so that’s why we were in North Carolina, but moved to New Mexico very soon after. That’s where I grew up the rest of my life, in the small town halfway between the Carlsbad Caverns and the Roswell UFO Museum in the eastern corner of New Mexico. Which people in New Mexico call Little West, Texas. It’s a little more Texas than the northern part of New Mexico, but it’s a mixture of all the above.

JW:  Well, tell us a little more about your childhood and maybe some of the influences that led you to who you became.

CB:  Absolutely. I was the third child of four, so I was a middle daughter with one brother. My parents had wanted to be medical missionaries to China. When World War II came, they weren’t able to do that but they still carried that service to underserved populations, which is why they ended up being doctors in rural parts of the USA instead. My father was a doctor, my mother was a social worker. Later in her life, after we were grown, she helped establish rural community health systems in the southern part of New Mexico, which really didn’t have any of those.

They were both very service-oriented. I called my mother a “civic activist” when I think back on it but in my childhood, she was a housewife. Very intelligent, and I think frustrated with being a housewife. I think part of my feminism, and that of my sisters who are also feminists, comes from a mother who, in a way, embodied the feminine mystique. Even though they were small town and very service-oriented, she embodied the feminine mystique in the sense that she felt her talents and uses were not really put to good use. She never gave us the sense that being a mother and having a household was the most important thing in life.

Even though she didn’t break from that, she did break from it in the sense that she ran for the school board, she was the first woman on the school board, the first woman President of the school board, in the small town where we lived. She was very active in both women’s organizations – and obviously the school board is not a women’s organization only – and in the town.

My father was a very service-oriented doctor. He took care of people before any kind of Medicare or Medicaid existed. We often got chickens, or half a cow, or whatever people could do. He bartered for them to pay their bills because it’s not a very rich part of the state. It’s a pretty poor part of the state. So, I grew up with an ethic that your value is tied to doing something to make the world better. They were not ideologically left, they were just civic-minded, liberal people, who believed in fairness and community. I think they didn’t have a larger ideology about it, but they just thought that was the way to live.

Early on, I wanted to be a missionary when I was a child because those were the only women I saw in the ’50s coming to small towns like mine who traveled a lot, and had interesting lives. They were mostly not married. They were mostly women who had a purpose. I thought that was great. Later, I decided that purpose could be social work, or more secular. But I was active; I mean, it was a small town, you had to be active in almost every organization just to keep from being bored.

So, I grew up in a very 1950s activist but not political household. In the sense that it was political, but it was more community civic politics, than ideological politics. I was active in most of my school organizations. All of the girls in my class were, in general, smarter than the boys. So, I grew up with smart girls around me and friends that were girls. I didn’t have any idea I would become a lesbian, but apparently my mother saw that possibility because I had such great girlfriends, even though I didn’t discover it until a number of years later. It was a pretty both typical, and particular small-town kind of growing up.

The one thing that I think was good about it for the work I do today, globally, is that I know what it is to feel like you come from a place that nobody’s ever heard of, and that is not an important place. And I think that has helped me working internationally because I don’t assume that US or New York, where I do now live, is the center of the universe. And that’s been very helpful in connecting to people around the world who come from places that nobody has ever heard of, or that expect to be well known.

JW:  Did your sisters follow similar paths as you?

CB:  Yes and no, in the sense that they are personally feminist. They are not activists. My older sister went into guidance counseling, and she’s worked all her life with helping people get their high school degree and with guidance counseling and teaching. She stayed in Texas and New Mexico. My younger sister kept her own name. Her daughter has her last name, and her son has his father’s last name, and is active in her local church and food pantries and things like that. So, in a way, they followed the same thing, but without as much of a political frame.

JW:  When did you get introduced to the women’s movement?

CB:  Well, I think there’s a certain way in which I feel like I was always a feminist and always doing things. My claim as the middle child and having a brother who was just two years older, was a claim for equality, that I should be able to do anything my brother could do. It wasn’t feminism as…I mean it was, but I didn’t know it as that. Then when I left New Mexico, I went to Duke University in North Carolina, and I met Sarah Evans, who’s somebody you should definitely interview, the American feminist historian. We became best friends, and we charted a path toward feminism in college.

We were both very active in the Methodist student movement, which in the ’60s – and I went there in 1962 – was kind of a hotbed of support for the emerging civil rights movement in North Carolina, in particular, where it was. So, I began to get political, really, through the Black Civil Rights Movement as a student. First, just meeting people, helping the university I was at [to] integrate the undergraduate level my freshman year.

Sarah and I were active in the YWCA. We served as mentors for the first seven undergraduate students who integrated Duke. Now, the graduate school was already integrated, but it was amazing to realize that the undergraduate school wasn’t. I don’t think I even knew that when I first went there, but it became an important part of my upbringing, my time at Duke. So, Duke was really the place that I became a political activist, first with the Civil Rights Movement; and I was still active in the Methodist student movement globally, or through my state, and then through the national machinery.

I also got to go to conferences where people like Martin Luther King were speaking. I went to events where South Africans were discussing Apartheid, and the Czechoslovakians were talking about Marxist-Christian dialog. I really had a wonderful exposure to the world of politics, pre-feminism, but as a woman and as a leader in the Methodist student movement. In those years as a student, I was getting political, but I wasn’t feeling discriminated against as a woman.

Then, I moved to Washington, DC, in 1966. I didn’t go to graduate school because Ann Scott, who was my history professor – I was a history major at that point – said, “You’re going to have to put aside your activism a little bit in order to do your graduate work, and then you can go back to politics after.” It was 1966, and I was like, “The revolution is happening now. I’m not putting it aside now.” And so, I stopped applying to graduate school, and I ended up going to Washington, DC.

After a year of being supported to do work through the Methodist Student Movement, I became a student at the Institute for Policy Studies. I was one of the very few women who were there. The men used to talk about how, Well, they would have more women fellows, but Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt were not available. That was their view. They didn’t quite see women as at their level.

I think I really became a feminist in response to what I called the adult male left. I had been able as a woman, to get involved in civil rights, and I was a student and I felt like I was taken pretty seriously. I was a leader in the progressive Methodist Ecumenical Movement, and then all of a sudden, I was in this male left environment, where even though I was an exception in that I was one of the first women they invited there, I still didn’t feel that they listened to what we would say. And that when I would speak, some man would say the same thing a half an hour later and everybody would say, Oh, what a great idea.

It really was classic. I think all of my ’60s feminism is really classic, coming out of what I call the women’s liberation or the new left wing of the movement. I didn’t have any history like some of my friends did, of socialist parents or anything, but I did have the background of the notion that you should do good and be in your community. Gradually, that became political to me, not just a way to live.

In the course of that, going to the Institute for Policy Studies, I met other women. Marilyn Webb was also there with her husband. I got married. I experienced for the first time being called Mrs. James Weeks instead of by my own name. I immediately hyphenated my last name. And so, some of my early women’s liberation writings are in the name of Charlotte Bunch Weeks. I didn’t have any inclination or knowledge that I might become a lesbian, but I knew that I didn’t want to be a Mrs. James something. These were all classic ’60s experiences.

I did come from an academic institution. I started writing about them, particularly in some of the more liberal church publications. There was a special issue of Motive magazine, which was published by the church that I helped convince them to do in 1969, on women’s liberation and feminism. In a way, it was a gradual process of what I call moving from the student left to an adult, somewhat left background, and suddenly realizing what sexism really was.

I read the Feminine Mystique when it first came out. It was actually assigned to us by our YWCA director in 1963, 1964, as our summer reading. And so, I had read that, but my reaction when I read it was, Okay, I’m not going to do that. That’s not the life I’m going to have. That was my mother’s life, I get it. I’m not going to do that. So, I was primed by all the feminism that was bubbling up, but I didn’t really become a feminist in terms of the focus of my work until 1968.

That’s when I was the student, Church, young person, speaking at the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, which was, I think, January of 1968, certainly winter ’68. And at the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, you may know historically, that some of the women from New York came and did a demonstration. I don’t know if it was Red Stockings or Radical Women – about women in relation to war. And the other thing that happened is that Sarah Evans, my best friend from Duke, and Heather Booth, and others, had started a small radical women’s discussion group in the fall of ’67, I believe, in Chicago, where Sarah had gone to graduate school. And so, they had a meeting with some of us.

Marilyn Webb, in Washington, had been talking about maybe doing something like that. So, we sat up with women, and talked all night. I think there were some from New York; the Chicago group was more like us, women coming from the left and having that background. And Marilyn and I decided to start what I would now call a consciousness-raising group. But we called ourselves, The Radical Women’s Discussion Group, because we still wanted people to know we weren’t like the bourgeois feminists. We were still radical women.

We started, first a discussion group, and then later that year, the DC Women’s Liberation Movement. Marilyn and I and a dozen other women really began, and we rented an apartment to be the headquarters for the DC Women’s Liberation Movement. We took turns, different ones of us, in staffing it. We helped organize. Really, it was Marilyn’s idea, I think, what became the Women’s Liberation Movement conference in Chicago in 1968, in November, just before Thanksgiving, at a Campfire Girls or some other camp like that. 

It was my first sense of all of that process for the Jeannette Rankin Bergen in the beginning of January through to this November conference was my process, and I think many others like me, of seeing this as a movement, and seeing ourselves as the radical wing of the movement. Coming to terms with the term feminism, adopting the term feminism by the end of that year, but also still having a distinct sense that we were not the same as NOW, which we saw as more our parents’ generation in many ways, even though many of the women who were doing it were really the same age as we were.

JW:  That was me.

CB:  Yes, right. Exactly. And within a couple of years, I was very coalition minded, and got involved with several efforts in DC to bring NOW, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the DC Women’s Liberation Movement together. I’ve always had this back and forth between some specific group. I’m better known for my work as a lesbian feminist in that period, but actually, it was very much coalition-minded. So, I was always going back and forth between the more separate identity politics and the coalition.

JW:  And what can we do together. That goes on everywhere, right?

CB:  Exactly. I often say my early women’s liberation story is the story of so many women of my generation. That we were struggling to find how to bring our experiences in the explosion of movements in the ’60s, and our experiences as women, as feminists, together. Some years later I wrote about that period in terms of, What do you do when you thought there was going to be a revolution?

And it turns out to actually be a very different kind of revolution, I would say today, but at the time, it felt like there’s not a revolution. So how do we build a impactful, reform oriented [movement] which led to my article, “The Reform Toolkit.” Which is, I think, one of the most important I wrote about that dynamic, and still true today. That dynamic of, How do you be radical and live in times that are changing, but not necessarily the revolutions you thought?

JW:  Did you have any connection to the Off Our Backs people?

CB:  I did. I was not on the staff of Off Our Backs. Marilyn Webb started Off Our Backs with some of the women from the DC Women’s Liberation Group. I helped put together the anti-imperialist issue where we said, Women will fight, and we talked about a feminist perspective on the war in Vietnam. I went to North Vietnam as a part of an anti-war mobilization trip where they asked me to talk about the women’s movement as a force for ending the war in Vietnam. I had a particular feeling that I owed it to the Vietnamese to try to make that happen. I was working on that special issue. I was never on the staff of Off Our Backs, but I did work on that special issue and several others along the way.

JW:  Well, you did then ultimately finish graduate school, right?

CB:  Actually, no, I never did finish graduate school. I never went to graduate school. Everybody assumes that, but it’s a slightly different story. When I got invited to go to Rutgers, years later, the women in the women’s studies world at Rutgers – and I think it’s an important story because at that time there were a lot of strong women’s studies programs by the time I got invited – they convinced the university successfully that my (I had been at the Institute for Policy Studies for 10 years) that my 10 years in Washington at IPS was comparable to a PhD in public policy.

And so, I was accepted as PhD level in public policy. When I got tenure at Rutgers, I was put on the faculty of the School of Public Policy, because at that time, Women’s Studies didn’t have a separate department. Later, I joined the people who started the Women’s Studies Department at Rutgers. Actually, I got convinced along the way that probably I should go to law school – that I was more of an activist who would benefit from a law degree – but I could never picture either three years in law school or five years toward a PhD. I had already gotten too immersed in the world of doing things that I could never figure out when to take the time off to go back.

And really, the luckiest thing [was that] the Institute for Policy Studies, it made me a feminist, but it also supported me. I was a fellow there for nine or ten years, first as a junior fellow and then as a regular fellow, and even the first and last tenured fellow after which they decided to abolish the idea of tenure. I think I was the only woman ever tenured. They decided that they weren’t an academic institution that should have tenure, when, not me, but some of the men in the group there, started to want to organize a union and so the leadership opposed that.

That was also the period in the later ’70s when I left IPS because I felt like if I stayed there longer, I would never be able to get a job in anything else because it’s a very rare fight. But I have great appreciation today for the 10 years of political and policy education I got at IPS. I do think if you want to study and do politics, policy institutes like that are a great place to work because you really do learn how policy gets formed. You get to think about the connection between policy, which is often small steps and big ideas. I do consider it my graduate education. They do now have a graduate degree program, but they didn’t when I was first there.

JW:  What issues did you work on there?

CB:  I started out working on social change and education because I had been involved in this university Christian movement that was working with students on campuses through the campus ministries, and we organized what we call depth education groups. I was working with Arthur Waskow, and others at IPS who were really interested in How do you build through universities a comprehensive sense of what we call intersectionality today, of the interconnectedness of issues? The people I was working with had the theory then that you could start to learn about one issue in-depth, and that as you did that, you would then begin to see the connections between that issue and others.

Because I was already working at the national level, we had sponsored depth education groups. We had a big conference in 1967 that was part of the tradition of student Christian movement conferences, like the one where I saw Martin Luther King speak and others. And this particular one, we organized around the idea of getting campus ministry groups – of which there were many more then than there are today – to take up one issue. Poverty, racism, whatever issue you wanted to start with, and have what we call depth education around it, and then think about how it connected to the other issues. So, I was doing work at IPS in the beginning on that an issue.

I think that later translated into my doing things like starting the women’s liberation course at IPS. So, in a way, I was being a teacher and a researcher in a non-traditional form, and started teaching feminist theory in – I don’t even know if we called it that – Women’s Liberation Feminist Theory, and working to develop the connection between the issues and to do some education in the women’s movement.

Then I started a course, the Washington area free diversity. Eventually, I ended up teaching adjunct at George Washington and American University and University of Maryland College Park before I left DC. So, I was a teacher in a non-traditional teaching place until I ended up at Rutgers really being a professor. The issue of education and how you link things, the issues of the broader question of how movements relate; I was still very concerned with feminism sort of being connected, particularly to racism because that was my first introduction to what I think of now as the movements of the ’60s.

I did some of the work with DC Women’s Liberation, with the National Welfare Rights Organization on women’s welfare rights, and really quite a few different issues in that point in time. Then as I came out as a lesbian in that period, I began to focus more on sexual rights and lesbian rights in particular. So, the mid ’70s, ’72 to ’74, ’75, maybe ’76, ’77, I was very active. First, as a lesbian separatist in the Furies Collective, and trying to develop an understanding of how lesbianism and homophobia connected to feminism, and to develop lesbian feminist thinking about its connection to the rest of the women’s movement.

We were separatists for about a year, and that’s what we wrote about initially, but gradually, most of us, I think almost all of us, wanted to move back into the women’s movement. And so, we began to develop – Olivia Records came out of that, Women in Distribution – various institutions. I then started with several other women, Quest, the feminist quarterly, which is the publication that I worked on, really the most. It came out of the Furies, but it really came out of the sense that lesbian feminism was not an end in itself. It was a part of a larger movement.

After working first to put what we call lesbian visibility, to put it on the agenda, I did join the board of the National Gay Task Force. And worked for the first time with gay men, which was actually somewhat interesting because I felt like the National Gay Task Force at that time accepted women as leaders and asked me to do leadership things that the women’s movement was always hesitant about.

So, I’ve written about leadership because I think the feminist effort to not have hierarchy, we know where that comes from, it came from a good place, came from trying not to have power over things. But it was harder to be a leader in the feminist movement. I wasn’t at the public level of the Kate Milletts and the people who experienced a lot of the trashing for their leadership. But I saw that phenomenon happening all over the place in the women’s movement.

It was interesting when I got on the board of the National Gay Test Force, and my entire agenda was to bring more lesbian visibility to gay politics, I suddenly found the men were like, Yes, we want you to take leadership. They were not yet at the level of competing for stardom.

JW:  So, then you were still in DC? You’d moved to New York? Where were you then?  

CB:  I was in DC throughout the ’70s. I was at the Institute for Policy Studies, basically until ’78, and during that time, my main political work became Quest, the feminist quarterly which we published out of my office at IPS. We were indirectly subsidized by IPS in the sense that they gave me a big enough office for me and the managing editor who we hired, and the graphics person to work and to produce the magazine until ’77, I think, or ’78. They allowed us that space and when I became a tenured fellow, I got to use the assistant. You’re supposed to have one secretary or assistant, and I got to use that money to hire our managing director for Quest. So, they really subsidized our existence for many years.

Then, when the other troubles were happening between the unionization and there was really a split within IPS, the men who had mostly supported me were most of the ones who were leaving, I felt it was time for me to leave. They had organized what we would now think of as a common work space, a kind of we work, but it was individuals who shared an office rental to each do our own work and figure out What next? because it was a very rarefied thing to be working at IPS.

And basically, I did The Furies, I did Quest. Once I was hired as a fellow, you were supposed to have your own political projects. You had to present them, and people were interested or not interested in your work, but it meant you were paid, basically, to be an organizer and a writer in a political area. It was great. I can’t imagine a better way to have spent those 10 years. It was both education, and the opportunity to do a lot of stuff.

I think the most publicly important thing we did was at the 1977 Houston Women’s Conference. The National Conference which was affiliated with the International Women’s Year of the UN, but was the US conference that Bella Abzug and others got money for. I was part of the group through the National Gay Task Force. Again, the National Gay Task Force really supported our organizing for the Lesbian Plank, which became the Sexual Preference Plank, as it was called, as part of the 26-point platform of the National Women’s Conference.

That’s where I really got to know and organize with a lot of the people from NOW. I was in the national offices in Washington and with women around the country, because that conference was elected delegates. We organized lesbians to go to the state conferences, to get elected to the delegation, and we really got a Plank that had not been there when they did the first outline on Sexual Preference; what the Plank is called, but basically on lesbian and gay rights.

I think it made a lot of difference for the solidarity of the emerging lesbian and gay movement with the feminist movement. I think the process of that, of convincing the feminist leadership – and I give women the credit for that because I think that the feminist leadership embraced coalition with lesbian and gay almost before anybody else. Even though we all know the famous lines of Betty Friedan and Lavender herring, and even though I was a lesbian separatist because women’s liberation didn’t come to it as quickly as we thought they should, I think there’s no question it was the feminist movement that was the best ally to the LGBT movement in the late ’70s when it really mattered, and laid the groundwork for the response to HIV/AIDS.

Because I think the more humanitarian part of that response and the help with the disease that came from women, a lot of whom were lesbians but many of whom were lesbians in the feminist movement, and many of whom were feminist friends of gay men who really helped build the support network for men who were suffering from that AIDS pandemic. I think that’s some of the most important work from the ’70s that I did as a part of the lesbian feminist movement. Not only writing the theory, which is what we did in the theories, but it was getting people to see what that theory meant.

I’ll give you one example because I think it’s such a great one. Part of our organizing was sending different women who were on the National Gay Task Force Board to national women’s organizations and presenting to them why the Lesbian Plank should be adopted. Jackie St. Joan was a lawyer in Denver, Colorado, a lesbian mother, on the board.

She went to the National YWCA and the board of the YWCA, and talked about lesbian rights and lesbian motherhood, and why this should be part of the Houston Plank. This was all work which we were organizing through NGTF. And they asked her, “Well, you have two children, a boy and a girl. Do you want them to be gay?” And she said, “I want my son to be heterosexual, and I want my daughter to be a lesbian because I want them both to be loved by women.” In the room full of women in the YWCA, it was like a light bulb went off.

I think that story is so wonderful in terms of what women began to understand about themselves and how that might affect – instead of having a blanket answer for both of them – an answer that made people think. Because it isn’t all feminist theory. It’s also how you connect people about what’s the reality. It turns out that they’re both heterosexual, but they’ve both been influenced by their very gay-friendly children and now have their own children. So that was the kind of work we did a lot of in that period.

JW:  That’s fabulous. So, tell me where you went after IPS.

CB:  Basically, within a year of leaving IPS, I decided to move to New York. And the main reason I decided to move to New York – these are what I call my years of wandering in the fields of global feminism – I decided after this decade that I had really become one of those people that I felt was getting stereotyped as only the lesbian speaker in all these environments. I knew that that was important to me, and I was glad I had done that work, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to do more globally.

When I first came out as a lesbian, my biggest fear was, I’ll never be able to work globally. Because as a student in the World Student Christian Federation, I had traveled all over the world, and I had, as a child, parents who wanted to go be missionaries. So, I always grew up with a sense of, I want to be out there in the world. I don’t want to spend my whole life just in the US. So, I had this in me already.

At first, I thought I’ll never be able to travel because you can’t be an out lesbian in so many parts of the world. And that was true in 1971, ’72, when I was coming out. But by the end of the ’70s, number one, Reagan had come to town, and the women’s group was facing a lot of backlash, and I felt we were stuck in some ways with our issues, with the ERA not getting passed, with what to do. And I thought, I really want to learn from, and connect to what women are doing elsewhere.

A lot of women had connections in Europe, but I was always oriented – maybe my parents, with their interests in China and Japan started it – I was interested in the rest of the world, not just Europe, but what’s happening with feminism in other places. And so, I realized that I could do more of that from New York than Washington, because in Washington, there are plenty of people that come to town, and I met many of them, and I did a global issue of Quest, actually, but the orientation of the city is national. It is the center of national politics. And for the ’70s, being at the center of national politics was great. I’m glad I was there.

I actually like the city of Washington in that regard. But I wanted to do this from an international perspective. And so, I did a little work talking to people. I had been in and out of New York my adult life, so it wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I had never lived here. I decided that I wanted to do international work on feminism from New York. I convinced my ex-lover, current best friend at that time, who had come from New York, to move to New York City and we moved to Brooklyn together.

I literally had no job, but I had a lot of connections. I did consulting for the National Gay Task Force, which had its headquarters in New York. I did some writing, and work for Ms. Magazine, eventually connected with something called the International Women’s Tribune Center, which gave me a platform to connect to women globally. And so, I did consulting for about eight years until I went to Rutgers. But during that time, I was exploring global feminism and what could bring women together more internationally. I did it also through the World Conferences on Women of the UN.

So, I worked with civil society groups, especially the International Women’s Tribune Center, that were coordinating and doing activity at the UN World Conferences on Women from 1980 in Copenhagen, to Nairobi in ’85 and then eventually the big one in ’95 in Beijing. But by then, I was at Rutgers. So, I went to conferences and I did organizing for events at both Copenhagen and Nairobi through the International Women’s Tribune Center.

I didn’t work as staff, I worked as a consultant, so I basically created the things I wanted to coordinate and offered it to them, and we would jointly raise money for it, and I would then do that. So, I got a chance to go to places where women were and to see what they were doing, and that became my framework of the work I was doing.

In the course of doing that work, I came to the decision that the issue that women could work across global north-south lines the best, was violence against women. This was an issue that affected women everywhere, and where nobody in the West could, or should, assume we had all the answers. Especially in the US, which has worse statistics on violence than many of the countries in the global south. Certainly, we have some experience to bring, and I was glad to bring that experience, but we didn’t have all the answers. It felt to me like an issue where we’re all in this together.

At the same time, the particulars were different. You could talk about race, class, culture, religion, in terms of the way it shaped violence without saying that any of us were free from that. That the intersections would illuminate the picture of the whole rather than divide us. And so, I started doing some workshops around this idea, and one of the main organizing efforts I did was a workshop on trafficking in women in 1983, which was one of the first workshops to try to bring this onto the global feminist agenda. But we were trying to bring a more feminist perspective into it. There’s a lot of different things that I did in those years. I wrote a lot about it. And that was really the basis for getting invited to go to Rutgers.

I went to Rutgers first for two years as a visiting professor. It was called the Laurie Chair in Women’s Studies. It was a two-year chair. Because Rutgers Women’s Studies was such a good department, they had raised money to bring somebody every two years. Most of them were academics, so they only came for one year, or one and a half years, to strengthen areas of the scholarship at Rutgers on women that they didn’t necessarily have themselves. I was the third one. The first Laurie Chair was Alison Jaggar, the second was Carol Gilligan. They were both academics.

They decided to use the chair differently, and they brought me, and they wanted me to help them make their curriculum more global and to introduce more. And so, I taught about global feminism and human rights. I then had developed this passion for bringing feminism to human rights, and I was using the issue of Violence Against Women as the concrete, What this really means, to show what it meant to do that. I did seminars at Rutgers and speeches as a visiting professor. They called it a visiting professor because then they asked me to stay and develop a center on these questions.

I owe everything to Ruth Mandel at the Center for American Women in Politics and Mary Hartman, who was dean of Douglas College and Catharine Stimson, who was a dean of the graduate school. To have this collection of academic women who had positioned themselves and had created this chair, and then were able to convince the university to bring somebody like me, who had publications, and they, as I mentioned, they sold it that I had comparable to a PhD in my public policy years in Washington.

And they got not only the two years, but then they got the university to agree that I could establish a center there on women’s global leadership, and that I could do what I was passionate about, which was really what Hillary [Clinton] picked up on as Women’s rights are human rights, and that I could establish a center that really would train women and bring that issue of how women’s rights are human rights, and particularly how to put violence against women onto the global human rights agenda. It was just beginning to emerge through the women’s conferences.

All that I did with that at Rutgers, was based on the experience I had with working with these workshops and groups at the women’s conferences in Copenhagen and Nairobi, where the issue of violence against women was coming on to the women’s agenda. We were beginning to have more and more places that that issue was being recognized nationally and internationally, so we were able to build the part of that, that would be aimed at bringing it onto the global human rights agenda. To see that violence against women was actually, in many ways, a classic example of human rights abuse. That it fit all the terms of slavery, of unlawful detainment, of battery, and even death.

Almost all the issues that were worked on in human rights had a parallel in the issue of violence against women. So that became the work of the center for many years, and probably the most important work that I did in terms of changing the perception at the global level, and therefore, space for women at the national level to bring these issues into the human rights framework, which has much more validity and resources than feminism did.

There’s a backlash against human rights, I think in part because we added women too. But that added to the backlash. And there’s also a sexual rights agenda now as human rights. And the backlash to human rights is partly a result of expanding the concept of human rights. But I still think it’s the only way that human rights can really be understood.

JW:  What comes to mind, Hillary Clinton saying, what did she say, “Reproductive rights are human rights?” Did she say that from you?

CB:  She stole it from our movement. She said, “Women’s rights are human rights.” We wanted her to say that. We were actually lobbying the Clinton administration. I mean, we were lobbying them about this perspective. We were not specifically saying what Hillary should say in her speech. We were definitely lobbying the Clinton administration that women’s rights are human rights, and that these issues should be on the human rights agenda of the State Department, et cetera. Hillary understood it, and she took it, and she took it to a bigger stage. All of that we actually were happy about.

The only thing I’m not happy about is that today people think that’s where it started. It came from a global women’s movement. It didn’t come from me alone. Even going back 40 years, Pauli Murray said, “Women’s rights are human rights.” She didn’t really say it as a slogan, but all the work that she wrote about race and gender as human rights issues, I mean, it’s embedded in what she wrote. It’s embedded in many people from before.

But we were the group, myself and others from the ’80s and ’90s, who put it together as a campaign in the specificity of the human rights system that we have today. At first, we were thrilled that she said it. We only got upset when we realized that the world now thinks it started there, and I never want them to think it starts with one person.

JW:  Are you still teaching or you’re not at Rutgers anymore? Is that right?

CB:  I just retired in February of this year. I retired at the end of December ’23 but I kept teaching. I was a director of the center for 20 years, so from 1989 to 2009, and then when I passed on the directorship to Radhika Balakrishnan, who has been the director since then, I continued to teach and to be on the faculty, and to benefit from tenure, a wonderful system for those who get it. Not necessarily a system to be defended across the board, but it enabled me to teach and I started to have more time being on the board of some of the women’s organizations like the Global Fund for Women, AWID, the Association for Women’s Rights and Development, and I’m now on the board of the Urgent Action Fund.

So, I had usually one of those at different times over the past 15 years to be on the board of, doing the work of supporting these kinds of ideas. I really do feel that my instincts in 1980, that the way to revitalize feminism in the face of the backlash of ’79, ’80, which we certainly had, and that Houston conference taught me how powerful the backlash was, that the resources and the way to fight that was also to bring a global perspective to the US has been a lot of my work, too.

I taught gender and human rights, women’s leadership classes, at Rutgers, where I was trying to introduce young people, mostly women, who were interested in these questions to see them from a global perspective and to see all the ideas that were coming from elsewhere and to be able to make their frameworks bigger and connected them to policy, to things that have been done at the global level or introducing them to writers who are writing about the issues that they’re working on. So, it was a great transition. I mean, I feel I’ve gone from doing the work to teaching the work. And that’s the way it should be.

JW:  Passing on the baton, yes, that’s great.

CB:  Or as Gloria said once, “I’m not passing my baton. I’m using it to light others.”

JW:  Oh, perfect. I’m going to use that.

CB:  I’m going to send you that because they just had awards at Rutgers called the Torch Lighter Awards.

JW:  Oh, how great.

CB:  That quote that we aren’t passing, but we’re lighting the torches of others.

JW:  Excellent. I love it. Well, as we close, do you have anything you’d like to add?

CB:  The only thing I would like to add is that to me, and maybe this comes out of being a historian in my academic training, I think it’s so important for women facing these issues and the backlashes of today, to know that they are part of a long line of women, not only in the US, but around the world. Who have done this fight, who are still doing this fight, and that their backlash is a sign of success. And so, yes, you have to fight back. But if you didn’t have backlash, you wouldn’t have changed anything.