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.”
Lesbian feminist trailblazer. Activist, Author, Educator, Organizer. National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee. Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University, Co-Chair. Elected first president of the University Christian Movement (UCM), Southern Methodist University. A founder of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, a feminist journal published in Washington, D.C. from 1974 until 1982. Honorary board member of Veteran Feminists of America.
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, October 2024

Photo. With Gloria Steinem, 1979.
More About Charlotte:
- Select Interviews
- An interview with filmmaker Tami Gold about her documentary, “Passionate Politics”, on the life and works of Charlotte Bunch.
- “Passionate Politics,” trailer
- Charlotte Bunch Is Important: The Autostraddle Interview by Jamie J. Hagen, June 2012.
- Makers: Women Who Make America, Charlotte Bunch, April 27, 2011
- Interview with Charlotte Bunch by Stephen McKiernan, January 2010
- Veteran Feminists of America
- Morris County NJ NOW
- Women’s Rights as Human Rights
- Charlotte Bunch and Rebecca Lubetkin discuss The World Women’s Conference in Beijing. Bringing it Home
- The Lesbian Tide, Hustling Theoretician, Charlotte Bunch, by Jeanne Cordova, pages 3, 38-39, 1977
- Archives
- Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute
- The Furies Collective
- “Those Ladies Were Outraged”: A Lesbian Collective on Capitol Hill Shakes Up Feminism
- Cited in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, pages 64 – 65.
- Wikipedia page