CHARLOTTE BUNCH

Charlotte Bunch was born in West Jefferson, North Carolina. That same year, her family moved to Artesia, New Mexico. She was a history major at Duke University and graduated magna cum laude in 1966. Bunch is an activist, author, and organizer in the Women's and Human Rights Movements. Bunch is the founding executive director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership as well as a distinguished professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University. One of Bunch's significant contributions is coining the phrase "women's rights are human rights." This rallying cry emerged in the late '80s as a response to the need for women's issues, such as sex trafficking and violence, to be recognized as human rights abuses. Before her work at the Global Center, Bunch was a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a founder of D.C. Women's Liberation and of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. She has written numerous articles and edited or co-edited nine anthologies, including the Center's reports on the UN Beijing Plus 5 Review process in 2000 and the World Conference Against Racism in 2001. She has published a volume of her own collected work, Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action, and co-authored Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights.

"Women's rights are human rights."