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Center for Women’s Global Leadership joins in global campaign for universal human rights
Charlotte Bunch’s office at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership is a montage of artifacts from around the world: a printed bark cloth from Fiji, a Peruvian block print on cloth, a puppet from India. Most are gifts from friends and colleagues met during many years of traveling and working for women’s and human rights.
One of those friends is Mary Robinson, a former high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations and now a member of the Elders, a group of prestigious human-rights activists who include Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, former President Jimmy Carter, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader of democratic activists in Burma. Last year Robinson’s office called to ask Bunch to participate in a global campaign to get one billion individual signatures on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
World governments signed onto this document in 1948. To commemorate the 60th anniversary of its signing, the Elders wanted to organize a global, grassroots recommitment to its sweeping principles. Robinson asked whether Bunch’s center would lead the women’s rights component of this yearlong human rights campaign that started last December.
The overture, to which Bunch said “yes,” would not surprise anyone who knows her work. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), founded by Bunch in 1989, is internationally renowned for its research, teaching, and activism on women’s and human rights. Straddling women's and gender studies and international studies at Rutgers, the center is part of the Institute for Women’s Leadership, a consortium of seven entities at Rutgers which study, educate, and promote women as leaders directed by Mary S. Hartman, and it also is part of the Office of the Dean of International Programs headed by Joanna Regulska.
Women suffer disproportionately from poverty, hunger, sexual violence and crime, and lack of personal, educational, and professional freedom. Bunch is one of a growing number of women’s-rights activists making the case that human rights will never be a reality for men until women are unafraid to live as they choose.
Still, the call from the Elders took her aback. “I hadn’t thought about the fact that they would ask us to be a partner with groups like Amnesty International and Action Aid, groups that are much larger than ours,” she said. “But we had organized the women's human rights campaign around the 50th anniversary of the declaration [in 1998] with the involvement of groups around the world.”
Her work requires big-picture thinking and exhausting physical and mental effort. Frequent travel is sandwiched between teaching a course on gender and human rights for upperclass and master’s students in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
“Sometimes I’m introduced as ‘tireless,’ and I want to say, ‘No, no, no, I’m not tireless,’” Bunch said recently in a rare quiet moment in her office at the women’s complex on the Douglass Campus. “We do get tired. We do have moments in which we’re discouraged. I think what keeps me going the most is that I work with the women who are working for change. I work on problems that are huge and enormous, but I work with women all around the world who are themselves activists, who are themselves seeking to make things different. I think we energize each other, and that’s probably at the core of this. It’s not only one’s work; it becomes a friendship network, a network of colleagues and people who share a vision and support each other.”
CWGL’s programs nurture leadership skills in women and advance feminist perspectives in policy-making processes in local, national, and international arenas. Since 1990, it has fostered women’s leadership in the area of human rights, and so it was an obvious choice to carry the banner for women’s rights within the Elders’ campaign.
The center’s staff and student interns are laying plans to gather signatures on the declaration on campus next fall, an effort that will culminate in the annual “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence,” November 25 to December 10.
Bunch’s message – that ultimately people, not governments, change the world – is emblematic of the evolution in the women’s-rights movement over the past decade from grassroots, home-based organizing to global, electronic organizing. Women still gather in their homes and talk about the pressing issues of the day, which will differ from Santiago, Chile, to Nairobi, Kenya. But they also are connecting over the internet and having global gatherings with their colleagues from around the world (on March 8, Bunch joined Latin American activists in Peru for several public commemorations of International Women’s Day). More important, women’s groups are also organizing with mainstream organizations that include men. Signature by signature, email by email, they are bringing a grassroots feminist perspective and expertise to the global struggle for human rights.
“In a way,” Bunch said, “this kind of international networking is the most positive side of globalization. People can connect now in amazing ways across the globe and create new forms of voice that can be very powerful.”
As much as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signature campaign has raised the center’s global visibility, Bunch hopes it will also raise the center’s profile within the Rutgers community and among prospective students.
“I would hope that we would be seen as part of the future for Rutgers, not only as having accomplished something in these 15-plus years, but also as pointing the way to what Rutgers needs in the future: to have its students and its institutions and learning connected to a global view,” Bunch said.
Meanwhile, Bunch will continue to travel the world and receive high-level human-rights activists at Rutgers, collecting handmade crafts and artifacts along the way to remind her that Rutgers is very much engaged with the most pressing global issues of the day.