AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch A Joyce Warshow film Discussion Guide Produced by: Tami Gold Research and Writing by: Anahi Russo Garrido Editing by: Charlotte Bunch and Jo Ann Miller AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE Contents Introduction page 1 Who is Charlotte Bunch? Chapter 1 page 5 Personal and Political Evolution Chapter 2 page 9 U.S. Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminism Published by Chapter 3 page 15 Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Global Feminism Emerges Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 160 Ryders Lane Chapter 4 page 22 New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8555 USA Center for Tel: 1-848-932-8782 Women’s Global Leadership Fax: 1-848-932-1180 Email: [email protected] Chapter 5 page 28 Website: http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu Women’s Rights Are Human Rights © 2013 Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) Appendix page 36 Thank you to CWGL staff who contributed to the Guide: Radhika Balakrishnan, Margot Baruch, Mika Kinose, A. Two Historic Videos and Lucy V. Vidal. Included on DVD Thanks also to other collaborators: David Pavlosky, Roxanna Carrillo, Debra Leibowitz, B. Biographies of Key Genevieve Cato, Barbara Balliet, and Dorothy Sander. Activists in the Film Funding for the Guide provided by: C. Timeline Open Society Institute, Institute for Women’s Leadership, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, D. Bibliography SAS, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers, the State and Resources University of New Jersey To order the film go to:passionatepoliticsfilm.com AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: Passionate Politics:The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch ecumenical organization was affiliated with Introduction: the World Student Christian Federation, whose Executive Committee took her on her first Who is Charlotte Bunch? travels around the world. In Washington, she Charlotte Bunch is an activist, writer, teacher, became the first woman tenured fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) – a left-leaning and organizer in the feminist and human think tank where she worked for a decade, rights movements of our day. She was born learning how public policy actually gets made. during World War II in the mountains of North From her position at IPS, Charlotte helped Carolina on Friday, October 13, 1944 – the third found Washington D.C.’s Women’s Liberation child and middle daughter in a family of four in 1968, The Furies Lesbian Feminist Collective children. Her family moved across the country and Newspaper in 1971, and Quest: A Feminist by car with wartime gas rations to Artesia, New Quarterly in 1974. Her life in the 1960s and 70s Mexico, when she was six weeks old. Charlotte reads like a classic chapter from the movements attended public schools throughout her years of the time, as she was both shaped by and in Artesia and participated in student clubs, helped to shape the era and especially the U.S. edited the school newspaper and yearbook, women’s liberation movement. and kept busy warding off boredom in a dusty town of eight thousand some two hundred In the 1980s, Charlotte took another prescient miles away from any big city. turn and moved to New York City to devote her time to developing the potential of global After high school feminism, a topic she had begun to explore in graduation, the 70s but now saw as the future of feminism. Charlotte traveled She worked as a consultant on a wide range across the country of projects, organized an early international to Duke University, workshop on sex trafficking, taught activist where she was courses in Latin America and South Asia, and active in the YWCA, the Methodist Student Movement, and many other student activities. She discovered her life passion for activism through the civil rights movement and graduated with a BA in history and political science in 1966. After Duke, Charlotte moved to Washington D.C., where she was both a local community organizer and did national organizing as the president of the University Christian Movement. This newly formed progressive AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: 1 Passionate Politics:The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch gradually developed a focus on the United Theory in Action and co-author of Demanding Nations World Conferences on Women and Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna their potential for advancing feminism. As a Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights. Throughout result of this work, she was invited to Rutgers her life, she has served on the Board of Directors University in New Jersey on a two-year visiting and advisory groups for many organizations and professorship in women’s studies, which is currently on the Board of the Global Fund for Women, the Advisory Committee for the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, and the Global Civil Society Advisory Group for UN Women. She has been central to feminist organizing around the U.N. World Conferences on Women (1980-95) and to numerous civil society efforts at the U.N., including the Advisory Committee for the Secretary General’s 2006 Report to the General Assembly on Violence Against Women, and as a leader in the GEAR (Gender Equality Architecture Reform) campaign for a new U.N. agency on women’s rights. Bunch’s contributions to women’s human rights have been widely recognized: the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the White House Eleanor Roosevelt Award, and the “1000 Women Peace Makers” nominated for the Nobel Peace morphed into a next- stage career as a global Prize are a few examples. organizer and thinker based at the University. Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of In 1989, Charlotte founded the Center for Charlotte Bunchis a one-hour documentary Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Douglass College, Rutgers University. CWGL initiated film that brings Charlotte’s story to life – from groundbreaking Women’s Global Leadership idealistic young civil rights activist to lesbian Institutes and launched campaigns for women’s separatist to internationally acclaimed leader of rights as human rights at the U.N. and globally a campaign to put women’s rights on the global that are still models for this work. As the human rights agenda. In dramatizing Charlotte’s Founding Director for 20 years, she remains a life and work, the film also reveals the wider Senior Scholar at the Center. Charlotte is also landscape of modern feminist activism – from a Distinguished Professor in Women’s and its roots in the 1960s struggles for social justice Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she to international campaigns against gender- teaches courses in women and leadership as based violence today. Interweaving past and well as gender and human rights. present interviews with rich archival material, Passionate Politicsis at once a deeply moving A prolific writer, Charlotte has published many personal portrait of an activist life and an influential essays and edited nine anthologies. inspiring chronicle of the building of a global She is the author of Passionate Politics: Feminist social justice movement. AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: 2 Passionate Politics:The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE A Companion Discussion Guide to the film: Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch The film focuses in particular on Charlotte’s While the film draws from an extensive involvement in the important movements that visual archive, the Guide points readers to have marked the twentieth and twenty-first a rich textual archive. Several of these texts centuries. Starting with her childhood in New were written by Charlotte; others highlight Mexico, organizations, Passionate activists, and Politics documents covers that appear Charlotte’s in the film. leadership Thus, the in the Guide struggle for introduces civil rights, readers to a women’s network of liberation, resources lesbian- that shed feminism, light on LGBT Charlotte’s and sexual life and rights, global work all women’s over the rights, world, and human spanning rights. more than four decades. Charlotte’s story is also The film narrated by appears her vast political and social networks around almost twenty-five years after the landmark the globe. We hear the inspiring voices of publication of Bunch’s collected essays, women from Asia, Africa, North and South Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action America, and the Caribbean, who have worked (St. Martin’s Press). Published in 1987, the with her and whose efforts she has encouraged book is, in the words of Rita Mae Brown, an and supported. Interwoven throughout the film “odyssey of intellect as well as years,” as it are excerpts from Charlotte’s personal letters, traces the contemporary history of women’s which illuminate her determination to create a struggles for justice since the 1960s. Passionate more just world. Politicsthe book is a particularly important companion for this guide to Passionate Politics As a companion to the film Passionate Politics, the film. this Discussion Guide puts into historical context the broad span of events depicted in The Discussion Guide’s five chapters follow the the film and provides guidelines for further chronological order of the film. exploration, reflection, and discussion of the topics in the film and in Charlotte’s life. Notably, ■■ The Introductionpresents Charlotte’s the Guide is intended to stimulate discussion personal and professional history and about the transformational strategies that provides an overview of the Guide’s appear throughout the film.