newjerseynewsroom.com

BY KENDALL LaPARO

Not every professor spends her time outside the confines of the classroom restructuring the agencies of the United Nations. But for internationally renowned women's rights activist Charlotte Bunch, it is just the next item of business on her to do list.

In her many years as an advocate for women's rights, Bunch, a professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and founder of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, has spearheaded a shift in the image of females around the world, said Meryl Frank, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

"Charlotte Bunch is an enormously important player in the women's equality movement worldwide," Frank said. "Her words ‘women's rights are human rights' made the simple and direct case for women's rights around the world."

Because of Bunch and CWGL campaigns, the UN has created dozens of programs and positions for reporters addressing the issue of violence against women and sexual violence in war and conflict, Bunch said.

With the help of Bunch and the CWGL, women in more than 100 countries have created laws specifically outlawing domestic violence and rape - legislation that 20 years ago did not exist, she said.

Despite these impressive achievements, Bunch said her work is far from over and believes that talking about women's issues is only the first step.

"We've been able to get more and more people to affirm that women's rights are human rights," she said. "A big challenge is to get that implemented, to make that a reality in women's lives."

Bunch is working at the UN on a campaign called Gender Equality Architecture Reform that aims to combine the several smaller offices that currently handle women's rights issues into one large agency.

"Right now, the UN has at least three different agencies that deal with women's issues, and they're all pretty small and underfunded," said Radhika Balakrishnan, a professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University and the executive director of the CWGL. "The GEAR campaign has been to try and get a new entity in the UN at a very high level."

Both Bunch and Balakrishnan said that a more powerful, unified agency would benefit women across the globe in terms of both policy and funding.

After three years of campaigning, Bunch said the new women's agency would come to fruition as soon as this fall.

The CWGL, which Bunch founded at the University in 1989, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with an International Symposium on March 6 at the Hunter College Assembly Hall in New York City.

The symposium brought together international women's rights activists, from women fighting for sexual rights in the Middle East to women vying for economic rights in Europe and Africa, Bunch said.

The event featured guest speakers, including Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and panel discussions focusing on sexual and reproductive rights, the economy and the women's rights movement as a whole, she said.

Bunch felt the positive energy at the event defied the detrimental stereotype of the bitter, angry feminist.

"Unfortunately, I think that [the angry feminist] is one of the media stereotypes that young women are afraid of," she said. "We had several hundred women from all over the world really sharing positive experiences, strategies that have worked, as well as looking at challenges and problems."

Feminism does not insist that all women are identical, Bunch said. It merely brings often-overlooked women's issues to the table.

"Any kind of domination or oppression based on sex - but also based on gender, race, class -should never be institutionalized," she said. "At its simplest, I think that's what feminism is."

But Bunch said she never lets the serious nature of her work get her down. Rather, she feels energized by the people she meets and the positive changes she has witnessed in her lifetime.

"I feel like working with people who are trying to do something to make the world better, to make the world reflect what we care about, is really very exciting," Bunch said. "Of course sometimes it's hard, and you have backlash against it, but it's the most rewarding thing I can imagine doing with my life."

Kendall LaParo is a contributing writer at NewJerseyNewsroom.com