Charlotte Bunch, an activist, author and organizer in the women's, civil and human rights movements for four decades, was on the University of Oklahoma campus Thursday for the launch of the Center for Social Justice.
Bunch also gave a public talk as part of Women's and Gender Studies Program Director Jill Irvine's Presidential Dream Course, Women and World Politics.
Bunch is the director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership in Douglas College at Rutgers University. Her lecture was titled "Women's Global Activism; Women's Rights as Human Rights."
She said that women's rights have made a lot of progress over the past few decades in both the U.S. and around the world. There is still a lot more to be done, however.
The push for women's rights isn't just a Western thing, however; countries around the world have a documented history for the push for women's rights in one aspect or another for centuries, Bunch said. These movements weren't called feminism, but they called for social change, she said.
It's important to remember that as Americans, Bunch said. The role that activists in the U.S. should play in the global movement for women's rights is one of supporting indigenous movements, she said.
Many activists from the West want to come into another country and tell them how things should be done, but Bunch said social change needs to happen from within the culture.
"It's always more effective to have local movements working for change," she said.
That's not to say that opponents of women's rights are right in excusing oppression in the name of culture, she said. Culture is not static, but it always changing and always diverse within a society. Human rights should still be valued within a society, Bunch said.
"Culture is constantly evolving," she said. "It is always changing ... but the question of who changes it and how it changes is an important principle in human rights."
Americans should support local women's movements around the world, but need to understand they don't know everything either, she said.
Women's rights in the U.S. has a long way to go as well, she pointed out. There's a lot that can be learned from the changes other countries have implemented, she said.
The U.S. is the last industrialized country that has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), often described as an international bill of rights for women.
For those interested in becoming an activist, Bunch said to remember that all global solutions are really local ones.
"When the question is asked how do you start, I think you start where you are," she said. From there, Bunch said in order to expand to other issues and places, put oneself into new situations where one can learn about different kinds of struggles.
Julianna Parker Jones 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com
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