Collection

Bunch, Charlotte Papers

Span Dates: 1950-1988
Bulk Dates:
Volume: 7 linear ft.

Description

The Charlotte Bunch Papers contain articles, essays, songs, and scripts on the women's liberation movement; correspondence, notes, press releases, pamphlets, newsletters, and mailing lists from many women's organizations and conferences, including local groups in Cleveland, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., the National Organization for Women, and the National Women's Studies Association; material on lesbian/feminism; correspondence, minutes, financial records, memoranda, reports, and bylaws of the National Gay Task Force; and drafts and correspondence with authors which reflect CB's editing work. A separate collection Charlotte Bunch Additional Papers, 1944-1988, document her early work with religious organizations (http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00221).

Hist/Bio Note

Charlotte Bunch was born in West Jefferson, North Carolina, on October 13, 1944, moving later that year to Artesia, New Mexico, where she attended the public schools. A history major, Bunch graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1966. Her college years were marked by numerous extracurricular activities, including work with the Young Women's Christian Association; the Methodist student movement; a poverty program in Oakland, California; and various civil rights groups. In 1966 she was a youth delegate to the World Council of Churches Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, Switzerland, and attended a meeting on China sponsored by the World Student Christian Federation. Returning from China, Bunch became president of the University Christian Movement, an ecumenical organization in Washington, D.C. concerned with social change. In 1967, she served as student intern at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington (IPS), exploring the interaction of education and politics. Moving to Cleveland in 1968, CB became an activist in the local women's liberation movement, helping to organize the first national women's liberation conference, in Chicago in November 1968. She worked on the staff of the campus ministry at Case Western Reserve University until 1969 when she became a visiting fellow at IPS. Deeply involved in the women's liberation movement and the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, she traveled to North Vietnam and Laos in 1970 and participated in the International Conference of North American and Indochinese Women held in Canada in 1971. After 1971, Bunch worked primarily to develop a lesbian/feminist ideology nationally and a lesbian/feminist community in Washington. She continued as a fellow at IPS until 1977, and has taught a variety of courses on feminism at a number of colleges and universities. She has lectured widely, been a participant or facilitator at a number of international workshops and conferences, and served from 1979 to 1980 as consultant to the secretariat for the World Conference for the United Nations Decade on Women. CB is the coeditor of a number of books, including The New Women: A Motive Anthology on Women's Liberation (1970), Learning Our Way: Essays in Feminist Education (1983), and Not By Degrees: Essays in Feminist Education, as well as one of the founders and editors of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, (from 1974 until its demise in 1984) and The Furies (1972-1973), a lesbian/feminist newspaper. The author of numerous articles and pamphlets, she is active in many organizations, including the National Women's Program Committee of the American Friends Service Committee, the National Women's Conference, and the National Organization for Women; she is a board member of the New York Feminist Art Institute and the National Gay Task Force.

Finding Aid

There are two major additions to this collection. See finding aids at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01377 and http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00221. Harvard University Libraries' online Hollis catalog also show related collections that include materials from and about Charlotte Bunch.
https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00220

Location

The Charlotte Bunch Papers are located at the Schlesinger Library at Cambridge, Massachussetts.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library

Tags

Ecumenical | Friends/Quakers | Author/editor | Feminism | Washington, D.C. | Methodist (UMC, United Methodist Church)