Justice & Law Quote by Charlotte Bunch

Bunch’s line is polite on the surface and radical in its demand: stop treating women’s rights as a policy category managed from above, and start treating it as a democratic mandate shaped from below. The first clause does two kinds of work. It asserts authority (women “have a lot to say”) while also rebuking the habitual paternalism that asks women to testify about harm but not to design the fix. She’s not requesting representation as symbolism; she’s arguing for expertise born of lived reality and political organizing.

The second clause names the real target: the state’s reflex to translate feminist demands into palatable, technocratic reforms. “Governments need to learn” flips the usual hierarchy. Activists become the teachers; officials, the remedial students. And the phrase “listen to the movement” is a strategic widening of the lens. Not “listen to women” in an individual, easily co-opted sense, but to a collective force with memory, analysis, and leverage. It’s a warning against token consultations, the single advisory panel, the photo-op “women’s forum” that produces no structural change.

Context matters: Bunch emerged from the human-rights turn in feminism, pushing the idea that gender violence, reproductive autonomy, and economic inequality aren’t private troubles but matters of international obligation. “Respond” is the hard endpoint. Listening is not virtue; it’s a trigger for accountability, budgets, enforcement, and laws that treat women’s rights as non-negotiable civic infrastructure rather than an elective moral cause.