Governor Peter Shumlin has appointed Charlotte Dennett of Cambridge to serve a four-year term on the Vermont Commission on Women.
Commissioner Dennett has a wide range of experience as a journalist, author, attorney, university professor and volunteer with women’s and labor groups.
Ms. Dennett was born in Beirut, Lebanon, the daughter of a U.S. diplomat and an English teacher. Though she grew up in Massachusetts, Ms. Dennett later returned to Lebanon with her mother and completed her last two years of high school in Beirut. She returned to the U.S. to get her BA at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass, and went on to obtain a Masters Degree in art history at Post Pius XII Institute in Florence, Italy. She then returned to Beirut and became a journalist, first as a roving correspondent with the weekly English language feature magazine, The Middle East Sketch, and later as a reporter for theBeirut Daily Star. Her journalistic work took her beyond Lebanon to Syria, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Dubai, Kuwait, and Oman and she became fascinated with the impact of modernization on women’s lives in those countries. (Years later, she would share her insights on the Middle East by writing a column forVermont Woman Magazine from 2003-2006 entitled “Beneath the Burqa” and an essay, “The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context” in an award-winning 2006 book critical of the U.S. media, Into the Buzzsaw).
Ms. Dennett moved to New York City in 1975 following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. While working the UN beat she met her future husband, investigative journalist and author Gerard Colby. Dennett and Colby spent the next 18 years researching and writing for national, international and Vermont news sources, including writing a book on the genocide of Amazonian Indians. HarperCollins published their 1000-page book, Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, in 1995.
The couple moved to Vermont in 1984 and in her spare time, Dennett became involved in local political and community issues. In 1986, she served as the chair of the ERA Task Force for Vermont NOW (National Organization for Women). From 1990-1994 she served on the board of the Franklin County Family Center, and was president of the board in 1994. She also “read for the law” in Vermont’s legal clerkship program and became a licensed attorney in 1997.
Since 2002, she has held the position of “Volunteer in Politics” on the Executive Committee of the Vermont AFL-CIO. The position is designed to advance women’s leadership in the labor movement. In 2008 and 2010, she ran for Vermont Attorney General. She also co-taught with Gerard Colby “Introduction to Politics” and “International Economic Development” at Johnson State College. She is currently focusing on her law practice with an emphasis on family law, personal injury and consumer fraud cases.
