Revisiting the Second Wave

Abstract This interview between Professor Mary King and Elizabeth Jacobs took place at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, during the course of 2004 and 2005. Mary King's work as Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies for the United Nations takes her to all corners of the globe. On this occasion she had returned to the United Kingdom to present a research paper at the international conference “The United States and Global Human Rights” held at Oxford University. The timing of the interview was made pertinent by this context and by the fact that it was almost forty years to the day after the main subject of the interview—the position paper by Mary King and Casey Hayden titled “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo”—first appeared at the SNCC retreat in Waveland, Mississippi in the fall of 1964. The paper was later published in the April 1966 issue of the pacifist and transatlantic War Resisters League Liberation magazine, and became a key text of second-wave feminism.