Casey Hayden and Mary King: “Sex and Caste”

It could be argued that the modern feminist movement began with the publication of “Sex and Caste,” described by its authors, Casey Hayden and Mary King, as a “kind of memo” sent to a number of women active in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in 1965 and published in the pacifist magazine Liberation in 1966. Prior to 1965 the authors had been involved in the civil rights struggle as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Earlier, in 1964, King had written a paper, cosigned by Hayden, in which she outlined her dissatisfaction with what she perceived to be the sexism of the SNCC. The paper was dismissed by the SNCC’s male leadership. The SNCC, despite its commitment to racial equality, fell lamentably short in matters of gender equality and generally expected the organization’s idealistic women volunteers to perform such tasks as cooking, typing, taking notes, running errands, operating mimeograph machines, and deferring to the male leadership. At a SNCC staff meeting in 1964, the organization’s leader, Stokely Carmichael, is alleged to have said that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.”