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 militant 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.”

Casey Hayden was born Sandra Cason in highly segregated East Texas. She was one of the founding members of the SNCC and a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. In 1961 she married Tom Hayden, the president of the Students for a Democratic Society. Mary Elizabeth King, too, was affiliated with the SNCC and was frequently at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr., during civil rights demonstrations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the two would not know it at the time, “Sex and Caste” would come to be widely discussed in feminist circles and is considered a foundational document of “second-wave feminism” (the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused not on the legal inequalities attacked by first-wave feminism but on unofficial inequalities and a range of social issues affecting women). Indeed, the authors themselves state that “the chances seem nil that we could start a movement,” yet that is precisely what they did.