Document 86A: Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason) and Mary King, "Sex and Caste," 18 November 1965, Liberation Magazine, April 1966, Elaine DeLott Baker Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. pp. 35-36

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Introduction

   In the summer of 1965, Casey Hayden wrote a second memo, extending the themes of the Waveland memo (Document 43). Casey had been in Chicago and wrote it on her way to visit Mary King in her family's Virginia home. While there, the two women polished the statement and sent it to a list of 40 SNCC and SDS women. Casey describes that process in this headnote, written 11 September 2014, in response to my request:

   After SNCC advised whites to organize whites, I went to Chicago for a summer project in 1965 as SNCC staff on loan to SDS, to work with JOIN (Jobs or Income Now). I was organizing women, poor women, in an effort to create an interracial movement of the poor. [See "How Did Feminism Contribute to the Transformation of Radical Theater in the United States, 1966-1983?" See Documents 2-9, also on this website, for further documentation of the JOIN project in Chicago.] The women were fearful and abused by the young unemployed sociopathic gang which SDS men were trying to organize. One was regularly beaten up by her boyfriend. The gang broke into our apartment, held us captive, and left with my family jewelry. I was terrified, at a loss as to how to raise this contradiction for discussion on the project, and realized it was foolhardy of me to try to organize women alone and on my own. I needed some help. This document was the result. I wrote it on the road and showed it to Mary King, who signed on and helped me finalize and distribute. It later appeared as the first published statement from new left women in Liberation magazine, the journal of the War Resisters' League. I knew the publisher, David McReynolds, through Bayard Rustin. Someone to whom the paper was mailed passed it on to him. Thus we came out.

   "Sex and Caste" emulates the YWCA's "Wise Way of Work," a feminist slogan from that remnant of the first wave: create a group, talk about a topic personally, create a program to meet the questions and issues raised. I had been a national Y leader; we followed this format all the way up. Our national programming areas in my last years with the student Y were race relations, the changing roles of men and women, peace, and vocation. This parallel positioning of race and gender was the basis of my approach to both issues, and is reflected in the Waveland Women's Paper's comparison of the two. (See Document 43) That paper also reflects my professional work in the Y just prior to joining SNCC, organizing illegal integrated weekend "human relations workshops" under Ella Baker's direction on a Field Foundation grant. Again, sharing of subjective experiences was the core. "How would you feel if. . ." was the question for white students attending these gatherings. At Waveland we asked this question of men.

   Now, however, I was not petitioning or asking for understanding from men. This is an organizing piece for women, a new approach, and much more my style than addressing the prevailing powers directly at the beginning as we had in MIssissippi. I like to start from what we have, not from what we don't have, and I'd engaged small groups of women to share ourselves and our values and problems as women in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, and Tougaloo. This paper aimed to replicate those groups and provided what I'd heard so far as a possible discussion guide. We were all about problems now.

   The key sentence, the intent of the paper, is this: "Perhaps we can start to talk to each other more openly than in the past and create a community of support for each other so we can deal with ourselves and others with integrity and can therefore keep working." Women represented to me the potential of our old beloved community, redeeming the culture, or, in this case, redeeming our Movement. I saw women's discovery of ourselves and each other through honest interchange as a potential stable core for our visionary Movement, now rapidly disintegrating into special interest groups. Social change was us, the Movement, standing outside power, driven by our existential desire for authenticity, absorbent and spreading outward in amoebic fashion through the force of attraction. This was where safety existed for me, as it had since my days as a wild Christian existentialist college student at our community in Austin, where these notions had first captured and comforted me.

   In this paper, we reject the notion of a separate movement for women's rights as infeasible, but in point of fact that was not my interest. I was wedded to revolutionary nonviolence and a great upending of the whole social/political/economic system and culture in favor of compassionate concern for others. I saw that as women's way, deep and radical, and hoped a more complete engagement with each other, and with our issue as part of a larger system, would lead us there.

   After I wrote this memo, finding politics inadequate, I sought out other life paths while the women's movement emerged in its own fashion. However, the failed vision and praxis hidden here might be politically useful when the exploitation of the planet reaches its limit and the current system proves unsustainable.


[p. 35]

Sex and Caste

The following is a memo which was written for private circulation but
which we have asked permission to publish, not only in the confidence
that it will interest our readers but also in the hope that it will lead to
continuing discussion of the vital, yet neglected, problems it raises
.

A KIND OF MEMO from CASEY HAYDEN and MARY KING
to a number of other women in the peace and freedom movements.

November 18, 1965

    We've talked a lot, to each other and to some of you, about our own and other women's problems in trying to live in our personal lives and in our work as independent and creative people. In these conversations we've found what seems to be recurrent ideas or themes. Maybe we can look at these things many of us perceive, often as a result of insights learned from the movement:

    • Sex and caste: There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a whole. But in particular, women we've talked to who work in the movement seem to be caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power which may exclude them. Women seem to be placed in the same position of assumed subordination in personal situations too. It is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women.

    This is complicated by several facts, among them: 1) The caste system is not institutionalized by law (women have the right to vote, to sue for divorce, etc.); 2) Women can't withdraw from the situation (a la nationalism) or overthrow it; 3) There are biological differences (even though those biological differences are usually discussed or accepted without taking present and future technology into account so we probably can't be sure what these differences mean). Many people who are very hip to the implications of the racial caste system, even people in the movement, don't seem to be able to see the sexual caste system and if the question is raised they respond with: "That's the way it's supposed to be. There are biological differences." Or with other statements which recall a white segregationist confronted with integration.

    • Women and problems of work: The caste system perspective dictates the roles assigned to women in the movement, and certainly even more to women outside the movement. Within the movement, questions arise in situations ranging from relationships of women organizers to men in the community, to who cleans the freedom house, to who holds leadership positions, to who does secretarial work, and who acts as spokesman for groups. Other problems arise between women with varying degrees of awareness of themselves as being as capable as men but held back from full participation, or between women who see themselves as needing more control of their work than other women demand. And there are problems with relationships between white women and black women.

    • Women and personal relations with men: Having learned from the movement to think radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before, a lot of women in the movement have begun trying to apply those lessons to their own relations with men. Each of us probably has her own story of the various results, and of the internal struggle occasioned by trying to break out of very deeply learned fears, needs, and self-perceptions, and of what happens when we try to replace them with concepts of people and freedom learned from the movement and organizing.

    • Institutions: Nearly everyone has real questions about those institutions which shape perspectives on men and women: marriage, child rearing patterns, women's (and men's) magazines, etc. People are beginning to think about and even to experiment with new forms in these areas.

    • Men's reactions to the questions raised here: A very few men seem to feel, when they hear conversations involving these problems, that they have a right to be present and participate in them, since they are so deeply involved. At the same time, very few men can respond non-defensively, since the whole idea is either beyond their comprehension or threatens and exposes them. The usual response is laughter. That inability to see the whole issue as serious, as the strait-jacketing of both sexes, and as societally determined often shapes our own response so that we learn to think in their terms about ourselves and to feel silly rather than trust our inner feelings. The problems we're listing here, and what others have said about them, are therefore largely drawn from conversations among women only --and that difficulty in establishing dialogue with men is a recurring theme among people we've talked to.

[p. 36]

    • Lack of community for discussion: Nobody is writing, or organizing or talking publicly about women, in any way that reflects the problems that various women in the movement come across and which we've tried to touch above. Consider this quote from an article in the centennial issue of The Nation:

However equally we consider men and women, the work plans for husbands and wives cannot be given equal weight. A woman should not aim for "a second-level career" because she is a woman; from girlhood on she should recognize that, if she is also going to be a wife and mother, she will not be able to give as much to her work as she would if single. That is, she should not feel that she cannot aspire to directing the laboratory simply because she is a woman, but rather because she is also a wife and mother; as such, her work as a lab technician (or the equivalent in another field) should bring both satisfaction and the knowledge that, through it, she is fulfilling an additional role, making an additional contribution.

    And that's about as deep as the analysis goes publicly, which is not nearly so deep as we've heard many of you go in chance conversations.

    The reason we want to try to open up dialogue is mostly subjective. Working in the movement often intensifies personal problems, especially if we start trying to apply things we're learning there to our personal lives. Perhaps we can start to talk with each other more openly than in the past and create a community of support for each other so we can deal with ourselves and others with integrity and can therefore keep working.

    Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full time on problems such as war, poverty, race. The very fact that the country can't face, much less deal with, the questions we're raising means that the movement is one place to look for some relief. Real efforts at dialogue within the movement and with whatever liberal groups, community women, or students might listen are justified. That is, all the problems between men and women and all the problems of women functioning in society as equal human beings are among the most basic that people face. We've talked in the movement about trying to build a society which would see basic human problems (which are now seen as private troubles), as public problems and would try to shape institutions to meet human needs rather than shaping people to meet the needs of those with power. To raise questions like those above illustrates very directly that society hasn't dealt with some of its deepest problems and opens discussion of why that is so. (In one sense, it is a radicalizing question that can take people beyond legalistic solutions into areas of personal and institutional change.) The second objective reason we'd like to see discussion begin is that we've learned a great deal in the movement and perhaps this is one area where a determined attempt to apply ideas we've learned there can produce some new alternatives.



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