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Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo from Casey
Hayden and Mary King to a number of other women in the peace and freedom
movements by Casey Hayden and Mary
King (1965)
(Editors Note: Casey Hayden and Mary King circulated this paper on
women in the civil rights movement based on their experiences as Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee volunteers. It is widely regarded
as one of the first documents of the emerging women's liberation movement.)
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 seem 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 pat-terns, 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 straitjacketing 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.
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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