A Kind of Memo

By Casey Hayden & Mary King, November 18 1965

A Kind of Memo, followed up on, and drew from, the discussions generated by the SNCC Position Paper: Women in the Movement that Hayden, King, and other SNCC women had circulated within the organization a year earlier in November of 1964. Both became foundational documents in the developing feminist movement.
The first paper noted and questioned gender inequalities within SNCC. A Kind Of Memo expanded into issues of sex, gender, and caste within American social movements more broadly. It raised questions of gender disparities coming out of their activist experiences and sought "real efforts at dialogue within the movement." Both papers were "bottom-up" organizing documents based on conversations with women in social justice movements, sharing those women's views of each other and of women in the culture. Both aimed at reshaping gender-related cultural values from the nonviolent movement's perspective.
A Kind of Memo was circulated among a group of about forty women activists, some of them working with SNCC, others active in other organizations. It was later abridged and published as Sex and Caste in the War Resisters League's Liberation Magazine.