Meanwhile the message of the Memo had landed in an unexpected place.  White women in SDS picked it up at the “Rethinking Conference, held in Champaign-Urbana in December 1965. A report in New Left Notes reported respectfully that "women came together to talk about problems of women in the movement."[1]  An statement "On Roles in SDS" was endorsed by the National Council mirrored the language of A Kind of Memo in several ways, in particular referring to "honest and open discussion" as the first step, however it stopped short of calling for the radical questioning of the Memo.[2]

Hayden rejected the women's liberation movement, and she has recently gone on record as never intending to stimulate the formation of that movement.  In 2014, she explained, “In this paper [A Kind of Memo], we reject the notion of a separate movement for women's rights as infeasible, but in point of fact that was not my interest.”  Hayden's writing from the fall of 1965 reveals her effort to work towards a radical critique of systemic power relations.  She had already seen the problems inherent to organizing women's separately in Chicago.  Hayden reflected in 2014 that she "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."  Without a strong center, the movement could not affect the radical change Hayden envision.

As the women's liberation movement developed, it did so along lines that were inconsistent with Hayden's life and ideals.  In 1987 she reflected on the movement's belief "that women are trapped by and need to be liberated from their childbearing function, their biology."
 

Why not take biology, the body, as positive and see the problem in the society, the culture's attitude toward birth? No one talks about labor much anymore, and never about labor as a source of value and seldom about labor as in bearing children. Both are undervalued and their place in the rewards of the culture are not reflective of the truth of their value to the experience of being human. Anyone who is present at a human birth, and especially the conscious mother, knows a great secret. Freedom is not a question of the control of the birth function (although certainly that is useful to have at our command) so much as recognition and dignification and reward of this function and the child-rearing function that follows from it. This line of reasoning carries one into deep waters, of course. We used to think like this all the time, these radical approaches with astounding implications.[*]

The disembodied aspects of women's liberation were in marked contest to the embodied praxis of Hayden's philosophy.  However, it also contradicted her belief that women's ways were superior to men's, what she described in 1988 as “nurturing (what I consider radically feminine),”[#]  Hayden has largely ignored academic debates about her life.  However, it would be a mistake to think that she is not aware of the labels of cultural feminism or gender essentialism.  She is more attracted to womanism.

I didn't have that language, but I think now that I saw SNCC then as womanist, feminist with a black twist. I'm not arguing for this position, but that is how I observed SNCC to be at the time.  … It was womanist, nurturing, and familial, springing from the underlying philosophy of nonviolence, which was neither western nor patriarchal.

The ties that bind Hayden to the movement for women's liberation are largely historiographical. A Kind of Memo is not reprinted in the earliest anthologies of women’s liberation, and the earliest histories of women’s liberation also largely ignore the Memo.[*]  Only after Evans’ resituated it did it start to appear in anthologies of historical documents from the women’s liberation movement, as well as historical accounts of the development of the women’s liberation movement.  As Wini Breines argues, Personal Politics’ thesis is “one of those rare scholarly arguments that has persisted virtually unchallenged for more than two decades.”[ii] Indeed A Kind of Memo now occupies an almost mythological position in scholarly narratives of women’s liberation creating a sort of documentary bridge that moves white women from participation in civil rights to a movement of their own. 

However, neither Hayden nor King got involved in the women's liberation movement; nor did Elaine DeLott or Emmie Schrader who helped to write the 1964 paper. While some scholars have cited burn out as the explanation for their absence in the movement, that seems simplistic at best.    For Hayden at least, a movement based on sex alone was insufficiently radical.  Her commitments lay with those at the "bottom" of society, and race and class crossed sex in ways that were too important to be subsumed.  Recalling her recruitment to sit-ins by Diane Nash, Hayden wrote "She talked about how the enemy is never personal, that the systems and the attitudes of racism, sexism, and so on are the enemy."(redemptive community)

Retrospective linkages have distorted A Kind of Memo as a diatribe against the movement, as a plea for more power for women, or as a manifesto for a new movement.  The analysis in A Kind of Memo presages many of the themes women's liberation picked up, while the method it advocates, talk, seems like a prefigurative consciousness-raising.  However, while now viewed as a pivotal document, A Kind of Memo only found its way into histories of the women’s liberation movement when it was printed as an appendix to Sara Evans’ Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and The New Left (1979).[i]  

Evans’ book, which is a complex discussion of women’s participation in the civil rights movement and the new left, has been reduced quite frequently to a single message, that the “origins” of “contemporary feminism” lay in the New Left and Civil Rights movement. Evans’ thesis that a movement to end sexism came out of women’s participation in other movements has led to her book being cited as evidence for the existence of sexism in those movements.  That remains a controversial conclusion and one refuted by most of the female participants in the movement.  

When Hayden writes of “the early organizing of the women’s movement” inspired by the Memo, she doesn't point to parallels between women and blacks, or to sexism in the movement.  Instead, she first recounts her lengthy organizing history, which she describes as integrating "intellect and sweat labor" an approach she attributes to Ella Baker's example.   "In this way, the women's movement traces back to Eila Baker. She is behind it. as she was alwavs behind the scenes. [iii]    When writing about the intellectual roots of the Memo, Hayden rejects de Beauvoir and Friedan, and instead emphasizes the influence of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.  Hayden saw in Lessing “a woman of the left” who also “view[ed] her life in the same compartments as I viewed mine.”[viii] Lessing’s description in The Golden Notebook is a startlingly apt characterization of Hayden’s zeitgeist.[ix]

Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries.  It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness. (p. 58)

Perhaps the seed of truth in the accepted historiography about A Kind of Memo may be found here. Looking back, Hayden observed “when we trusted in ourselves we could afford to distrust and question everyone and everything else,” which led to, as she wrote in the Memo,  “think[ing] radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before.“[X]  Thinking radically mean both that women would have to “trust… inner feelings” and above all to “question.”  Only together, in community, was this possible. As Hayden said in a 1965 SNCC staff meeting, "Society thinks we're crazy because we present a reality the country thinks is crazy. I think we're sane because I have a group that thinks like I do."
 # Casey Hayden, Circle of Trust, 156.