Women of the protest generation at midlife: Personality development, political consciousness and activism.

Abstract

This study proposed and tested a life cycle-based model of the development of political consciousness and participation among women who were young adults during the period of intense student protest in the late 1960s and early seventies. Black and White women alumnae of the University of Michigan classes of 1967-73 completed mailed questionnaires in 1992, when their mean age was 47 ($N = 167$). Measures assessed political consciousness, collectivist orientation, personal meaning of historical events, power discontent, political efficacy, sense of community, and the Eriksonian construct of generativity. Student activism was positively and significantly related at midlife to leftist political orientation, finding personal meaning in historical events, collectivist orientation, and attributing race and gender based inequities to systemic causes. Student activism was also positively associated with midlife generativity, and with political efficacy. Race differences in the patterns of these correlations were presented and discussed. Factor analysis of the personality and political attitude variables yielded three scales: political identity, power discontent, and expressions of generativity. Taken together with level of participation in student activism, political identity and expressions of generativity accounted for 37% of the variance in midlife political participation. Results suggested that the experience of student activism laid the foundation for political participation at midlife, independent of its relationship to ideological variables. As a formative experience taking place in late adolescence, student activism appeared to be related both to midlife political participation, and to aspects of political ideology and identification that were important to later activism. At midlife, generative concerns provided a developmental press that contributed to political involvement as well. The discussion suggests that the recently observed upsurge in the participation of women in electoral politics may not be a sudden occurrence, but rather, represents the current stage in a lifetime of a generation's development.