What motivates women to become politically active? Abigail Stewart and her colleagues have been finding the answers.
“We wanted to look at how someone enters into political participation,” says Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies and director of the ADVANCE Program, who will deliver the second Distinguished University Professor lecture. “We looked at political activism including things as simple as writing a letter to the editor or joining a group to getting involved with movements to running for office.”
She noticed a small fraction of people — and an even smaller percentage of women — become politically active (beyond voting in elections) and looked at data from the 1960s through the present to identify the characteristics of politically active women.
Stewart will discuss political women from students to global feminists in her 2008 Distinguished University Professor lecture at 4 p.m. Feb. 11 in Rackham Amphitheatre. A reception will follow in the Rackham Assembly Hall.
The DUP lectures are given by professors chosen to receive one of the University’s highest faculty honors. Stewart chose to name her lecture after former colleague Sandra Schwartz Tangri, who earned her doctorate in social psychology in 1969 from U-M.
Tangri, who died in 2003, began the Women’s Life Paths Study involving data collected in 1967, 1970, 1981 and 1992, with the last wave being one that Tangri and Stewart collaborated on. Stewart and her current colleagues are conducting another wave of the study.
The original U-M group from 1967 included women from three groups: those aiming for nontraditional careers, those who were aiming for careers considered traditional for women and those who weren’t planning to pursue careers. In the end, “all of them ended up in careers, and most were nontraditional,” Stewart said.
Stewart also used data from the Global Feminism Project to examine issues among women from the United States, Poland, India and China.
She will elaborate on four themes in her lecture:
• Generation. The period when a person is raised affects future political involvement or interest in the process;
• Participation. People who join organizations and get involved with causes tend to remain politically active;
• Bad experiences connected to gender. Women who were raped, had an abortion or went through a similar negative experience related to being a woman were more likely to show an interest in politics; and
• Personality. Some people are pre-disposed to engage in the political arena.
“Many of the women we found would say, ‘I was the type of person who got mad rather than discouraged,'” Stewart says.
Distinguished University Professorships, established in 1947, recognize full or associate professors for scholarly and/or creative achievement, national and international reputation, and superior teaching skills. Each professorship bears a name determined by the appointive professor in consultation with his or her dean.
Recipients get an annual salary supplement of $5,000 and an annual research supplement of $5,000.
