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Using data collected in 1965 on white student civil rights workers in the South affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, this paper seeks to probe the factors that underlie the subjective sense of success and failure in an episode of political activism. Focusing on some fifty local projects scattered from Virginia to Alabama, we find that success was only partially a function of gains in voter registration, the summer's principal objective. It was related as well to the degree to which projects had been able to penetrate barriers into the black community to build black organizations, the degree of project cohesiveness, and the extent of personal fulfillment of the volunteers as individuals. One last correlate involved the amount of time spent protesting, and the paper explores this in particular detail, focusing on the sense in which the summer might be described as a romantic venture. Finally, the paper offers a comparison between the white student New Left and some of its older predecessors, stressing a distinction between "sympathetic" and "self-interested" activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed that previous studies of the relationship between orthodoxy and social activism have yielded inconsistent findings because a critical mediating variable, salience or perceived importance of religion, usually has been neglected. Findings from a survey of 1,300 students at Washington State University support the hypothesised role of salience as a mediating variable. Relationship between orthodoxy and church activism emerges only for the high salience subsamples. The apparent utility of the orthodoxy-salience-activism model for bringing coherence to previously inconsistent findings seems to argue for more widespread use of salience as a control variable in studies of the concomitants and consequences of religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most solidly researched and validated findings in the social sciences relate to the differential participation of men and women in political activities of all kinds from voting and membership of parties, to interest in politics and political attitudes. Women have been found to vote less than men, to participate in political parties less than men, to know less about politics than men, to have less interest in politics than men and to be more conservative than men. A number of explanations of these findings have been suggested in this article. One type of explanation stresses the structural restraints militating against women's participation; the restraints, including the tasks of child-rearing and maintaining a home, are held to account for the lower political participation and knowledge since women, contrasted with men, are prevented from linking up with the wider network of social contacts which helps to maintain male political involvement. This explanation is obviously a powerful one and does account for the well-documented finding that women's rate of participation increases when such burdens cease and that mothers with young children are consistently less likely to vote than are fathers with young children across all levels of education within both the 21-34 and 35-54 age groups.

Events of every era seem disorderly while they are happening. Only from the perspective of history do clear strands of meaning and pattern become evident. It is the aim of this article to speculate about the pattern underlying some of these events in the second half of the twentieth century thus far, and to suggest something of the direction that will be taken in the next decade or two as of December 1969. The main question is just what contemporary social movements are all about and what they signal with respect to major changes in the social system. At present, movements dealing with the Vietnam war and ghetto protest are the most obvious and most on minds of people. However, Vietnam movements are excessively colored by what people hope is a situation of limited duration, and it is necessary to look for the more lasting circumstances and more persistent themes in social movements. The civil rights movement has been tremendously important, but it has not been a major preoccupation of the American people. It has been more like a troublesome side-show, and the civil rights activists have constantly been forced to go to extremes in order even to get the population to give attention to their movement and its aims. Again, there is a good deal to be learned from examination of the civil rights movement, but this may well be secondary to the main preoccupations determining social change in the contemporary era.

A theory based on four stages of social and cultural changes for large territorial units is presented and three hypotheses are deduced linking territorial differentiation to societal change. The stages are measured by the degree to which the territorial units of a society display similar characteristics, and whether the units are diverging or converging from one another. Hypothesis I asserts that the form of societal change among territorial units over time is curvilinear. Hypothesis II maintains that changes in technological efficiency lead to changes in territorial differentiation on selected social and cultural characteristics. Finally, according to Hypothesis III, changes in territorial differentiation on technological efficiency are directly related to changes in territorial differentiation on selected social and cultural characteristics. The hypotheses are tested in terms of changes in the United States and Canada and receive strong support from the direction and magnitude of the relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]