Ladies: South by Northwest

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Abstract
The lady represented the ideal image for most nineteenth‐century American women, even those who pioneered the American frontier. The Southern lady, however, has always been considered the particular embodiment of that image. Since the advent of women's liberation and the large‐scale movement of women into the labor force, one might well question the salience of the lady as role model for contemporary women. Do modern women still want to be ladies? Using the constructed type of the lady role, this study examines the salience of the lady image for selected samples of women from the South and the Pacific Northwest. Our respondents indicated the extent of their agreement with our constructed type and also the extent to which they held the temperamental and behavioral traits of the constructed type. In general, the women in our samples supported the constructed type. Also the women in both regions felt that they lived up to the role expectations of the lady; however, the Northwest women felt that they met more of the temperamental and role expectations than did our Southern respondents. We discuss the implications of our findings for an understanding of contemporary gender roles.
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