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Using data from official court records and observations in court hearings throughout one state with a typical reform statute, this study investigates the elderly against whom petitions are brought for involuntary civil commitment. In relation to their proportion in the population, the aged are only slightly more likely than younger persons to become respondents in commitment proceedings; but they are over three times more likely to remain involuntarily hospitalized and to be subjected to recommitment proceedings. Once brought into the process, they are more likely than younger respondents to be committed and are more likely to be successively recommitted. In analyzing court testimony, focus is on evidence of dangerousness since involuntary commitment is limited to the mentally ill who are dangerous. Almost half of the young old initial respondents with formal hearings have no testimony alleging dangerous behavior and more than half of the old old have no such testimony. The alleged dangerous acts of the a...

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...