The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his F

admin2014-09-18  51

问题     The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his Frontier Thesis, a thesis that explained American development in terms of westward expansion. From the perspective of women’ s history, Turner’ s exclusively masculine assumptions constitute a major drawback: his defenders and critics alike have reconstructed men’ s, not women’ s, lives on the frontier. However, precisely because of this masculine orientation, revising the Frontier Thesis by focusing on women’s experience introduces new themes into women’ s history—woman as lawmaker and entrepreneui—and, consequently, new interpretations of women’s relationship to capital, labor, and statute.
    Turner claimed that the frontier produced the individualism that is the hallmark of American culture, and that this individualism in turn promoted democratic institutions and economic equality. He argued for the frontier as an agent of social change. Most novelists and historians writing in the early to mid-twentieth century who considered women in the West, when they considered women at all, fell under Turner’ s spell. In their works these authors tended to glorify women’ s contributions to frontier life. Western women, in Turnerian tradition, were a fiercely independent, capable, and durable lot, free from the constraints binding their eastern sisters. This interpretation implied that the West provided a congenial environment where women could aspire to their own goals, free from constrictive stereotypes and sexist attitudes. In Turnerian terminology, the frontier had furnished " a gate of escape from the bondage of the past. "
    By the middle of the twentieth century, the Frontier Thesis fell into disfavor among historians. Later, Reactionist writers took the view that fron- tier women were lonely, displaced persons in a hostile milieu that intensified the worst aspects of gender relations. The renaissance of the feminist movement during the 1970’s led to the Sta- sist school, which sidestepped the good bad dichotomy and argued that frontier women lived lives similar to the live of women in the East. In one now-standard text, Faragher demonstrated the persistence of the "cult of true womanhood" and the illusionary quality of change on the westward journey. Recently the Stasist position has been revised but not entirely discounted by new research.
It can be inferred that which of the following statements is consistent with the Reactionist position as it is described in the passage?

选项 A、Continuity, not change, marked women’ s lives as they moved from East to West.
B、Women’s experience on the North American frontier has not received enough attention from modern historians.
C、Despite its rigors, the frontier offered women opportunities that had not been available in the East.
D、Gender relations were more difficult for women in the West than they were in the East.
E、Women on the North American frontier adopted new roles while at the same time reaffirming traditional roles.

答案D

解析 哪一个和反对Turner的主张相近?类似第3题,总结,反对Turner的主张:西部妇女境遇凄惨。∴D正确,性别歧视在西部比在东部更为严重。A、B、C、E或为传统Turner观点,或为平衡学派观点,或者原文未提。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/9QzYFFFM
本试题收录于: GMAT VERBAL题库GMAT分类
0

最新回复(0)