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  3. Hollywood will not be hurried. Thus it has taken almost a decade to produce the movie of Allison Pearson’s witty novel I Don’t K

Hollywood will not be hurried. Thus it has taken almost a decade to produce the movie of Allison Pearson’s witty novel I Don’t K

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问题     Hollywood will not be hurried. Thus it has taken almost a decade to produce the movie of Allison Pearson’s witty novel I Don’t Know How She Does It. And watching Sarah Jessica Parker’ s character being torn between a banking career and young children, I was struck by inevitable anachronisms. Certainly ten years ago a working mother feared that mentioning her baby might mean professional death and knew that family commitments were not a valid excuse to decline a last-minute weekend business trip. But now? Nick Clegg does the school run so Miriam can make her 9am meeting in Madrid. The three most recent prime ministers took paternity leave. Business lunches often conclude with an iPhone display of toddler snaps. Flexible working is practised both formally, and more often casually.
    And it was in part the success of Pearson’s novel that led to "work-life balance" being fast-tracked from neologism to cliche in a decade. Kate Reddy’s misery encapsulated the unhappiness and disillusion of a generation of professional women, giving them confidence to lobby for business to change. And change it did. I recently met the head of a City law firm busy restructuring working practices to prevent his now mostly female workforce leaving.
    And yet, I found myself musing at the film screening, while so much has undoubtedly been achieved, has the unhappiness of working mothers abated? What felt most lastingly true in the movie were the mental contortions of Kate, lying awake at night, writing lists, thinking how tricky logistics can be overcome, and beating herself up at the most minor failure. It is still mostly mothers who wrestle ceaselessly with "the puzzle of family life".
    Indeed, that women are coming down harder than ever on their own shortcomings was revealed by a survey this week that showed rates of depression in women are apparently double those experienced in the 1970s and that they are most likely to occur during childbearing years of 25 to 40, when women are up to four times more likely to be depressed than men. It is a devastating thought that a perfect graph could be drawn with female economic and professional progress on one axis and female misery on the other—especially if the apogee of womanly contentment turned out to be the 1970s.
    My mother recently brought down my old school reports and I was reminded that I once learnt a subject called "housecraft". While the boys were welding and operating lathes, we were taught plain cooking, the qualities of various cleaning products and the advisability of "feminine" deodorants. "Janice has a ’couldn’t care less attitude’," wrote my teacher. Too right. But all about me 16-year-old girls with far better O levels than mine were leaving school for the secretarial jobs that preceded early marriage.
    But were they happier, these young women who followed their mothers to take a fixed place in the gender order? Happier than those of us who, as we packed for college, weren’t sure exactly what we wanted, except that it sure as hell wasn’t housecraft? I find the frequent reports about a depression "epidemic" among modern women troubling and questionable. Too often they are framed as a logical consequence of women breaching the natural order, overstretching their delicate selves by trying to bestraddle male and female worlds. Rather as Victorians believed women too weak-minded to become doctors.
    If indeed one in seven women now suffers depression, could it be that female experience itself is being pathologised? Have we turned the ebb and flow of female hormones, the trials of raising a child, the sudden sadnesses that pistolwhip your heart as you realize, into a psychological condition? Certainly there is money to be made from treating it: around one in three British women will at some point be prescribed antidepressants. Anti-depressants have a valid place in treatment, but there is concern among mental health groups that women are offered them too readily, kept for years on medication that muffles their pain rather dealing with its causes. Moreover, for mild depression there are doubts over whether drugs actually work. But such is the fear of trivializing depression that it is more acceptable for a doctor to issue a prescription than to tell a patient to go for a long daily brisk walk.
    Psychotherapist Dorothy Rowe who has devoted her career to treating depression notes that the Royal College of Psychiatrists website no longer talks about the condition being caused by chemical imbalance but that it is provoked by life events. She writes that it almost always begins when an incident reveals "a huge discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it is". Which describes the territory in which women now abide: between the flawless body and unageing face and the hag in the mirror; the porn-standard sex life of magazine legend and the fumbling reality; the seamless synthesis of motherhood and career compared with the flapping Post-it Notes on the fridge. In the 1970s, life was dull and limited, but we expected little better. Now the gap between the untidy mess of human existence and the styled-to perfection unreality that we struggle for is unbridgeably vast.
Which of the following can be concluded from the last paragraph?
选项 A、The depression "epidemic" among women is caused by chemical imbalance.
B、Women in the 1970s were happier than today because they expected little better.
C、The gap between the ideal life and existing reality can lead to women’s depression.
D、The seamless synthesis of motherhood and career affords no room for imagination.
答案C
解析
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