Historians of women’s labor in the United States at first largely disregarded the story of female service workers— women earning

admin2019-02-01  26

问题     Historians of women’s labor in the United States at first largely disregarded the story of female service workers— women earning wages in occupations such as salesclerk, domestic servant, and office secretary. These historians focused instead on factory work, primarily because it seemed so different from traditional, unpaid "women’ s work" in the home, and because the underlying economic forces of industrialism were presumed to be gender-blind and hence emancipatory in effect. Unfortunately, emancipation has been less pro- found than expected, for not even industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex segregation in the workplace.
    To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of women, historians have recently begun to emphasize the way a prevailing definition of femininity often determines the kinds of work allocated to women, even when such allocation is inappropriate to new conditions. For instance, early textile-mill entrepreneurs, in justifying women’s employment in wage labor, made much of the assumption that women were by nature skillful at detailed tasks and patient in carrying out repetitive chores; the mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order hoary stereotypes associated with the homemaking activities they presumed to have been the purview of women. Because women accepted the more unattractive new industrial tasks more readily than did men, such jobs came to be regarded as female jobs. And employers, who assumed that women’s "real" aspirations were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be per- ceived as "female. "
    More remarkable than the origin has been the persistence of such sex segregation in twentieth-century industry. Once an occupation came to be perceived as "female," employers showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profits beckoned. And despite the urgent need of the United States during the Second World War to mobilize its human resources fully, job segregation by sex characterized even the most important war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers quickly returned to men most of the "male" jobs that women had been permitted to master.
It can be inferred from the passage that the " unfinished revolution" the author mentions in lines 18-19 refers to the

选项 A、entry of women into the industrial labor market.
B、recognition that work done by women as homemakers should be compensated at rates comparable to those prevailing in the service sector of the economy.
C、development of a new definition of femininity unrelated to the economic forces of industrialism.
D、introduction of equal pay for equal work in all professions.
E、emancipation of women wage earners from gender-determined job allocation.

答案E

解析 从文中推出,L18—19所说,“未尽革命”是指:A.妇女进入工业劳动力市场。无。B.认识到妇女家务劳动应和服务性行业的工作得到同样报酬。此说法现在确实流行,可惜原文未提。C.和工业经济压力无关的女性特征的发展。无。D.同工同酬。文中未提。E.正确。妇女从性别决定工作分配中解放出来。第一段最后:妇女解放结果没有想像得深入,因为即使工业劳动者在工作场所也未能从性别歧视中解脱。下文的“unfinishedrevolution”就指这种说法。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/NqdYFFFM
本试题收录于: GMAT VERBAL题库GMAT分类
0

最新回复(0)