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 emancipator in effect. Unfortunately, emancipation has been less profound 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 lire, declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as "female".

More remarkable than the original 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.


The passage supports which of the following statements about the early mill owners mentioned in the second paragraph?


They hoped that by creating relatively unattractive "female" jobs they would discourage women from losing interest in marriage and family life.

They sought to increase the size of the available labor force as a means to keep men's wages low.

They argued that women were inherently suited to do well in particular kinds of factory work.

They thought that factory work bettered the condition of women by emancipating them from dependence on income earned by men.

They felt guilty about disturbing the traditional division of labor in the family.

考题讲解

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正确答案是 C。

由文章第二段内容可知,早期的纺织厂老板在辩护女性就业的工资劳动时,大量依赖于女性天生擅长细节任务且能够耐心完成重复琐碎的假设。因此,他们认为女性天生适合工厂工作的某些类别,所以 C 选项正确。

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