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.


It can be inferred from the passage that the "unfinished revolution" the author mentions in highlight text refers to the


entry of women into the industrial labor market

recognition that work done by women as homemakers should be compensated at rates comparable to those prevailing in the service sector of the economy

development of a new definition of femininity unrelated to the economic forces of industrialism

introduction of equal pay for equal work in all professions

emancipation of women wage earners from gender-determined job allocation

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正确答案是E。这一点可以从文中的最后一段中看出,那些早期建立纺织厂的企业家用性别来决定哪些工作应该由女性完成,这些厂主将与家庭管理活动相关的古老的刻板印象引入了新的工业秩序中。因此,可以推断,文中提到的"未完成的革命"指的是女性从性别决定的工作分配中解放出来。

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