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 hiring policies in the United States?


After a crisis many formerly "male" jobs are reclassified as "female" jobs.

Industrial employers generally prefer to hire women with previous experience as homemakers.

Post−Second World War hiring policies caused women to lose many of their wartime gains in employment opportunity.

Even war industries during the Second World War were reluctant to hire women for factory work.

The service sector of the economy has proved more nearly gender-blind in its hiring policies than has the manufacturing sector.

考题讲解

此讲解的内容由AI生成,还未经人工审阅,仅供参考。

正确答案为 C。

答案解释:文章指出,尽管第二次世界大战期间,由于启用其全部人力资源的迫切需要,即使是最重要的战争工业仍然存在性别隔离的招聘政策。但是,一旦战争结束,雇主们很快就将多数由女性管理的雇佣岗位重新给了男性,导致女性失去了她们在职业机会方面战争期间取得的许多收益,即选项 C 正确。

展开显示

登录注册 后可以参加讨论

快来第一个发言吧
OG2015V-RC