It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of women. For example, it has be

admin2013-07-02  32

问题     It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of women. For example, it has been suggested that the employment of women in industry took them out of the household, their traditional sphere, and fundamentally altered their position in society. Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by entering factories, women would give up their femininity.

    Friedrich Engels, however, predicted that women would be liberated from the "social, legal, and economic subordination" of the family. Generally observers agreed mechanization would transform women’s lives.
    Historians, particularly those investigating the history of women, now seriously question this assumption of transforming power. They conclude that such dramatic technological innovations as the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, the typewriter, and the vacuum cleaner have not resulted in equally dramatic social changes in women’s economic position or in the prevailing evaluation of women’s work. The employment of young women in textile mills during the Industrial Revolution was largely an extension of an older pattern of employment of young, single women as domestics. It was not the change in office technology, but rather the separation of secretarial work, previously seen as an apprenticeship for beginning managers, from administrative work that in the 1880’s created a new class of "dead-end" jobs, thenceforth(其后)considered "women’s work". The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.
    Women’s work has changed considerably in the past 200 years, moving from the household to the office or the factory, and later becoming mostly white collar instead of blue collar work. Fundamentally, however, the conditions under which women work have changed little since before the Industrial Revolution: the segregation of occupations by gender, lower pay for women as a group, jobs that require relatively low levels of skill and offer women little opportunity for advancement all persist, while women’s household labor remains demanding.
It is questioned that the mechanization of work haven’t create large social changes in women’s______position.

选项

答案economic

解析 第二段前两句指出史学家们,尤其是那些研究妇女历史的史学家们,现在对关于机械化进程的变革作用这一假设表示严重的怀疑。他们得出结论认为,诸如纺织机、缝纫机、打字机、以及真空吸尘器之类的巨大技术革新没有在妇女的经济地位或对妇女工作的普遍评价方面产生同样巨大的社会变革。题目中的the mechanization of work是对文中一系列的technological innovations的概括。文中指出置疑的是妇女的经济地位和对她们工作的普遍评价两个方面,根据空后的position一词可以判断这里考查对经济地位的影响,故此处填economic。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/0gn7777K
0

最新回复(0)