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  3. It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the ne

It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the ne

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问题    It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. 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. In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, 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 by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of "the whole female sex... into public industry. " Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanization’s effects, but they agreed that it 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 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. Recent historical investigation has led to a major revision of the notion that technology is always inherently revolutionary in its effects on society. Mechanization may even have slowed any change in the traditional position of women both in the labor market and in the home.
It can be inferred from the passage that the author most probably b.elieves which of the following to be true concerning those historians who study the history of women?
选项 A、Their work provides insights important to those examining social phenomena affecting the lives of both sexes.
B、Their work can only be used cautiously by scholars in other disciplines.
C、Because they concentrate only on the role of women in the workplace, they draw more reliable conclusions than do other historians.
D、They oppose the further mechanization of work, which, according to their findings, tends to contribute to the existing inequalities in society.
答案A
解析 推理判断题。关于研究女性历史的史学家们的观点，作者在第二段首句和第三段最后两句中集中表述。这些史学家质疑过去的传统观点，认为机械化对于女性职场状况并没有什么改善作用，作者指出他们的看法是seriously question this assumption of transforming power以及a major revision，可见作者认为这些史学家的看法是重要的，故[A]项为答案。是否可用于其他学科领域，原文并未提及，故排除[B]项；作者虽然赞同这些史学家的看法，但并未将其与其他学者的观点进行比较，故排除[C]项；虽然史学家们认为机械化对于女性职场和生活地位的改变没有多大作用，但是并没有反对机械化的发展，故排除[D]项。
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