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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 take them out of the household, their traditional sphere and fundamentally alter 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. Fredrich 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 and extension of an older pattern of employment for 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 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 labour 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 labour market and in the home.
What is the main idea of the first paragraph?
选项 A、The mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect.
B、The social mechanization would affect women’ s lives.
C、The social status of women has changed.
D、Observers have different ideas about the effect of social mechanization.
答案B
解析 主旨题。第一段讲到，普遍认为：劳动的机械化对操作机器的人以及引进机器的社会都有革命性的影响。工业中雇佣妇女使她们从家务这样的传统领域中解放出来，并且从根本上改善了她们在社会上的地位。接着讲到，观察者关于社会机械化对妇女的影响持有不同观点，但他们一致认为这必将改变妇女们的生活。由此可知，第一段主要讲了社会机械化对妇女的影响。B项符合。
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