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  3. The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his F

The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his F

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问题     The settlement of the United States has occupied traditional historians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his Frontier Thesis, a thesis that explained American development in terms of westward expansion. From the perspective of women’ s history, Turner’ s exclusively masculine assumptions constitute a major drawback: his defenders and critics alike have reconstructed men’ s, not women’ s, lives on the frontier. However, precisely because of this masculine orientation, revising the Frontier Thesis by focusing on women’s experience introduces new themes into women’ s history—woman as lawmaker and entrepreneui—and, consequently, new interpretations of women’s relationship to capital, labor, and statute.
    Turner claimed that the frontier produced the individualism that is the hallmark of American culture, and that this individualism in turn promoted democratic institutions and economic equality. He argued for the frontier as an agent of social change. Most novelists and historians writing in the early to mid-twentieth century who considered women in the West, when they considered women at all, fell under Turner’ s spell. In their works these authors tended to glorify women’ s contributions to frontier life. Western women, in Turnerian tradition, were a fiercely independent, capable, and durable lot, free from the constraints binding their eastern sisters. This interpretation implied that the West provided a congenial environment where women could aspire to their own goals, free from constrictive stereotypes and sexist attitudes. In Turnerian terminology, the frontier had furnished " a gate of escape from the bondage of the past. "
    By the middle of the twentieth century, the Frontier Thesis fell into disfavor among historians. Later, Reactionist writers took the view that fron- tier women were lonely, displaced persons in a hostile milieu that intensified the worst aspects of gender relations. The renaissance of the feminist movement during the 1970’s led to the Sta- sist school, which sidestepped the good bad dichotomy and argued that frontier women lived lives similar to the live of women in the East. In one now-standard text, Faragher demonstrated the persistence of the "cult of true womanhood" and the illusionary quality of change on the westward journey. Recently the Stasist position has been revised but not entirely discounted by new research.
The primary purpose of the passage is to
选项 A、provide a framework within which the history of women in nineteenth-century America can be organized.
B、discuss divergent interpretations of women’ s experience on the western frontier.
C、introduce a new hypothesis about women’ s experience in nineteenth-century America.
D、advocate an empirical approach to women’ s experience on the western frontier.
E、resolve ambiguities in several theories about women’ s experience on the western frontier.
答案B
解析 主题类型：A．提供妇女历史框架。不是本文作者目的。B．正确。讨论对西部边疆妇女经历的多种解释。文中有Turner及其追随者的思想，反对者思想，平衡学派观点。C．“19世纪妇女经历”不准确，文中只对西部妇女感兴趣。D．“推动一丰张”。无。本文是评论几种理论。E．解决几个理论中的模棱两可。无。
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