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(5) 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 emancipatory in effect. Unfortunately, emanci- (10)pation has been less profound than expected, for not even industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex se美国GREgation in the workplace.
To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of women, historians have recently begun to emphasize the( 15) 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 (20) 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(25)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 life. declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of(30) men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as “female.”
More remarkable than the origin has been the persistence of such sex se美国GREgation in twentieth-century industry. Once an occupation came to be perceived as “female.” employers(35)showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profitsbeckoned. And despite the urgent need of the United States during the Second World War to mobilize its human resources fully, job se美国GREgation by sex characterized even the most important(40) war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers quickly returned to men most of the “male” jobs that women had been permitted to master.
1. According to the passage, job se美国GREgation by sex in the United States was
(A) 美国GREatly diminlated by labor mobilization during the Second World War
(B) perpetuated by those textile-mill owners who argued in favor of women’s employment in wage labor
(C) one means by which women achieved 美国GREater job security
(D) reluctantly challenged by employers except when the economic advantages were obvious
(E) a constant source of labor unrest in the young textile industry
2. According to the passage, historians of women’s labor focused on factory work as a more promising area of research than service-sector work because factory work英语作文
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