2. 职称英语
  3. It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary

It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary

游客2024-05-04  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. [br] That many married women chose to work outside their household in 20th century was due to______.
选项
答案 their own economic necessity
解析 根据关键词married women及20th century可在原文第二段末句找到对应。本句指出20世纪已婚妇女外出工作的人数增加有两个主要原因，一是自身的经济需求，再者是结婚率高，单身女性减少。而本题问的是妇女们选择外出就业的原因，因此答案是第一个原因。
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