Passage 31(Discrimination)(Moderate)(錯二)(Argument)
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 focused instead on factory work (看factory work,而不看service worker), primarily because it seemed so different from traditional, unpaid “women’s work” in the home, and because the underlying(基礎上的) economic forces of industrialism were presumed to be gender-blind and hence emancipatory in effect(有利於). Unfortunately, emancipation has been less profound than expected(這樣的解放其實比預期不夠深入), for not even industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex segregation in the workplace.
第一段:以前的historian都是注意factory worker而不管service worker,這是因為工廠女工與傳統的無薪家庭主婦大不同,也是因為工業革命的經濟力量帶動婦女解放。Wage labor並未從歧視中逃出來。
To explain this unfinished revolution(考點) in the status of women, historians have recently (時間) begun to emphasize the 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 that women were by nature skillful at detailed tasks and patient in carrying out repetitive (重覆性的) chores (routine task); the mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order hoary (old) stereotypes associated with the homemaking activities they presumed to have been the purview (工作範圍) of women. Because 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(會考嗎?)” aspirations (抱負) were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages commensurate (成比例) with those of men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as “female.(這裡肯定是negaative)”
第二段:historian發現,廣泛的定義讓stereotype 根深締固,virtually, the owner never asked female what they want to do, they judge female by themselves.
(承接) More remarkable than the origin has been the persistence of such sex segregation in twentieth-century industry(20世紀更慘,肯定考和20世紀以前的對照). Once an occupation came to be perceived as “female.” employers showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profits beckoned (哪怕是有獲利出現). And despite the urgent need of the United States during the Second World War to mobilize its human resources fully, job segregation by sex characterized even the most important war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers quickly returned to men most of the “male” jobs that women had been permitted to master.(即使是女性擅長的工作,也被男人迅速補上,不給女人做),承接第二段,二十世紀的雇主也沒有改變對女人的印象。