Historians of women’s labor in the United States at firstlargely disregarded the story of
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 segre-
gation 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 etermines
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 stereo-
types 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 segregation in twentieth-century industry. Once
an occupation came to be perceived as “female.” employers
(35) showed surprisingly little interest in changing that percep-
-tion, even when higher profits beckoned. 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
(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.
According to the passage, job segregation by sex in the United States was______
A．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 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
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