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."
1. 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
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
(A) involved the payment of higher wages
(B) required skill in detailed tasks
(C) was assumed to be less characterized by sex segregation
(D) was more readily accepted by women than by men
(E) fitted the economic dynamic of industrialism better
3. It can be inferred from the passage that early historians of women s labor in the United States paid little attention to women s employment in the service sector of the economy because
(A) the extreme variety of these occupations made it very difficult to assemble meaningful statistics about them
(B) fewer women found employment in the service sector than in factory work
(C) the wages paid to workers in the service sector were much lower than those paid in the industrial sector
(D) women s employment in the service sector tended to be much more short-term than in factory work
(E) employment in the service sector seemed to have much in common with the unpaid work associated with homemaking