It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. 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. In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, 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 by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of the whole female sex into public industry. Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanizations effects, but they agreed that it would transform womens 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 womens economic position or in the prevailing evaluation of womens 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 1880s created a new class of dead-end jobs, thenceforth considered womens 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.
【gre考试阅读真题解析(B)】相关文章:
最新
2016-03-01
2016-03-01
2016-03-01
2016-03-01
2016-03-01
2016-03-01