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. 1) These historians 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, emancipation has been less profound than expected, for not even industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex segregation in the workplace.
2) To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of women, historians have recently 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. 3) 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 chores. The mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order obsolete conventions associated with the homemaking activities they assumed to have been the traditional sphere of women. 4) 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 desires were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages equal to those of 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. 5) Once an occupation came to be received as “female”, employers showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profits were expected to be gained. 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. (354 words)
Notes: emancipatory 起解放作用的。 segregation 隔离。
IV. Writing
Directions: You have forgotten the appointment you made with your American teacher. Write a letter to him to:
1) apologize for missing it,
2) state the mistakes you made,
3) ask for another appointment.
Letter of Apology
Dear Mr. Smith,
I am writing to apologize for missing my appointment yesterday afternoon. 我把约会记在了我的日历上而且盼着这一时刻到来，但是不知怎么我把时间搞混了，and didn’t realize the mistake until this morning. 我本来打算早晨给您打电话，但是被意想不到的任务拖累了。
Please forgive me. I would like to call you on Friday看您如果方便的话是否有可能再安排一次约会。 I hope that you would still like to see me. I am waiting for your reply.
Yours sincerely
Li Ming
作业： 1. 认真复习本单元内容。2. 结合“复习指导”，“中级完形填空练习”每周做二个。3. 每周翻译1—2篇“复习指导”中英译汉练习。注意课堂“英译汉”中长难句的理解和翻译。
赠言：放弃心爱的业余爱好是痛苦的，但为了事业必须忍痛割爱。朝着既定目标前进吧！
选择搭配题参考译文(1)
转基因食品已经在市场上站稳脚跟。这并不是说传统农业生产的食品就会消失，只不过食品的购销模式将两极分化：和绿色食品一样，传统食品市场仍将有利可图。实际上，人们甚至有可能会更偏爱转基因食品，因为消费者认识到少施杀虫剂的食品对健康有益。
目前使用的化学物质多达约20,000种，但科学家们仅掌握其中约1,000种物质的详细信息资料。要想了解转基因食品的好处，只需想一想最近报端所披露的消息：生菜摆上超市的货架之前，—般要喷11次杀虫剂。随着发达国家居民越来越关注自身的健康问题，我相信化学物质及其诱发各种疾病的作用将成为下个世纪的一大热点。
转基因食品不会被淘汰的原因是：到2050年，我们的食品产量须增长3倍才能跟上世界人口预计增至100到110亿的步伐。事实上，问题不仅在于要喂饱更多的肚子。常为人所忽视的一个事实是，所有这些新增的人口都要占据空间，从而缩小了农业可用地的总面积。
世界上有8亿饥民。到现在为止，增加食品供应靠的是改良品种、改进杀虫剂和化肥，这就是绿色革命。如今我们又处在一场新革命的边沿－－基因革命。
长远来看，从转基因食品获益最多的很可能是发展中国家。当然，在未来10年左右转基因作物可能很昂贵，但个人电脑的经验教训在此也很适用，转基因技术一旦培育出能够赚大钱的作物，如玉米、大豆和棉花之类的，这一技术就会渐渐普及，进入寻常百姓的家庭。遗憾的是，这并不意味着饥荒就消除了。但提高食品的生产和配送能力有助于减低饥荒的严重程度，缩短饥荒的时间。
在跨入这个农业新纪元的同时，我们又开始了一项实验。 但别忘了，在此之前世界已见证了无数次试验。 几千年来我们一直在改良小麦的品种。 我和我的基因工程同行并不是在做诸如将卷心菜变成菜花这样惊人的事情—正如过去植物育种家做过的那样。我们是要挖掘利用整个基因库， 而不是一次专攻一个物种。
基因将会在不同物种之间转移，这是常规育种方法无法做到的。有些作物可能会因基因的转移而出现问题。绿色革命期间就曾发生过错误，如使用滴滴涕。 毫无疑问，转基因作物培育的过程中也会发生错误。然而，人类是从错误中走过来的， 错误不应阻止我们进步。
