“In every known human society the male’s needs for achievement can be recognized ... In a great number of human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activities that women are not allowed to. The maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some fields or performing some feat (壮举).”
This is the conclusion of the anthropologist (人类学家) Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women is society should be distinguished.
If talk and print are considered, it would seem that the formal liberation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defence which men have thrown up around their, by far and away, accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women’s claims to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed, bring to the business of running the world.
There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men’s status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister, in India, Sri Lanka and Israel.
Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. We witness the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts of previously exclusively male pastimes.
In the ancient natural society, cave men went out and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women kept the fire going. Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive and natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaeology (考古学), but that does not matter since it’s not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people’s sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles and the two sexes.
【小题1】The phrase “men’s sureness of their sex role” in the first paragraph suggests that they ________.| A．are confident in their ability to charm women |
| B．take the initiative in work and life |
| C．have a clear idea of what is considered “manly” |
| D．tend to be more immoral than women are |
| A．prevent women from taking up certain professions |
| B．secretly admire women’s intellect and resolution |
| C．doubt whether women really mean to succeed in business |
| D．forbid women to join certain clubs and societies. |
| A．is based on the study of ancient societies |
| B．illustrates how people expect men to behave |
| C．is dismissed by author as an irrelevant joke |
| D．proves that men, not women, should be the breadwinner |
| A．approves of | B．takes for granted |
| C．completely rejects | D．expects to go on changing |
