2. 职称英语
  3. Click Women are beginning to experience that

Click Women are beginning to experience that

游客2024-02-19  45
问题                                 Click
    Women are beginning to experience that click! of recognition—that moment of truth that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun. Those clicks are coming faster, and women are getting angry. Not redneck-angry from screaming because we are so frustrated and unfulfilled, but clicking-things-into-place-angry. We have suddenly and shockingly seen the basic lack of order in what has been believed to be the natural order of things.
    One little click turns on a thousand others.
    In Houston, Texas, a friend of mine stood and watched her husband step over a pile of toys on the stairs, put there to be carried up. "Why can’t you get this stuff put away?" he mumbled. Click! "You have two hands," she said, mining away.
    Last summer I got a letter from a man who wrote: "I do not agree with your last article, and I am canceling my wife’s subscription." The next day I got a letter from his wife saying, "I am not canceling my subscription." Click!
    On Fire Island, my weekend hostess and I had just finished cooking breakfast, lunch, and washing dishes for both. A male guest came wandering into the kitchen just as the last dish was being put away and said, "How about something to eat?" He sat down, expectantly, and started to read the paper. Click! "You work all week," said the hostess, "and I work all week, and if you want something to eat, you can get it, and wash up after it yourself."
    In New York last fall, my neighbours—named Jones—had a couple named Smith over for dinner. Mr. Smith kept telling his wife to get up and help Mrs. Jones. Click! Click! Two women radicalized at once.
    A woman I know in St. Louis, who had begun to enjoy a little success writing a grain company’s newsletters, came home to tell her husband about lunch in the executive dining room. She had planned a funny little story about the deeply humorous pomposity (自以为是) of the executives, when she noticed her husband rocking with laughter. "Ho ho, my little wife in an executive dining room." Click!
    Last August, I was on a boat leaving an island in Maine. Two families were with me, and the mothers were discussing the troubles of cleaning up after a rental summer. "Bob cleaned up the bathroom for me, didn’t you, honey?" she confided, gratefully patting her husband’s knee. "Well, what the hell, it’s vacation," he said fondly. The two women looked at each other, and the queerest change came over their faces. "I got up at six this morning to make sandwiches for the trip home from this ’vacation’," the first said. "So I wonder why I’ve thanked him at least six times for cleaning the bathroom?" Click!      Click!
    In suburban Chicago, the party consisted of three couples. The women were a writer, a doctor, and a teacher. The men were all lawyers. As the last couple arrived, the host said, heartily, "With a roomful of lawyers, we ought to have a good evening." Silence. Click! "What are we?" asked the teacher. "Invisible?"
    In an office, a political columnist, male, was waiting to see the editor-in-chief. Leaning against a doorway, the columnist turned to the first woman he saw and said, "Listen, call Barry Brown and tell him I’ll be late." Click! It wasn’t because she happened to be the chief editor herself that she refused to make the call.
    In the end, we are all housewives, the natural people to turn to when there is something unpleasant, inconvenient, or inconclusive to be done. It will not do for women who have jobs to pretend that society’s ills will be cured if all women are gainfully employed. In Russia, 70 percent of doctors and 20 percent of construction workers are women, but women still do all the housework. Some revolution, as the Russian women’s saying goes, simply freed them to do twice the work.
    They tell us we are being petty. The future improvement of civilization could not depend on who washes the dishes. Could it? Yes. The liberated society—with men, women, and children living as whole human beings, not halves divided by sex roles—depends on the steadfast search for new solutions to just such apparently unimportant problems, on new answers to tired old questions. Such questions as:
    Denise works as a waitress from 6 am to 3 pm. Her husband is a cabdriver, who moonlights on weekends as a doorman. They have four children. When her husband comes home at night, he asks, "What’s for dinner?"
    Jonathan and Joanne are both doctors. They have identical office hours. They come home in the evening to a dinner cooked by the housekeeper. When they go to bed, he drops his clothes on the floor and she picks them up. In the morning he asks, "Where is my pink and orange striped shirt?"
    In moments of suburban strife, Fred often asks his wife, Alice, "Why haven’t you mended my shirt and lubricated the car?What else have you got to do but sit around the house all day?"
    According to insurance companies, it would cost Fred ＄8,000—＄9,000 a year to replace Alice’s services if she died.Alice, being an average ideal suburban housewife, works 99.6 hours a week—always feeling there is too much to be done and always guilty because it is never quite finished. Besides, her work doesn’t seem important. After all, Fred is paid for doing whatever he does. Abstract statistics make no impact on Alice. "My situation is different," she says. Of course it is. All situations are different. But sooner or later she will experience—in a blinding click—a moment of truth. She will remember that she once had other interests, vague hopes, and great plans. She will decide that the work in the house is less important than reordering that work so she can consider her own life.
    The problem is: What does she do then?
[br] Insurance companies estimate that it would cost about ______ annually to replace a housewife’s services.
选项
答案 ＄8,000—＄9,000
解析
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