GMAT Reading Comprehension

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Source: OG13th

Level: 3

Women's grassroots activism and their vision of a new civic consciousness lay at the heart of social reform in the United States throughout the Progressive Era, the period between the depression of 1893 and America's entry into the Second World War. Though largely disenfranchised except for school elections, white middle-class women reformers won a variety of victories, notably in the improvement of working conditions, especially for women and children. Ironically, though, child labor legislation pitted women of different classes against one another. To the reformers, child labor and industrial home work were equally inhumane practices that should be outlawed, but, as a number of women historians have recently observed, working-class mothers did not always share this view. Given the precarious finances of working-class families and the necessity of pooling the wages of as many family members as possible, working-class families viewed the passage and enforcement of stringent child labor statutes as a personal economic disaster and made strenuous efforts to circumvent child labor laws. Yet reformers rarely understood this resistance in terms of the desperate economic situation of working-class families, interpreting it instead as evidence of poor parenting. This is not to dispute women reformers' perception of child labor as a terribly exploitative practice, but their understanding of child labor and their legislative solutions for ending it failed to take account of the economic needs of working-class families.

Question List: 1 2 3 4 5 6

The primary purpose of the passage is to

  • A explain why women reformers of the Progressive Era failed to achieve their goals
  • B discuss the origins of child labor laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
  • C compare the living conditions of working-class and middle-class women in the Progressive Era
  • D discuss an oversight on the part of women reformers of the Progressive Era
  • E revise a traditional view of the role played by women reformers in enacting Progressive Era reforms

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