GRE Reading Comprehension

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Source: CHP

Students of United States history, seeking to identify the circumstances that encouraged the emergence of feminist movements, have thoroughly investigated the mid-nineteenth-century American economic and social conditions that affected the status of women. These historians, however, have analyzed less fully the development of specifically feminist ideas and activities during the same period. Furthermore, the ideological origins of feminism in the United States have been obscured because, even when historians did take into account those feminist ideas and activities occurring within the United States, they failed to recognize that feminism was then a truly international movement actually centered in Europe. American feminist activists who have been described as "solitary" and "individual theorists" were in reality connected to a movement一utopian socialism一 which was already popularizing feminist ideas in Europe during the two decades that culminated in the first women's rights conference held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

Question List: 1 2

It can be inferred that the author considers those historians who describe early feminists in the United States as "solitary" to be

  • A insufficiently familiar with the international origins of nineteenth-century American feminist thought
  • B overly concerned with the regional diversity of feminist ideas in the period before 1848
  • C not focused narrowly enough in their geographical scope
  • D insufficiently aware of the ideological consequences of the Seneca Falls conference
  • E insufficiently concerned with the social conditions out of which feminism developed

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