When the History of Women Began to Receive Focused Attention in the 1970 GMAT Reading Comprehension

Reading Passage Question

When the history of women began to receive focused attention in the 1970’, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of a handful of female Americans who were well known to both historians and the general public. Despite the evidence that she had been important in social reform circles before her husband was elected President and that she continued to advocate different causes than he did, she held a place in the public imagination largely because she was the wife of a particularly influential President. Her own activities were seen as preparing the way for her husband’s election or as a complement to his programs. Even Joseph Lash’s two volumes of Sympathetic biography, Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and Eleanor: The Years Alone (1972), reflected this assumption.

Lash’s biography revealed a complicated woman who sought through political activity both to flee inner misery and to promote causes in which she passionately believed. However, she still appeared to be an idiosyncratic figure, somehow self-generated not amenable to any generalized explanation. She emerged from the biography as a mother to the entire nation, or as a busybody, but hardly as a social type, a figure comprehensible in terms of broader social developments. But more recent work on the feminism of the post-suffrage years (following 1920) allows us to see Roosevelt in a different light and to bring her life into a more richly detailed context. Lois Scharf’s Eleanor Roosevelt, written in 1987, depicts a generation of privileged women, born in the late nineteenth century and maturing in the twentieth, who made the transition from old patterns of female association to new ones. Their views and their lives were full of contradictions. They maintained female social networks but began to integrate women into mainstream politics; they demanded equal treatment but also argued that women’s maternal responsibilities made them both wards and representatives of the public interest. Thanks to Scharf and others, Roosevelt’s activities—for example, her support both for labor laws protecting women and for appointments of women to high public office—have become intelligible in terms of this social context rather than as the idiosyncratic career of a famous man’s wife

“When the history of women began to receive focused attention in the 1970’’ is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.

This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 7 comprehension questions. The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for the purpose of testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analysing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Solutions and Explanation

1. The passage as a whole is primarily concerned with which of the following?

(A) Changes in the way in which Eleanor Roosevelt’s life is understood
(B) Social changes that made possible the role played by Eleanor Roosevelt in social reform
(C) Changes in the ways in which historians have viewed the lives of American women
(D) Social changes that resulted from the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt
(E) Changes in the social roles that American women have played

2. Which of the following studies would proceed in a way most similar to the way in which, according to the passage. Scharf's book interprets Eleanor Roosevelt's career?

(A) An exploration of the activities of a wealthy social reformer in terms of the ideals held by the reformer
(B) A history of the leaders of a political party which explained how the conflicting aims of its individual leaders thwarted and diverted the activities of each leader
(C) An account of the legislative career of a conservative senator which showed his goals to have been derived from a national conservative movement of which the senator was a part
(D) A biography of a famous athlete which explained her high level of motivation in terms of the kind of family in which she grew up
(E) A history of the individuals who led the movement to end slavery in the United States which attributed the movement's success to the efforts of those exceptional individuals

3. The author cites which of the following as evidence against the public view of Eleanor Roosevelt held in the 1970’s?

(A) She had been born into a wealthy family.
(B) Her political career predated the adoption of women’s suffrage.
(C) She continued her career in politics even after her husband’s death.
(D) She was one of a few female historical figures who were well-known to historians by the 1970s.
(E) Her activism predated her husband’s presidency, and her projects differed from his.

4. The author indicates that, according to Scharf’s biography, which of the following was NOT characteristic of feminists of Eleanor Roosevelt’s generation?

(A) Their lives were full of contradictions
(B) Their policies identified them as idiosyncratic.
(C) They were from privileged backgrounds.
(D) They held that women had unique responsibilities.
(E) They made a transition from old patterns of association to new ones.

5. The author mentions which of the following as one of the “contradictions” (highlighted) evident in the lives of the women discussed in the third paragraph?

(A) They pursued political aims for personal motives.
(B) They were idiosyncratic individuals who can nevertheless be seen as social types.
(C) They came from wealthy families but sought to remedy the problems of the poor.
(D) They demanded equal treatment for women but justified the privileges of wealth.
(E) They maintained female social networks but promoted women's participation in mainstream politics.

6. The author credits which of the following for making possible the current understanding of Eleanor Roosevelt's career?

(A) The work of historians in the 1970s
(B) Accounts written by feminists in the 1920s
(C) Recent studies of feminists of her generation
(D) Official records of her husband's presidency
(E) The discovery of the writings of her associates

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