WWI Women II

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     Two historians of the First World War both depict women as taking up roles previously reserved for men, but they differ slightly in the significance they describe to these unprecedented but temporary wartime duties. Gail Braybon describes the war as a liberating experience for many women. Although women working in munitions factories were subject to new dangers, such as explosions and trinitrotoluene poisoning, they were mindful of and proud of supporting the war effort, whether or not they considered the broader significance of their actions. Joshua Goldstein too describes a sense of freedom in women but emphasizes that it was short-lived. Although the war bent gender roles, it did not lessen hostility to women in traditionally male jobs, increase the value of female labor, or uproot the notion that home life was a strictly female responsibility. Braybon might reply by noting that, while other changes were slower in coming, some women suffragists supported the war and women's role in it to further their cause, and this position may have contributed to the advent of women's right to vote after the war, even by Goldstein's account. Perhaps more central to Braybon's position is that the liberation that women experienced during the war was one of sentiment and therefore made no less real by the lack of accompanying widespread reform. Furthermore, even though the spirit of liberation must have faded with the end of the war, it might have lived on in a latent form and ultimately contributed to the formation of the women's movement.

The author of the passage mentions women's right to vote primarily in order to

Review: WWI Women II


Explanation

This question asks about the right of women to vote, which comes up at exactly one point in the passage. That point is during the response of Braybon to Goldstein; the right to vote is presented as evidence that women's liberation during the world war was not purely temporary, as Goldstein was described as saying. Let's look for that in the answer choices. (E) matches our description. Choice (A) is a distortion, because the point in the passage is not that voting played a role in the war efforts (although it may have). (B) is not entirely sensical, since women did not receive the right to vote until after the war, and it has the same problem as (A). Choices (C) and (D) are farther off the point.

The correct answer is (E).


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