VI. Reading Comprehension 15%
Section A
       In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early United States history. Onefocused on the status of women, primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden agetheory, which posited that during the cighteenth-century colonial era, American womenenjoyed a brief period of high status relative to their English contemporaries and tonineteenth-century American women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women's livesdeteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women's lives had been no better before1800. At issue were the causes of women's subordination: were these causes already in placewhen the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the rise ofnineteenth-century industrial capitalism? The second debate, the so-called origins debate,concerned the cmergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitableresult of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did racial prejudice ariseonly after these planters instituted slave labor?        Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key differences distinguished them.Whereas the debate over women's status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonialwomen to their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800-1860), thus inviting commentfrom scholars of both historical periods, the origins debate was primarily confined to adiscussion about slavery in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debateover women's status and its continued currency throughout the early 1980s, the debate overrace and slavery, begun in the 195Os, had lost some of its urgency with the publication ofMorgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely regarded as the last word onthe subject.        Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups whose histories itconcerned. In its heyday, the origins debate focused mainly on White attitudes towardAfricans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood's BlackMajority (1974) and Mullin's Flight and Rebellion (1972), which were centrally concernedwith enslaved African men, most works pertaining to the origins debate focused on the Whitearchitects, mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women's historians wereinterested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women's subordination, they wereequally concerned with documenting women's experiences. As in the origins debate, however,early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, women'shistorians focusing mainly on affluent White women.        Over time, however, some initial differences between the approaches taken by scholarsin the two fields faded. In the 1980s, historians of race and slavery in colonial America shiftedtheir attention to enslaved people； interest in African American culture grew, thereby bringingenslaved women more prominently into view. Historians of early American women moved insimilar directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of racial difference onwomen's experience.
【題組】46. ( ) It can be inferred that the author of the passage mentions American Slavery,American Freedom in the second paragraph primarily in order to:
(A) substantiate a point about the methodology that came to be prevalent amongscholars engaged in the origins debate.
(B) cite a major influence on those scholars who claimed that racial prejudicepreceded the institution of slavery in colonial America.
(C) show that some scholars who were engaged in the origins debate prior to the1980s were interested in the experiences of enslaved people.
(D) identify a reason for a certain difference in the late 1970s between the originsdebate and the debate over American women's status.
(E) contrast the kind of work produced by scholars engaged in the origins debatewith the kind produced by scholars engaged in the debate over Americanwomen's status.