Question

(The following passage is excerpted from a magazine article first published in 1981.) A few weeks before my twenty-fifth reunion last spring, a Washington reporter called to say she was writing an article on why so many women of accomplishment had gone to Smith College. "Don't you think it's remarkable that the two top women in the country went to the same college?" "Like who?" I asked cautiously, sensing a news peg. "Like Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush,"[2] she said. There was a pause while both of us waited for me to find a diplomatic way to challenge the question. "Look," I said finally, "do you think a reporter is interviewing Mr. Thatcher's schoolmates to find out how they were trained to marry a chief of state? Is Mr. Thatcher 3 one of the top men in England?" The reporter laughed. She agreed this story was a dumb idea, especially since she herself had gone to Smith, but her editor had assigned it. "Did you know Jean Harris[4] also went to Smith?" she added dryly. I hadn't. I wondered if the connection among Jean Harris, Nancy Reagan, and other famous companions was the same in the reporter's mind as in mine: they were Olympic champions at the traditional feminine game of transferring their egos into the body of a male human being. It was the awful familiarity of this game that had made so many women, especially older women, feel both uncomfortable and sympathetic when Jean Harris's years of willing humiliation were laid bare in the press. She said she had intended to commit suicide when she accidentally shot Dr. Tarnower, her longtime lover whose money and affection were being distracted by a younger woman and perhaps she had. Perhaps he was herself. We skittered off this disturbing idea and onto something more positive. Even in the 1940s when Nancy Reagan and Jean Harris were students, Smith and other women's colleges were producing a disproportionate number of women scholars and professionals; especially those in such "unfeminine" fields as science and math. Though Smith was proud of the fact that men greatly outnumbered women on its faculty-a proof of seriousness highlighted in the college catalogue even when I was there in the 1950s-and though not one woman was president of Smith until the current one arrived in 1975, we still had many more women professors and role models than did coeducational schools. Equally important, there was never a danger of being made to feel like a female misfit in a mostly male classroom, the fate of so many women in co-ed schools, especially in fields like science or math. But even as the reporter and I discussed those interesting reasons why Smith had produced more than its share of independent achievers, we knew that all of them put together were less newsworthy than one Nancy Reagan. Any First Lady, no matter what she does or doesn't do, is still more likely to top the lists of Most Admired Women than any woman who has succeeded on her own. It's a social message that's especially painful for women who are encouraged toward personal accomplishment and excellence, and then expected to subordinate themselves to children and a husband's career. "If we're ever to have educated children," we were told at Smith in the 1950s, "we must have educated mothers." That impossible way of resolving the tension resulted in the prototypical class note 5 of the Alumnae Quarterly each year: "Sophia Smith Jones, '56, has completed her Ph.D., done volunteer work, and begun several teaching jobs while having four children and following her husband John in his corporate career." It was the question the reporter didn't ask that sent me back to my reunion: How had we survived that double message of our education? Which of the following statements best represents the thesis of the passage? (A) Ambitious women face harmful and contradictory messages about the nature of women's achievement. B) Women's colleges do not adequately prepare their graduates to succeed in male-dominated fields. The demands of parenthood are incompatible with the demands of a high-pressure corporate career. (D) Women today experience more discrimination on the job than they do in educational settings. (E) Roles such as First Lady are outdated and should no longer be recognized in public life.

Answer 1

Option C is an absolutely accurate answer.

Option C

Explanation:-

Because in the 25 reunion in Washington where it has been shown that the demand of the parenthood are incompatible as compared to the demand of career orientation of people.

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