新SAT阅读官方例题解析-Textual Evidence循证题

Questions 33-42 are based on the following

passage.

This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s

address to the 1869 Woman Suffrage Convention in

Washington, DC.

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I urge a sixteenth amendment, because “manhood

suffrage,” or a man’s government, is civil, religious,

and social disorganization. The male element is a

destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving

war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the

material and moral world alike discord, disorder,

disease, and death. See what a record of blood and

cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what

slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what

inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and

persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the

soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries,

while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have

been dead alike to love and hope!

The male element has held high carnival thus far;

it has fairly run riot from the beginning,

overpowering the feminine element everywhere,

crushing out all the diviner qualities in human

nature, until we know but little of true manhood and

womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for

it has scarce been recognized as a power until within

the last century. Society is but the reflection of man

himself, untempered by woman’s thought; the hard

iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the

home. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at

the fragmentary condition of everything, when we

remember that man, who represents but half a

complete being, with but half an idea on every

subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all

sublunary matters.

People object to the demands of those whom they

choose to call the strong-minded, because they say

“the right of suffrage will make the women

masculine.” That is just the difficulty in which we are

involved today. Though disfranchised, we have few

women in the best sense; we have simply so many

reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine

gender. The strong, natural characteristics of

womanhood are repressed and ignored in

dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she

will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his

condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman

must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas,

opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She

must respect his statutes, though they strip her of

every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher

law written by the finger of God on her own soul. . . .

. . . [M]an has been molding woman to his ideas

by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a

negation, has used indirect means to control him,

and in most cases developed the very characteristics

both in him and herself that needed repression.

And now man himself stands appalled at the results

of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that

falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life.

The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines,

railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of

womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true

religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of

thought and action.

We ask woman’s enfranchisement, as the first step

toward the recognition of that essential element in

government that can only secure the health, strength,

and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift

woman to her true position will help to usher in a

new day of peace and perfection for the race.

In speaking of the masculine element, I do not

wish to be understood to say that all men are hard,

selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful

spirits the world has known have been clothed with

manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though

often marked in woman, that distinguish what is

called the stronger sex. For example, the love of

acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of

civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the

elements, the riches and forces of nature, are powers

of destruction when used to subjugate one man to

another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.

Here that great conservator of woman’s love, if

permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in

freedom against oppression, violence, and war,

would hold all these destructive forces in check, for

woman knows the cost of life better than man does,

and not with her consent would one drop of blood

ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.