Which one of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?

Victoria August 14, 2020

Hi @joaquin-acuna,

Happy to help!

The second paragraph is necessary for the effective discussion of the main idea in paragraph 3 because the thesis of the passage posits that the concept of a decline in status was simplistic and unsophisticated. The first paragraph merely outlines the "golden age" account. The second paragraph is what ties this account to future scholars who suggested that there was a decline in status between colonial and 19th-century women. These theories are intrinsically connected as you cannot have a decline in status without a golden age.

Dexter's golden age account posits that colonial society did not allow for the existence of rigid sex-role distinctions, creating a "golden age" for women (lines 7 to 20). This theory was then incorporated into studies of 19th-century middle-class women and the idea of the "decline in status." Paragraph 3 questions this account, and its eventual incorporation into future scholarship, as it tells us that recent scholarship has "exposed the concept of a decline in status as simplistic and unsophisticated" and has illustrated that the golden age account "assumed all too readily that a relatively simple social system automatically brought higher standing to colonial women" (lines 41 to 48). Paragraph 3 outlines that this recent scholarship has painted a more complicated picture, suggesting that the oversimplified golden age account is outdated.

Hope this helps clear things up a bit! Please let us know if you have any further questions.

denleybishop February 6, 2022

yes but E says the earlier study was insufficent right

Ravi February 8, 2022

The issue with E is that we don't say that the golden age theory is incorrect because insufficient research was done. Additionally, it was not only one study; it was a whole theory that continued to be pervasive in the study of history, so we can get rid of this answer choice.