When the history of women began to receive focused
attention in the 1970's, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of
a handful of female Americans who were well known
to both historians and the general public. Despite the
evidence that she had been important in social reform
circles before her husband was elected President and
that she continued to advocate different causes than
he did, she held a place in the public imagination
largely because she was the wife of a particularly
influential President. Her own activities were seen as
preparing the way for her husband's election or as a
complement to his programs. Even Joseph Lash's two
volumes of sympathetic biography, Eleanor and
Franklin (1971) and Eleanor: The Years Alone (1972),
reflected this assumption.
Lash's biography revealed a complicated woman who
sought through political activity both to flee inner
misery and to promote causes in which she
passionately believed. However, she still appeared to
be an idiosyncratic figure, somehow self-generated not
amenable to any generalized explanation. She
emerged from the biography as a mother to the entire
nation, or as a busybody, but hardly as a social type, a
figure comprehensible in terms of broader social
developments.
But more recent work on the feminism of the postsuffrage
years (following 1920) allows us to see
Roosevelt in a different light and to bring her life into a
more richly detailed context. Lois Scharf's Eleanor
Roosevelt, written in 1987, depicts a generation of
privileged women, born in the late nineteenth century
and maturing in the twentieth, who made the
transition from old patterns of female association to
new ones. Their views and their lives were full of
contradictions. They maintained female social
networks but began to integrate women into
mainstream politics; they demanded equal treatment
but also argued that women's maternal responsibilities
made them both wards and representatives of the
public interest. Thanks to Scharf and others,
Roosevelt's activities-for example, her support both
for labor laws protecting women and for appointments
of women to high public office-have become
intelligible in terms of this social context rather than as
the idiosyncratic career of a famous man's wife.



The author indicates that, according to Scharf's
biography, which of the following was NOT
characteristic of feminists of Eleanor Roosevelt's
generation?
A. Their lives were full of contradictions
B. Their policies identified them as idiosyncratic.
C. They were from privileged backgrounds.
D. They held that women had unique responsibilities.
E. They made a transition from old patterns of
association to new ones.
[spoiler]
B vs D

Pls give your explanations[/spoiler]


Which of the following studies would proceed in a way
most similar to the way in which, according to the
passage, Scharf's book interprets Eleanor Roosevelt's
career?
A. An exploration of the activities of a wealthy social
reformer in terms of the ideals held by the reformer
B. A history of the leaders of a political party which
explained how the conflicting aims of its individual
leaders thwarted and diverted the activities of each
leader
C. An account of the legislative career of a
conservative senator which showed his goals to have
been derived from a national conservative movement
of which the senator was a part
D. A biography of a famous athlete which explained
her high level of motivation in terms of the kind of
family in which she grew up
E. A history of the individuals who led the movement
to end slavery in the United States which attributed
the movement's success to the efforts of those
exceptional individuals