跟读练习: Do Women Have Equal Rights Yet? - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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I was recently talking with some teenage boys who heard that I'm a feminist historian,
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I was recently talking with some teenage boys who heard that I'm a feminist historian,
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and they said, name one way that women are oppressed.
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There are no laws that keep women from doing anything they want to do.
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Were they right?
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How would you respond?
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I've had lots of conversations like this,
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and I used to struggle to know what to say,
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but then I learned a few things that helped me see this situation clearly.
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Check this out.
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It's 1931 in England.
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Women in the UK had just gotten the vote three years before,
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and new career opportunities were opening up for women that had never been allowed before.
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Virginia Woolf had been invited to give a talk to a group of young women on the topic Professions for Women.
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Woolf was a celebrity author and a public intellectual,
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so this was supposed to be a super inspiring talk about women breaking into the workplace.
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But when Woolf got there she said,
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I don't think I'm going to be able to give you the talk that you're expecting.
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Yes, we have the vote now.
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Yes, we can work in all of these new spaces,
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but people are acting like that's going to immediately level the playing field
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when it's actually going to take generations upon generations to get
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the patriarchal expectations of the past out of all of our laws and our traditions and our own minds.
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Wolf and her generation had been raised in the Victorian cult of domesticity.
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Queen Victoria herself had been against women's suffrage.
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She, the queen, said we women were not made for governing.
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And she also called the suffrage movement this mad,
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wicked folly of women's rights with all its attendant horrors.
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She said that feminists ought to get a good whipping.
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So, the Victorian cult of domesticity was an ideology where women were expected to take the role of the pure,
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meek, self-sacrificing angel in the house.
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Girls were trained to become that angel,
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and boys were trained to expect that their future wife would be that angel.
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As Wolff said, it is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
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This concept reminds me of the metaphor of the elephant tied to a stake.
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Did you know that
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if you tie a baby elephant to a stake it will
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obviously only be able to walk in a very small circle but sadly if you leave the elephant tied there long enough,
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you can untie it and it will still stay in the same circle.
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It can't imagine itself being able to leave.
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Its limitations have been effectively mapped onto its mind.
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This was what Virginia Woolf was talking about in 1931.
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She's saying, ladies, look around you.
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Yes, the big heavy stake prohibiting us from voting has been removed,
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but men still don't see us as equals, let alone leaders.
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We've been so tied down for so long,
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we don't see ourselves as men's equals or leaders.
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So that era, the 1920s to 1940s,
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is super fascinating to study and it's still relevant today.
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In many ways, women were breaking free in exciting new ways.
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You can see it in their clothes and in their hair.
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They're shedding the weight of history as they chop those locks and hack those hemlines.
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But in many ways, they were still held back.
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And I'm guessing they had a lot of conversations with men,
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just like the one that I had with those teenage boys,
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where men said, oh my gosh,
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you were whining about the right to vote for 80 years and you finally got it.
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What could you possibly want now?
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So what did they want?
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Well, In the 1930s, there were still a lot of legal limitations.
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In our metaphor, this is the elephant literally tied to a steak.
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And a lot of mental limitations,
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where the elephant isn't actually tied,
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but people are having a really hard time changing the culture.
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Here are some examples of legal limitations at the time.
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Companies could prohibit women from working there blatantly on on the basis of their sex.
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Companies could legally pay women much less than men for equal work.
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Courts did not allow women to secure divorce easily.
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As we talked about last week,
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through the Comstock laws, men prohibited women from using contraception to prevent pregnancy and from obtaining abortions when they needed them.
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Also, if you can believe this,
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state laws designated a husband as head and master of the house with unilateral control of property.
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Women couldn't get credit in their own name.
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Men prohibited women from attending many top-level schools.
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And within religious contexts, male leaders kept women from ordination,
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which meant women had lesser spiritual authority and no vote on matters affecting their own lives.
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This is still a huge problem.
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So what happened between Virginia Woolf's era and the women's movement that took the world by storm just a few decades later?
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A huge game-changer was the Second World War.
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Because World War II represented an existential threat,
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it was what we refer to as a total war,
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which is a type of warfare where even regular citizens are recruited to the effort.
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As part of this total war,
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350,000 American women volunteered, and 19 million women worked for wages,
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5 million of them for the first time.
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The government actively recruited women during this time,
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using all kinds of materials,
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such as an advertisement asking women,
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can you use an electric mixer?
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If so, you can learn to operate a drill.
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Women were flooded with images like these.
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And of course, the iconic poster of Rosie the Riveter.
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A rivet, of course, I totally didn't have to look this up,
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is a short metal pin or bolt used to hold together two plates of metal.
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So a riveter is someone who uses a rivet gun to put metal plates together.
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a factory job for war equipment.
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The idea of Rosie the Riveter originated in a song written in 1942 by Red Evans and John Jacob Loeb.
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She's making history, working for victory, Rosie.
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The Riveter.
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And this song inspired a social movement
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that increased the number of working American women from 12 million to 20 million by 1944.
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These are some of the photos of actual riveters during the war effort.
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And again, these women were being paid for their work,
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which was a huge departure from the Victorian rules of the past.
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In fact, at the end of the war,
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when Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the Declaration of Human Rights for the newly formed United Nations,
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she included a specific women's resolution.
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This resolution urged governments to encourage the participation of women in the economy
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and in the government so that women would keep moving forward and not just revert to their previous angel-in-the-house roles.
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But what actually happened when the war ended and the men came home?
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The men wanted their jobs back,
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so the government launched campaigns to encourage women to return to the domestic duties of the home.
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The percentage of women working went from 36% to 28% in 1947.
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And this ushered in the Cult of Domesticity Part 2.
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So friends, was the work of gender equality done in the 1920s?
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A lot of people thought so.
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Is it done now?
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A lot of people think so,
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including those teenage boys that I mentioned at the beginning of the video.
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My answer to them now is this.
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Think of that elephant.
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Are there any laws or policies in our government,
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in our workplaces, in our religious institutions that are like the stake and the rope restricting women's authority or women's participation?
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Are there any cultural norms that have lingered in our customs and our thoughts,
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like that phantom rope still keeping women in place?
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Let me know what you think in the comments.
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And let me know what you say when people argue that the playing field is already equal.
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Be sure to join us next week on this station at the same time.
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We'll keep you up to date on Women in the News.
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Thank you.
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背景与上下文
本视频中，讲述者与一群青少年男孩进行了讨论，他们并不完全理解女性所面临的压迫。他们质疑当前的法律是否保障了女性的平等权利。通过历史上的例子，尤其是维珍尼亚·伍尔夫在1931年对女性职业的看法，讲述者深入探讨了女性在社会和职场中长期以来的困难和障碍。这些障碍不仅源于法律，更多的是源于深植于文化和思想中的传统观念。
日常交流的五个重要短语
- 我们并没有真正的平等。 (We don't have true equality.)
- 这需要几代人的努力。 (It takes generations of effort.)
- 我们不能只看表面。 (We can't just look at the surface.)
- 历史的影响仍在继续。 (The influence of history continues.)
- 改变需要时间。 (Change takes time.)
逐步跟读指南
为了有效地使用视频中的内容来提高您的英语发音技巧，请按照以下步骤进行:
- 选择视频片段： 找到视频中您认为特别有启发性的段落，可以是伍尔夫讨论女性平等的部分。
- 反复听取： 集中注意力，反复播放所选片段，注意讲者的语音语调和重音。
- 逐句跟读： 停下来逐句重复讲者的台词，模仿他们的发音和语速，以提高您的英语影子跟读能力。
- 分析短语： 参考上面列出的短语，尝试在您的对话中使用它们，以加深理解并提升口语表达能力。
- 录音对比： 将您的录音与视频中的原音对比，识别需要改进的发音。
通过这些步骤，您不仅能提升英语发音，还能为将来的雅思口语练习打下坚实的基础。记得持续练习，积极参与讨论，以实现自我提升。
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。