PASSAGE 45

　　By the turn of the century, the middle-class home in North American had been transformed. The flow of industry has passed and left idle the loom in the attic, the soap kettle in the shed, Ellen Richards wrote in 1908. The urban middle class was now able to buy a wide array of food products and clothing — baked goods, canned goods, suits, shirts, shoes, and dresses. Not only had household production waned, but technological improvements were rapidly changing the rest of domestic work. Middle-class homes had indoor running water and furnaces, run on oil, coal, or gas, that produced hot water. Stoves were fueled by gas, and delivery services provided ice for refrigerators. Electric power was available for lamps, sewing machines, irons, and even vacuum cleaners. No domestic task was unaffected. Commercial laundries, for instance, had been doing the wash for urban families for decades; by the early 1900's the first electric washing machines were on the market.

　　One impact of the new household technology was to draw sharp dividing lines between women of different classes and regions. Technological advances always affected the homes of the wealthy first, filtering downward into the urban middle class. But women who lived on farms were not yet affected by household improvements. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, rural homes lacked running water and electric power. Farm women had to haul large quantities of water into the house from wells or pumps for every purpose. Doing the family laundry, in large vats heated over stoves, continued to be a full day's work, just as canning and preserving continued to be seasonal necessities. Heat was provided by wood or coal stoves. In addition, rural women continued to produce most of their families' clothing. The urban poor, similarly, reaped few benefits from household improvements. Urban slums such as Chicago's nineteenth ward often had no sewers, garbage collection, or gas or electric lines; and tenements lacked both running water and central heating. At the turn of the century, variations in the nature of women's domestic work were probably more marked than at any time before.

　　1. What is the main topic of the passage ?

　　(A) The creation of the urban middle class

　　(B) Domestic work at the turn of the century

　　(C) The spread of electrical power in the United States

　　(D) Overcrowding in American cities.

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