og10-7-38

Passage 7
        

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the

accidental death of their two year old was told that since

the child had made no real economic contribution to the

family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast,

(5) less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three

year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages

and won an award of $750,000.

The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing

these two incidents is the subject of Viviana

(10) Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child.

During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept

of the “useful” child who contributed to the family

economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion

of the “useless” child who, though producing no income

(15) for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet

considered emotionally “priceless.” Well established

among segments of the middle and upper classes by the

mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread through-

out society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

(20) centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations

and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the

assumption that a child’s emotional value made child

labor taboo.

For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were

(25) many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s

productive value in a maturing industrial economy,

the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child

mortality, and the development of the companionate

family (a family in which members were united by

(30) explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors

critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth. Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus,’...

although clearly shaped by profound changes in the

economic, occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer

(35) maintains. “was also part of a cultural process ‘of sacralization’ of children’s lives. ” Protecting children from the

crass business world became enormously important for

late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she

suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what

(40) they perceived as the relentless corruption of human

values by the marketplace.

In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s

worth. Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new

“sociological economics,” who have analyzed such tradi-

(45) tionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, educa-

tion, and health solely in terms of their economic deter-

minants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces

in the form of individual “preferences,” these sociologists

tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by

(50) the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is

highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead

the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to

transform price. As children became more valuable in

emotional terms, she argues, their “exchange” or “ surrender” value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater

38. It can be inferred from the passage that in the early 1800's children were generally regarded by their families as individuals who

a) needed enormous amounts of security and affection

b)required constant supervision while working

c)were important to the economic well-being of a family

d) were unsuited to spending long hours in school

e)were financial burdens assumed for the good of society

答案是C，定位到LINE11，可以得出答案。但是LINE1-4说到1894年，孩子对家庭没有经济上的贡献。这不是跟这题的答案矛盾了吗？请NN们解释下~