In the passage about the mechanization of work, wouldn’t the main idea of the first paragraph be the second sentence “For example, … altered their position in society” as the rest of the paragraph supports this point? If not, why would the first sentence by the main idea instead of this one?
If a sentence begins with “for example”, what does that indicate about that sentence’s function in a paragraph?
For reference, here is the paragraph in question:
(1) It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. (2) For example, it has been suggested that the employment of women in industry took them out of the household, their traditional sphere, and fundamentally altered, their position in society. (3) In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, women would give up their femininity. (4) Friedrich Engels, however, predicted that women would be liberated from the “social, legal, and economic subordination” of the family by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of “the whole female sex … into public industry.” (5) Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanization’s effects, but they agreed that it would transform women’s lives.
The function of such sentences would normally be an example supporting the main idea, but in this particular passage, the example in the sentence that the remaining lines support. So wouldn’t the example have more weightage than the topic sentence?
The quantity of sentences doesn’t determine main topic. If sentences 3 and 4 support sentence 2, but sentence 2 exists to support sentence 1, which sentence is actually setting the tone here? The rest of the sentences are all ideologically “downstream” of sentence 1.