Bonjour,
Je passe mes oraux d'anglais mercredi et j'aimerais s'avoir si quelqu'un pouvait corriger mes synthèses et me donner son avis?
Merci d'avance.

Places and forms of power

I’m going to talk about the notion of “places and forms of power”. I decided to approach the notion from a political point of view, because in the context of my English classes we have focused on some people who have contest the power. To get what we want, we must fight. However, we have the choice on how we want to lead this fight.
Thus, I have raised the following question: What are the diverse ways to dispute the power?
I’m going to talk about two groups of people who fought for the Right to Vote, but they did it in diverse ways.


Let’s first talk about the Suffragette. My first document is the trailer of “Suffragette” a movie of Sarah Gavron that I’ve seen last year. In this trailer the drama tracks the story of the women of the early feminist movement. Those resisters were forced to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a government more and more violent. So, they turned violent and radical too, because they realized that it was the way to change things. They wanted, as men, to get the right to vote. Thus, in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters created the WSPU, the Women's Social and Political Union, also named Suffragette in Manchester, to defend rights of women. At the beginning, this movement was pacific, but it became violent from 1910 because of the British government who refused to support women suffrage. Women began organized riots at demonstration with window's smashing. But they were arrested for public disorder and they were put in jail to several days or months. However, the prison did not scare them. Indeed, once out, the women resumed their radical actions. For example, they caused fires or cut off the telegraph wires. They will even attack the Prime Minister directly by vandalizing his house. Finally, at the end of the war, in 1918 an act of parliament eventually implemented the right to vote for women, but it was under some conditions. So, women kept fighting again, and their fight bore their fruits in 1928.

A few years later, another community also fought for this same right to vote and more broadly for equality between men: black community. However, they felt that for them the best way to get what they wanted was certainly not violence. Thus, in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her place on a bus as the laws of Jim Crow demanded, the black community of Montgomery in Alabama, decided to show his flush against the segregation by boycotting the buses as we heard in a recording in class. From there, Martin Luther King decides that it was time for black Americans to wake up. He then takes the head of the Civil Rights movement. In class, we watched a documentary about the last 5 years of MLK's life. In this documentary, we could see that Martin refused to be associated with violent acts. For him, violence did not overcome anything. You had to be smart. He kept organizing marches like Selma’s one, giving speeches like the famous "I have a dream" in Washington in front of the Abraham Lincoln memorial. In this speech, the Reverend King recalls that Blacks must keep hope because one day, their time will come. And he was indeed right, because in 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Right Act giving blacks the right to vote and at the same time ordering desegregation.


To conclude, I would like to say that power is something good. It allows us through laws set up to live in community while respecting others today. However, this has not always been the case and there are films to remind us of these fights.