Notion anglais BAC Idea of Progress

Today I’m going to talk about the idea of progress.

This year, in class we studied many documents, like the following films : The Imitation Game and Selma, but we also talked about women's fight to got the right to vote.

I am going to talk about social progress which is, according to me, the only aspect of progress with positive sides.

First, I’m going to talk about the right to vote for women. Then I will study the acceptance of homosexuality. Finally, I will speak about the abolition of segregation in the USA. According to me, all these elements represent great aspects of progress in our society.

So, let's talk about women's fight to get the right to vote.

In class we studied the movie The Imitation Game. During the Second World War, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, succeeded in decrypting the Nazi Enigma code. The Enigma machine communicated to the Germans where the oncoming attacks against the Allies would happen. In the film, he meets a woman, Joan, and together with his team they will work successfully to decrypt the codes of the Enigma machine. In the film we see that women didn’t have the same rights as men. They were imprisoned by social rules. It was unthinkable to disobey them. At that time, women were doomed to get married young, stay at home and raise a family.

The fact that 8.5 million British women obtained the right to vote at the end of the First World War has often been attributed to women’s war work ; the Suffragettes fought for years to get it. It’s for me an important form of progress. While some people may have changed their view on the value of women when confronted with their participation in the war effort, prejudice certainly did not disappear as quickly as both the press and politicians would have liked people to believe. Besides, many elements contradict the idea of the vote as a reward : the mass dismissal of women workers at the end of the war and the age restriction imposed by the Representation of the People Act that left most women war-workers out of the electorate because they were under 30. For one should not forget that the electoral reform of 1918 was never meant for women and that women’s suffrage was, in fact, the only measure in the whole bill not to be approved unanimously.

Today women are much more present in our society thanks to the right to vote, which is a fundamental aspect of progress. Therefore they have a greater impact and have been able to impose themselves more and more despite the inequalities that still exist.

So now, let’s focus on another aspect of progress : how people’s mentalities have evolved as far as homosexuality is concerned.

Alan Turing was a war hero but he was nevertheless judged and sentenced because of his homosexuality. Being gay was illegal in 1945. Indeed, being a man and being attracted to another man was against the law. In the movie The Imitation Game, Alan had been gay since he was a teenager, he had fallen in love with a teenager whose name was Christopher. Being gay is not something that you choose or decide, it just happens to you. At that time, if everyone had known that Alan was gay, he would have spent years in jail.

Indeed, gay people were all punished because of their

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