Oral de spécialité AMC

Today, we will study women’s place in our society since a few centuries. The place of women in society has long been limited to the family and domestic life. While, during the XXth century, women enter into new fields. In the last forty years, many advances have been made in improving their conditions and in recognizing the part they have played. So, we will ask ourselves to what extent can we say that American women have always had to struggle to find their place in the society. In order to answer this key question we will, firstly see how women struggled against discrimination. Then, we will focus on women during World War II. At the end, we will analyze the situation nowadays. In order to answer this question, we will refer to several documents :

-          an article entitled “An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks” from National Archives.

• another from The Guardian entitled “What Bader Ginsburg’s death means for the Supreme Court.
• one from “How did English women fight against the myth of « women being inferior to men”

• a representation entitled 4 freedoms from Rockwell

• an article entitled “American Women in World War II: On the Home Front and Beyond”

• at least, a proclamation from the White House about Women’s History Month published in 2022

Many women played and still play an important role in the fight against racism such as Rosa Parks, perhaps, the most famous activist woman for that cause. In fact, Rosa Parks occupies an iconic status in the civil rights movement, which was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights according to the law in the United States. She refused to vacate a seat on a bus to a white person and move to the back of the bus, in Montgomery (Alabama) in 1955. This act created a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery a few days later. Parks was arrested and found guilty of disorderly conduct. We can compare it with a hero. In fact, a hero “can be someone who is ready to sacrifice his life in order to make things evolved positively.” And this is what she caused. Rosa Parks was not the first woman to revolt. Indeed, in 1886, the National Association of Colored Women was created. The organization, in an effort to help African American women, is active on issues of black men and women’s suffrage, lynching and the Jim Crow laws put in place between 1877 and 1964 to hinder the constitutional rights of African Americans after the Civil War. NACW also fight against the AIDS virus, violence against women and chemical exposure in the workplace.

Now we will study a woman who made a difference in the justice system. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was the second woman in U.S. history to serve on the Supreme Court. As one of the justices of the highest court in this country, she has been a tireless advocate for gender equality and discrimination in general. Ginsburg comes from the generation of women who had to be three times better than men in order to get half the recognition of the average man. That's why, when she died, her replacement by a conservative judge, according to the second document, create a loss of balance. As a proof we can take a current topic, a project has been leaked recently. The Supreme Court is prepared to strike down the decision Roe vs Wade in 1973 that allowed abortion.

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