Women's vote in France

"Le vote des femmes en France"
French B2 writing exercise

Catherine and Blanche tell us about the first time they were allowed to vote in 1945.

Pay attention to the hints!

Some vocabulary you may want to look up before or during this exercise: "a ballot", "a ballot box", "local elections", "revenge on [something]", "Plato", "to resent [someone] for [doing something]", "to rebel", "to lose one's temper", "to make no sense", "to hear [news]", "to go without saying".

I’ll give you some sentences to translate into French

  • I’ll show you where you make mistakes
  • I’ll keep track of what you need to practise
  • Change my choices if you want
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Catherine and Blanche were both twenty-four years old on April 29th 1945, when they were able for the first time to put a ballot in the ballot box. Indeed, after women had obtained the right to vote a year earlier, these were the first - local - elections they could participate in. Catherine, a former philosophy teacher, took this evolution as revenge on Plato and his selective democracy: "I had to wait for twenty-four centuries to vote. Plato, I've resented him all my life for having excluded us women." As for Blanche, she remembers a day when she'd rebelled and her mother had lost her temper: "But you're a girl, Blanche!" "- For me, this didn't make any sense. I've never understood these differences in treatment between men and women." The day she heard that women were going to vote, it seemed to her "to go without saying".

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