IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 259

The campaign for women's suffrage was one of the longest and best organised reform movements of the modern era. When it began, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a woman could not vote in a general election, and once she married, English law absorbed her legal identity into that of her husband. Women were not, however, entirely excluded from public life. They had been able to vote in some local elections since 1869, and from 1870 they could sit on the newly created school boards, which gave campaigners experience of elections and public speaking.

The first serious attempt to open Parliament to women came in 1866. A group led by Barbara Bodichon, a writer and artist, collected signatures on a petition asking that the vote be granted to women who already held the property qualification required of men. The petition was presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and MP, who would later set out his case in The Subjection of Women, published in 1869. It was politely received and then quietly dropped. In 1867 Mill went further, proposing an amendment to the Reform Bill that would have replaced the word 'man' with 'person'. It was defeated by 196 votes to 73.

Defeat produced organisation rather than despair. Suffrage societies were founded in Manchester, London and other cities, and for thirty years they campaigned peacefully, holding public meetings, publishing pamphlets and persuading sympathetic MPs to raise the question in the Commons. Private members' bills in favour of women's suffrage were debated repeatedly in the 1880s and 1890s; several passed a second reading, only to run out of parliamentary time. Progress was real but painfully slow, and the patience of a younger generation began to wear thin.

In 1897 the various groups united as the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Its members, known as suffragists, were respectable, patient and strictly constitutional. They believed that the vote would be won by convincing enough parliamentarians of the justice of their case, and they were careful to avoid any action that might alienate the Liberal or Conservative parties, both of which contained supporters and opponents.

A different mood appeared in 1903, when Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia founded the Women's Social and Political Union in Manchester. Its motto was 'Deeds, not words'. In October 1905 Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney interrupted a Liberal Party meeting at the Free Trade Hall, addressed by Sir Edward Grey, demanding to know whether the government would give women the vote. They were ejected, arrested and sent to prison, and the resulting publicity transformed the campaign. In 1906 a reporter for the Daily Mail coined the word 'suffragette' to distinguish these militants from the older suffragists.

The suffragettes moved steadily towards confrontation. In February 1907 supporters marched through London in the rain in what became known as the Mud March, and in June 1908 the WSPU organised a rally in Hyde Park which its leaders claimed drew 300,000 people. The scale of such events proved that the movement had a mass base, but it did not shift the government. From 1909 imprisoned suffragettes began refusing food to demand the status of political prisoners, and prison authorities responded by feeding them by force, which shocked many observers.

Political frustration grew. In November 1910 a protest outside Parliament ended in hours of scuffles in which many women were injured, an episode remembered as Black Friday. Two years later the WSPU abandoned its respect for property: windows in London's West End were smashed, pillar boxes were set alight and, eventually, empty buildings and railway stations were burned. Such tactics won attention but lost sympathy, and they divided the movement. In 1913 the government passed the so-called Cat and Mouse Act, under which hunger-striking prisoners were released when their health collapsed and rearrested once they had recovered.

On 4 June 1913 the campaign acquired a martyr. Emily Wilding Davison, who had been imprisoned and force-fed several times, ran onto the course at the Epsom Derby and was struck by the king's horse; she died four days later. Whether she intended to die remains disputed, but the image of a woman trampled by the royal colours was published around the world.

The First World War changed everything. Militant action was suspended, and both the WSPU and the NUWSS devoted themselves to the war effort, while hundreds of thousands of women took over jobs in factories, transport and hospitals. When the war ended, the argument that women were unfit for the responsibilities of citizenship was hard to sustain. The Representation of the People Act received royal assent in February 1918 and gave the vote to women over thirty who occupied property or were married to a man who did, as well as to all men over twenty-one. Women under thirty, and those who could not meet the property qualification, were left out.

Ten years later the age limit was removed. The Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave women the vote on exactly the same terms as men; Emmeline Pankhurst had died a few weeks earlier. Historians still argue about what won the vote: the patient argument of the suffragists, the disruption of the suffragettes, or the upheaval of the war. Most would now accept that no single factor explains it, and that the movement's strength lay in combining a constitutional wing that kept the cause respectable with a militant wing that made it impossible to ignore.

In the history of European painting, few technical changes have mattered as much as the adoption of oil as a binding medium. The standard story credits the invention to Jan van Eyck, the Netherlandish painter whose Ghent Altarpiece was completed in 1432. The story goes back at least to Giorgio Vasari, who in his Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, wrote that a painter of Bruges had devised a method of painting with oil that gave pictures a brilliance never seen before. The attribution is wrong, but it survives because it contains part of a truth: van Eyck did not invent oil paint, yet he used it in a way that no one had used it before.

Oil paint itself is a simple mixture of powdered pigment and a drying oil, usually pressed from flax, walnuts or poppy seeds. What makes it remarkable is the way it sets. The oil does not harden by evaporation; it absorbs oxygen from the air and gradually forms a tough, flexible film. Because the film forms slowly, a painter can blend one colour into another while both are still wet, soften an edge, or scrape a passage back and begin again.

The medium that oil displaced was egg tempera, in which pigment is bound with yolk. Tempera was the dominant technique for European panel painting throughout the Middle Ages, and it has real virtues: it is durable, and its colours stay bright. Tempera sets within minutes; oil, by contrast, remains workable for a day or more. Oil can also be laid on in thin, translucent glazes, so that light passes through the paint to the pale ground beneath and is reflected back, giving a depth of colour that tempera cannot match. Oil films, it is true, can yellow slightly with age.

The notion that oil paint was a fifteenth-century invention is chronologically false. Craftsmen had used oils for centuries, chiefly as varnishes and as binders for certain pigments, and medieval treatises on painting describe the practice. Analysis of wall paintings in the cave monasteries at Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, has identified an oil-based binder in material thought to date from about the seventh century. The finding does not show that European painters learned the technique from Central Asia, for there is no evidence of transmission, but it does show that the chemistry was understood long before van Eyck.

What van Eyck and his contemporaries did was to turn a collection of known materials into a system. A wooden panel, usually of oak imported from the Baltic region, was smoothed and sealed with glue. Over this went a ground of chalk or gypsum mixed with animal glue, providing a smooth, slightly absorbent white surface. The painter drew the design on the ground, blocked in the main areas of colour and then built up the finished image in thin layers. Many specialists believe that a resin was also added to the oil, making it dry faster and leaving a glossier surface.

The support changed as the medium spread. In Italy, and especially in damp Venice, where large churches needed large pictures, painters increasingly worked on canvas rather than on panel. Canvas was lighter and cheaper than wood and could be stretched to almost any size, and it tolerated the flexible oil film better than a brittle layer of tempera. Oil on canvas became the standard form of European painting and remained so for four centuries.

The scientific study of materials has transformed our knowledge of how these pictures were made. X-radiography passes through paint and records the density of what lies beneath: the grain of the wood, the nails of the frame and sometimes an earlier composition hidden under the finished one. Infrared reflectography, which responds to a different part of the spectrum, can capture the drawing that an artist made on the ground before any paint was applied.

Other techniques answer different questions. A cross-section taken from a painting shows, under the microscope, the sequence of layers the artist applied, from the ground upwards, and can reveal whether a picture has been altered or restored. Pigment analysis can identify materials that travelled enormous distances: the deep blue of ultramarine was made from lapis lazuli, a stone found in what is now Afghanistan and, weight for weight, more costly than gold. Dendrochronology works from the wood itself. Because the width of each year's growth ring depends on the weather, the pattern in a panel can be matched against reference sequences, giving the year in which the tree was felled. If the rings show that the timber was cut in 1450, no painting on that panel can have been made before that date, whatever a hopeful dealer may claim.

Technical evidence also has limits, and an uncomfortable habit of unsettling confident attributions. Disputes over the cleaning of old paintings — how much yellowed varnish should be removed, and whether the bright colours revealed are original or the work of an over-enthusiastic restorer — have divided experts for generations. Conservators now test their assumptions by making reconstructions, grinding pigments and binding them in oil to see how the paint behaves, then comparing the result with a real panel. Such work rarely produces certainty. It produces a better account of what is possible, which is what historical evidence usually offers.

A public statue is never a neutral object. It is an argument made in stone about who deserves honour, and it is usually paid for by people with a particular interest in the answer. When a crowd pulled down the figure of Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020 and rolled it into the harbour, they were not making a claim about the seventeenth century. They were making one about the twenty-first. Four people were later tried for criminal damage and acquitted, and the argument that followed the verdict showed how far the dispute is from being settled.

Those who want such monuments gone make a simple and, I think, largely correct point. A figure standing on a pedestal in the middle of a city is not a record but an honour. Whatever the intentions of the council that maintains it, the message received by a passer-by is that this is a person the city is proud of. The common reply — that removing the statue erases history — confuses history with memory. Historians do not depend on bronze; we have documents, archives, photographs and museums, and none of them disappears when a statue does.

It is worth asking why so many of these figures were put up when they were. Relatively few date from the lifetime of the person commemorated. A great many were erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when municipal pride and imperial self-confidence encouraged wealthy donors and town councils to fill public squares with heroes. A city that removes such a figure is not deleting the past; it is recording a change of mind, and there is nothing dishonest about that.

Yet the case for keeping is stronger than campaigners often allow. A city's inherited landscape is a layered record of what earlier generations admired, and a town scrubbed clean of every uncomfortable object teaches nothing about how ideas change. There is also a real danger in judging the past exclusively by the standards of the present. Almost every historical figure held views that most of us would now find indefensible, and a habit of measuring them against a single contemporary test soon becomes indiscriminate.

Not every objection is well founded, and not every statue is equally objectionable. Some were erected to celebrate men whose fortunes came directly from slavery or whose careers were built on violence; others commemorate people whose worst opinions were simply those of their age. The distinction matters, because a campaign that refuses to make it will lose the argument with the public it needs to persuade.

The debate is not confined to Britain or to figures connected with slavery. In the United States, monuments to Confederate commanders, many of them erected long after the Civil War, have been removed or relocated by several cities. In Eastern Europe, statues of Soviet leaders were pulled down within months of the collapse of communist governments. In each case the question was the same: whether an object put up to assert a political claim can be reinterpreted, or whether it must simply go. Governments have tried to settle the matter with guidance of the kind often summarised as retain and explain, but a policy that tells institutions to keep and explain has to be paid for if it is to mean anything.

In most cases the answer is neither to ignore the monument nor to melt it down, but to interpret it honestly. A second inscription can record what the person did as well as what they were praised for, and a work by a contemporary artist can stand beside the old figure and answer it. Where a monument is simply unbearable in its present position, a museum is the appropriate home, since a museum is exactly the kind of place where an object is explained and where nobody is obliged to walk past it on the way to the shops.

Honest interpretation, however, is easily used as an excuse for doing very little. A small plaque cannot answer a large objection. The question of who writes the text, and who approves it, is itself a question of power. Interpretation is a genuine response only when it is properly funded, openly debated and allowed to say plainly what the person did.

The process by which such decisions are reached matters as much as the outcome. A statue removed by a minister's order and a statue removed by a crowd are both removed without the consent of the people who live with it. Public argument, in council chambers and in the press, is slow and often ill-tempered, but it has the advantage of producing a decision that a community can recognise as its own. The worst result is a contest in which the loudest and best organised win and everyone else concludes that the argument was never genuine.

So where does that leave the explorers and empire-builders who fill our squares? My view is that most should stay, on condition that the city says clearly, on the monument itself, what they did and who paid for it. A smaller number, whose principal achievement was the infliction of suffering, should be moved to a museum with the full story attached. And every city that removes a figure should commission something in its place, so that the space records two eras rather than none. The test is not whether the result pleases the loudest campaigners on either side, but whether it leaves a visitor better informed than before.