What protest changes
Text 1: A Meeting at the Corn Exchange, by Eliza Thornbury
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
Dear Harriet, I have done a thing that Father would call unwomanly and Mother would call unwise, and I am not sorry. On Tuesday evening I attended the meeting at the Corn Exchange in favour of the suffrage for women. I went, I told myself, only to listen, and I sat at the back in my plainest bonnet with my hands folded, as though I had come in by mistake.
The hall was perhaps half full, and the half that was not full was very loud. A party of young men near the door kept up a chorus of cat-calls throughout, and when Mrs Ashdown rose to speak someone threw a cabbage, which fell short and rolled under the platform, where it remained for the rest of the evening like a heckler who had lost his nerve. Mrs Ashdown did not so much as glance at it. She spoke for forty minutes without notes, and she spoke of women who pay taxes upon property they may not vote to protect, and of widows who keep shops and families and are yet counted with lunatics and infants in the eyes of the law.
At the end a petition was passed along the rows, and I signed it. My hand shook so that my name is hardly legible, but it is there, among three hundred others. I do not suppose Parliament will tremble. The young men will go on throwing cabbages and the newspapers will go on calling us shrieking sisters. But I walked home through the dark streets feeling that I had stepped out of a small room I had lived in all my life. I do not think I shall ever be able to squeeze back inside it.
Text 2: No Planet B, by Tamsin Hale
An original contemporary article.
I was fifteen the first time I missed school to protest about the climate. I had never been to a demonstration before. I painted a sign on the back of a cereal box, ‘THERE IS NO PLANET B’, which I thought was original until I saw that about forty other people had painted the same thing. We stood outside the town hall in the rain, around sixty of us, mostly teenagers, and chanted until our voices went.
In the strict sense, we did not achieve very much. The council leader came out once, thanked us for our passion, and went back inside. Our school sent letters home about unauthorised absence. My dad, who drives a delivery van for a living, asked me over dinner whether I wanted him to lose his job, and I did not have a good answer. Over the next year we went back every month, and every month the crowd was a little smaller, as exams and part-time jobs and plain tiredness took people away.
But something did change. Two years later the council approved a network of protected cycle lanes, and one of the councillors said in the local paper that the young people outside the town hall had ‘kept the issue on the table’. I cannot prove we made a difference. What I can prove is what it did to me. I learned to speak into a megaphone. I learned to read a council budget. I learned that my dad and I could disagree about something enormous and still watch football together on Saturday. I went to that first protest to change the world. Mostly, it changed me, and I think that is not nothing.
‘Both writers show that protest changes the protester more than it changes society.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
160 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3 Section A: Reading information and ideas – skills, covering 2.3.1 Identify and interpret key ideas, 2.3.2 Comment on writers’ language choices, 2.3.4 Summarise and synthesise across texts, 2.3.7 Evaluate usefulness, bias and misuse of evidence, 2.3.8 Use context to inform reading, and 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.