Emmeline Pankhurst: EIE with an accent on SLE

"They have fought the Bolshevist and Pacifist element with great skill, tenacity, and courage." — David Lloyd George, on Pankhurst's Women's Party

"The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics."

"I do not come here as an advocate because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England, it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become a subject of revolution and civil war. And so tonight I am not here to advocate women’s suffrage. American suffragists can do that very well for themselves. I’m here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain, it seems strange it has to be explained, what civil war is like."

"If any one begins to suggest that some other policy ought to be substituted... she ceases at once to be a member. Autocratic?" — in her own autobiography

There is a photograph everyone knows: a slight, elegant, fifty-six-year-old widow in a feathered hat, lifted clean off her feet by a London policeman outside Buckingham Palace, her face a mask of outraged dignity. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) understood, as few politicians before the age of film did, that the image was the weapon. She had deliberately gone to the Palace to be arrested. She was an EIE with a slight accent of the front-line brawler.

Pankhurst built the militant suffrage movement out of mass emotional conversion, and she was personally its generator: the WSPU's star speaker, on the road perpetually, without a settled home for years — hotels, rented rooms, an endless circuit of meetings — converting audiences by hypnotic oratory. The movement she made was an army with a liturgy: the tricolor with its allegorical assignments (purple for dignity, white for purity, green for hope), the uniformed processions a quarter-million strong, the martyrs' medals struck for hunger strikes as an order of chivalry. And her willingness to put her body on the line testifies to a certain inversion to "statics", common among more "messianic" EIE's: the willingness to stand on your own principles, witholding discomfort is associated not only with intuiton and "ascending", but also with statics — and SLE is the most "static" type of all, besides also being one of the most willing to tolerate physical discomfort. And Pankhurst, despite having a frail, thin frame, possessed a brawler's mindset (compare with "pure" EIE, who is second only to SEI in having its mood dependent on its physical state).

"Deeds, not words" was the motto, but the deeds were words: the campaign smashed property and — by explicit doctrine — "never human life." Still, the autocracy was as open as the theatre. In 1907, facing internal demands for democracy, Pankhurst simply abolished the WSPU's constitution and canceled its annual meetings, announcing that the committee would henceforth be appointed by herself and serve at her pleasure; members, one contemporary noted acidly, could be dismissed "as readily as an employer discharges her cook." Her own autobiography states the doctrine without a blush — anyone suggesting an alternative policy "ceases at once to be a member" — and then adds: "Autocratic?", almost as a boast. The excommunications followed the prophet's pattern: Charlotte Despard and the democrats driven out in 1907, the Pethick-Lawrences — the movement's financiers and her oldest comrades — expelled in 1912 while they were on vacation, and finally her own daughters, Sylvia purged for socialist deviation, Adela dispatched to Australia with a one-way ticket, the family rift never healed. Billington-Greig's parting verdict — "emotionalism, personal tyranny and fanaticism" — is hostile, and it is also a functional diagnosis. This is also exactly what disproves ILE for her. As we saw, political radicalism isn't something alien to the ILE type (in fact, ILE comes third after SLE and EIE in dislike for moderate, compromise political solutions), but it won't run an institution as a self-confessed autocrat. The ILE radical is the perpetual heretic, including inside his own movement. Pankhurst is the exact inverse — she expelled people, rather than being the one expelled. If an EIE radical is a heretic outward and an inquisitor inward, an ILE radical often ends up heretic in all directions. Compare her to Serge dissenting even among the dissidents and Myasnikov demanding liberty for his enemies once the immediate threat was over. That's how you distinguish these two ascending-intuitive-extravert-questim radicalisms, even although in the initial stage they can be remarkably similar.

In August 1914 the most wanted enemy of the British state became, within weeks, its recruiting sergeant: militancy halted by fiat, the union's paper renamed Britannia, and Pankhurst campaigning for conscription and the White Feather — the same theatrical-shaming instrument, now aimed at young men out of uniform. After the vote was won came anti-Bolshevism, imperial lecturing, and her ending up as a Conservative party candidate. The crusade engine was the constant, but the banner — Suffrage, Britannia, Toryism — was the variable. 

The weak flank of her functional configuration is equally legible. Te, for her, was a fairly weak, unvalued function, and Ti, while clearly being more valued, wasn't much to speak of when it comes to its strength. Pankhurst was plagued by money troubles all her life, and the movement's strategy — the legal reasoning, the campaign logic, the organizational machinery — was substantially outsourced to a single trusted supplier: Christabel, the trained legal mind, the WSPU's chief organizer and key strategist. The diarchy was a two-person functional unit — the mother the fire, the daughter the imported structure — and Emmeline's notorious favoritism toward Christabel over her other children was, among other things, the dependence of a base function on its missing Ti complement.

She won, of course — or her cause did, in 1918, by which time she had already wheeled her army into the war effort, and she died weeks before the franchise was extended to all women on equal terms (in 1918, it was already granted, but only to women over 30). The statue they raised in Manchester shows her, suitably, in mid-oration, the small upright figure standing on a chair with one arm extended toward a crowd that is no longer there — the orator, permanently addressing history, dignified, theatrical, and absolutely certain.