Mitford, Jessica

MITFORD, JESSICA (1917-1996). Jessica Mitford was one of the six Mitford Sisters whose exploits tantalized London readers between the wars. One sister, Unity, devoted herself to Hitler and another, Diana, became the wife of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosely. Jessica, in contrast, identified as a communist while still a teenager.

On a rebellious impulse, she eloped in 1937 with Esmond Romilly, the nephew of Winston Churchill, to Spain where Esmond had been fighting with the International Brigade. The couple soon returned to London, but to the working-class neighborhood of Rotherhithe, where their daughter, Julia, died of measles in May 1938. They migrated to the United States in 1939 and worked at various jobs, including in a Miami bar. Mitford gave birth to another daughter, Constancia, while living with noted activists Virginia Foster Durr and Clifford Durr, in Washington DC. Esmond died in wartime action as a member of the Royal Canadian Airforce in November, 1941.

Working in Washington DC, Mitford met civil rights attorney Robert Treuhaft. They married in 1943 and afterward maintained a home in Oakland, California. Both joined the Communist Party, and she became an activist with the Civil Rights Congress as well as the Party itself. Mitford played a very public role in the failed attempt to save the life of Willie McGee, a Mississippi truck driver wrongly accused of rape and executed in 1951. She had organized a rally in Jackson, Mississippi, and helped to bring the case to international attention. She remained a local leader of the Civil Rights Congress until political repression forced its closure. Mitford and her husband, called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953, refused to cooperate. The two left the Communist Party in 1958, responding to Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes. A Fine Old Conflict (1977) offers an entertaining saga of her life in the Left.

Jessica Mitford’s first published book, Leftitselfmanship (1956), in part a gentle satire of the Left own special political patois, was published to raise money for the People’s World, the Party’s West Coast daily. She gained a second identity and great celebrity as an investigative journalist and memoirist, publishing numerous articles and books while remaining politically active in the Bay Area. Hons and Rebels (1960), a memoir of her aristocratic childhood and early life, attracted many readers. The American Way of Death (1963), exposing the funeral industry’s ruthless exploitation of grieving families, became a best seller and propelled Mitford to greater renown. The Trial of Dr. Spock (1969) defended the famed physician along with fellow activists William Sloane Coffin, Jr, Michel Ferber, Mitchell Goodman and Marcus Raskin, all of them charged with assisting Americans who refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

Mitford also wrote Kind and Usual Punishment: The American Prison Business (1973), which presaged the rise of the prison-industrial complex and Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979). One of her last major works, The American Way of Birth (1992), investigated the history and business of birthing in the US. Mitford also wrote frequently for major publications such as the Nation, Esquire and the San Francisco Chronicle. She became intimate friends with Maya Angelou, and one of her grandchildren is Pulitzer Prize winner James Forman Jr. She remained politically active until near her death of lung cancer in 1996.

Mallon, Thomas, "Red Sheep: How Jessica Mitford found her voice", New Yorker, 16 October 2006.

Mitford, Jessica. Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. Peter Y. Susman, ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2006.