Jessica Mitford

Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft (née Freeman-Mitford, later Romilly; 11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.

Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who was killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the Communist Party USA and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress.

Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Mitford gave birth at home to a daughter, Julia Decca Romilly, on 20 December 1937.

The baby died in a measles epidemic the following May.

In 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States.

They travelled around, working odd jobs.

At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C., and considered joining him once he was posted to England.

While living in D.C, with contemporaries Virginia Foster Durr and Clifford Durr, she gave birth to another daughter, Constancia Romilly ("the Donk" or "Dinky") on 9 February 1941.

Her husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a bombing raid over Nazi Germany.

Mitford threw herself into war work.

Through this, she met and married the American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft in 1943 and eventually settled in Oakland, California.

Mitford and Treuhaft became active members of the Communist Party in 1943.

She became an American citizen in 1944.

There, the couple had two sons; Nicholas, born in 1944 (who was killed in 1955 when hit by a bus), and Benjamin, born in 1947.

Mitford approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely".

She became closer to her own mother by letter over the decades, but remained estranged from her sister Diana for the rest of her life.

Mitford spent much of the early 1950s working as executive secretary of the local Civil Rights Congress chapter.

Through this and her husband's legal practice, she was involved in a number of civil rights campaigns, notably the failed attempt to stop the execution of Willie McGee, an African American convicted of raping a white woman.

In 1953, as Communist Party members at the height of McCarthyism and the 'Red Scare', they were summoned to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Both refused to name radical groups and friends or testify about their participation in Communist organisations, and were dismissed as 'unresponsive'.

In 1956, Mitford published a pamphlet, "Lifeitselfmanship or How to Become a Precisely-Because Man".

In response to Noblesse Oblige, the book her Sister Nancy co-wrote and edited on the class distinctions in British English, popularizing the phrases "U and non-U English" (upper class and non-upper class), Jessica described L and non-L (Left and non-Left) English, mocking the clichés used by her comrades in the all-out class struggle.

(The title alludes to Stephen Potter's satirical series of books that included Lifemanship.)

They resigned from the party in 1958.

Mitford and Treuhaft resigned from the American Communist Party in 1958, because they had come to the conclusion they could pursue their ideals more effectively outside the party.

Her 1960 memoir Hons and Rebels and her 1963 book of social commentary The American Way of Death both became classics.

Born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, the sixth of seven children, Jessica Mitford was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney (daughter of politician and publisher Thomas Bowles).

She grew up in a series of her father's country houses.

She had little formal education.

Her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known Fascists.

Jessica (known as "Decca" to family and friends) later described her conservative father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background while still a teenager, and became an adherent of communism.

Mitford said that her parents had "appeased Hitler and Nazism. ... He had crushed the trade unions, he had crushed the Communist Party and he had crushed the Jews ... and don't forget there's a huge strain of anti-Semitism that runs through that class in England."

She was known as the "red sheep" of the family.

At the age of 19, Mitford fell in love with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was recuperating from dysentery caught while defending Madrid with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Romilly was a nephew (by marriage) of Winston Churchill.

The cousins eloped to Spain, where Romilly picked up work as a reporter for the News Chronicle.

After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they married.

They moved to London and lived in the East End, then mostly a poor industrial area.

Jessica Mitford rarely spoke of Julia in later life, and she is not referred to by name in Mitford's 1960 autobiography, Hons and Rebels.