洁西卡·密特福德

Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft (née Freeman-Mitford, later Romilly; 11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English-American author, communist activist and one of the Mitford sisters. Her 1960 memoir Hons and Rebels and her 1963 book of social commentary The American Way of Death both became classics.

Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, emigrating to the United States in 1939. Romilly was reported missing in action in 1941 and, in 1943, Mitford married American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. She took American citizenship in 1944. The couple joined the Communist Party USA and refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Early life and ancestry

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 Gibson Bowles). She was one of the Mitford sisters: Nancy (1904–1973), Pamela (1907–1994), Diana (1910–2003), Unity (1914–1948), Jessica, and Deborah (1920–2014). The sisters had one brother, Tom, who in 1945 was killed in action at the age of 36.

Refused permission by her parents to attend school, Jessica was educated at home by governesses, and increasingly rebelled against her heavily circumscribed home life. When she was twelve she opened a 'running away' account at Drummond's Bank, and her social and political conscience was awakened as she read newspaper accounts of the economic depression facing the Britain of the late 1920s.

Jessica's older sister, Unity, with whom as a girl she shared a bedroom, had beliefs at the opposite end of the political spectrum, later becoming a dedicated Nazi and friend of Adolf Hitler. The two sisters drew a chalk line down the middle to divide the room. Jessica's side was decorated with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin, while Unity's was decorated with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler.

Jessica 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 has been called the "red sheep" of the family.

Marriages and family

Life with Esmond Romilly

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 of Clementine Churchill, the wife of Winston Churchill. Despite their family relationship, the two second cousins had not previously met, but according to Mitford's own account, "I had been in love with Esmond for years, ever since I first heard of him".

The cousins eloped to Spain, where Romilly picked up work as a reporter for the News Chronicle. The plan was that Mitford would travel as his secretary. As a cover story to explain her departure to her family, Mitford invented an invitation to visit friends in Austria. The pair departed from England on 8 February 1937. They reached Bayonne, on the French-Spanish border, and after a tense wait for Mitford's Spanish visa, they took a cargo boat to Bilbao, Spain. After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they married in a civil ceremony in Bayonne, France, on 18 May 1937.

Romilly and Mitford moved to London and lived in a flat in Rotherhithe in the East End, then mostly a poor industrial area. The ground floor of the building operated as a casino and Romilly worked there as a croupier before landing a more regular job as a copywriter with the advertising firm Graham & Gillies. 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. 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.

On 18 February 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States after throwing a farewell party for their friends. They travelled around, working odd jobs. At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF); 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 was devastated.

Life with Robert Treuhaft

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. 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.

In 1954, Mitford was attacked by a young Black man while going to a meeting at night. Some versions of the story say her husband heard what was happening and rescued her. However, Mitford later told a friend that she was raped by the man who attacked her, and saw a doctor because of what happened. She didn't report the offense to the police because she was afraid it would risk a Black man's life.