Jessica Mitford, the fifth of the six illustrious daughters of one of England`s oldest aristocratic families, was a rebel early on: Even as a child she thought the redistribution of wealth was a sound solution to social ills. But the 75-year-old writer who has flayed American institutions, starting with the funeral industry and now American childbirth practices, became a muckraking journalist almost by default.
At an age when other young, upper-class women were busy trying to find husbands and making their debuts in society, Mitford was planning to escape to Spain to fight with the International Brigade against the fascists. In 1937, the ”Ballroom Communist,” as the 20-year-old Mitford was called, ran away to Spain with her second cousin (and nephew of Winston Churchill) Esmond Romilly, who already had distinguished himself in the Spanish Civil War.
Mitford`s parents soon located the young fighters and had the British consul arrange their expulsion from Spain.
”I was a frustrated guerrilla soldier,” Mitford says. ”So I became a guerrilla writer.”
The indignation that sent her to the Spanish Civil War later prompted her as a writer to fight what she perceived as greed and exploitation, she says.
”That has been my way of life.”
But if it weren`t for surveillance by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Mitford says she might not have become a writer.
In the early 1950s, in the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his campaign to suppress communism, Mitford-who by then had become an American citizen and an active member of the American Communist Party-was living with her second husband, a union lawyer, in Oakland.
She was a telephone solicitor for a San Francisco newspaper-the only type of work, she says, that a one-time aristocrat ”approaching middle age with no marketable skills could get.” But she was fired because of her involvement with the Communist Party, she says.
”I felt that if the Committee on Un-American Activities and the FBI could chase me out of this pathetic job, there was no point in looking for another,” Mitford says. ”I had no education.”
Like her sisters, the young Mitford was educated at home, a fortresslike residence in the British countryside near Oxford, by a series of governesses whom she describes as having questionable qualifications.
”The only thing you can do when you`re totally uneducated is write,”
she says with a chuckle.
Writing didn`t come easily, though, she says.
”I started with what I knew-my life-and it took me a few years to sort it out,” Mitford says, adjusting her black-rimmed glasses.
”I still write very slowly” and without a computer, she says. ”I warm up with letters when I wake up in the morning, then I write three pages, and that`s it. It`s all I can do for the day. Then I do lots of rewrites.”
Her first book, ”Daughters and Rebels” (Holt), a lively and witty account of growing up in an aristocratic, eccentric British family in the aftermath of World War I (her parents were Lord and Lady Redesdale), was published in 1960, when Mitford was 43.
Robert Treuhaft, her husband, gave her the idea for her first and most famous investigative work, ”The American Way of Death” (1963), an expose of the funeral industry that grew out of a magazine article. Treuhaft, a trade unionist lawyer, had noticed that when a union member died, all his or her benefits were eaten up by the funeral arrangements.It was fascinating. I got hooked on the subject.”
For months she explored the ”baroque wonderland” of American mortuaries, learning the importance of Nature-Glo cosmetics for ”the departed” (not ”corpse” or ”body”) and a Sealy mattress inside the casket (not the ”coffin”).
Her book was hailed as a classic in investigative journalism. It won her the title of ”Queen of the Muckrakers”-which she relishes-and led to major reforms in the funeral industry.
Working on that book honed her interview style. ”I am always polite to people,” Mitford says. ”I never get raucous or indignant.”
She will sit for hours with her subjects, asking non-threatening questions about their professions in her upper-crust British accent. ”Then I sprinkle the hard questions,” she says with a grin.
Now 75, she has looked at the other end of the spectrum of life.
”The American Way of Birth” (Dutton, $23) released in the United States in November, ”isn`t about the miracle of birth,” Mitford says. ”It`s very much about money and greed.” The book examines the conditions under which babies are born in the United States.
The fiery writer reserved her most stinging pen strokes for the California Medical Board, which she accused of harassing midwives against whom there were no complaints, while it ignored serious grievances against doctors. Through statistics, interviews and observations-including those from her experience of giving birth four times, in England and in the United States-Mitford examines what she calls the medical establishment`s aggressive attempt to prevent midwives from delivering babies, the chauvinism among male doctors and their tendency toward invasive medical interventions such as Caesarean sections.
Yet, despite her respect for midwives, she doesn`t buy all of midwifery`s holistic approach, which includes concepts such as ”spiritual bonding” and
”sisterhood of midwives.”
The National Funeral Directors Association and the American Medical Association share great similarities, Mitford says. ”They`re both money-oriented and protecting their turf.” But ”funeral directors are quite pushovers compared with the AMA. (Doctors) have a great deal of political clout, power and money,” she says.
She ends her book with an argument for the adoption of a universal health care system similar to the Canadian one.
How Mitford acquired such a passion for fighting greed and exploitation, despite her privileged upbringing and her family`s conservative views, is something she can`t explain fully.
”When I was growing up there were two outstanding things going on: a terrible unemployment crisis in Europe and the rise of fascism.”
Raised in the self-contained Redesdale residence in the English countryside, Decca-a name Mitford acquired in her nursery days and is still called by friends-was isolated from the outside world. She was not directly affected by the growth of fascism, but she was fascinated enough to read newspapers and books on the subject.
”I responded, like many others of my generation, by becoming first a convinced pacifist, then quickly graduating to socialist ideas,” Mitford wrote in ”Daughters and Rebels.”
The young aristocrat began questioning the social order she grew up with, and at 18 found herself ”in headlong opposition to everything the family stood for,” she says.
When her sisters Diana and Unity joined the British Union of Fascists, the horrified Decca, who was repelled by the movement, vowed to become a communist.
As Mitford`s political convictions deepened, they alienated her from the rest of the clan. She was estranged from her mother for a long time, she says. Her father, who sympathized with the fascists, disinherited her.
As stylesetters of their day, the Mitford sisters were famous-enough so to inspire a musical comedy, ”The Mitford Girls.” Diana married the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, the sister Mitford adored, became a close friend of Adolf Hitler; Deborah is the Duchess of Devonshire; the late Nancy was a novelist and social satirist; Pamela is raising chickens in the countryside.
Severed from her aristocratic roots, Jessica tried to weave a life of her own. In 1937 she married her cousin Esmond after the young fighters were expelled from Spain.
The young couple immigrated to the U.S., eventually settling in Washington, D.C.
Romilly, who volunteered for the Canadian Air Force during World War II, was killed in action in November 1941.
In 1943 Mitford married Treuhaft, whom she had met in Washington, and the couple moved to Oakland.
In some ways, Oakland in the `50s was the right place for Mitford: ”It was a semi-fascist town. The racism and police brutality were terrible.”
At the time, Mitford was devoting her efforts to the East Bay branch of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization seeking equality for all (and one of the groups described as ”subversive” by the U.S. attorney general).
”Oakland was a small town. The mayor, the police chief, the newspaper publisher were all my personal enemies,” she recalls. ”I loved it.”
Throughout these years Mitford and her husband were investigated by the FBI and the Un-American Activities Committee for being communists. They left the party in 1958 because they believed it had become stagnant, but they have remained ardent socialists.
”It`s still a dirty name, but who cares?” she says.
After the local branch of the Civil Rights Congress disbanded in 1956, Mitford needed a new outlet. With her inquisitiveness and sarcastic wit, she became the perfect investigative journalist.
At 75, she doubts she will write another book.
”Of course, my publisher reminds me I say that after all my books,” she adds, laughing.
