Jessica Mitford
From Philosopedia
Mitford, Jessica (11 September 1917 - 22 July 1996)
Mitford, "Queen of the Muckrackers" and an incisive critic of her British upbringing and of American ways, was born to a markedly eccentric, religious, aristocratic family in England.
The youngest of six daughters born to Lord Redesdale (David Mitford) and Lady Redesdale, the former Sydney Bowles, she came from an eccentric family. Her parents were anti-Semites and notorious members of the British Union of Fascists. Her sister Pamela aspired as a child to be a horse. Her sister Diana wanted to be a Fascist and, eventually, became the wife of England’s ranking Fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley. Her sister Unity became a disciple of Hitler, shot herself in the head (whereuon Hitler sent her to Switzerland in his private train so her parents could then get her out of Germany and back home), then died nine years later in a nursing home. (In the sitting room they shared as children, Unity had adorned her side with swastikas while Jessica responded by carving small hammers and sickles into the windowpanes on her side of the room.) Her sister Nancy, who embraced a left-wing socialism, became a novelist, best known for her Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Two of her sisters became high-profile Fascists, but by age 14, Jessica was a pacifist. Peter Y. Sussman's editing of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006) provides further examples of the family goings-on.
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The First Marriage
When nineteen, she ran away from home with a second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, getting cut out of her father’s will.
Romilly, who joined the Canadian Air Force, was killed in action in 1941. She then married a Brooklyn lawyer in 1943, moving to Oakland, California. They honeymooned in Spain while he wrote about his experiences in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II and was killed in 1941 during a raid over Nazi Germany.
The Second Marriage
Jessica, who married radical lawyer Robert Treuhaft in 1943, was active in civil rights campaigns. She led the "White Women's Delegation" to Mississippi seeking to save a black defendant from the death penalty.
She and her husband, who were members of the American Communist Party until 1958, refused to give evidence when summoned before HUAC. Journalist Richard Severo reported that Mitford’s work led to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and that California Congressman James B. Utt, whose state is known “for its Pharaonic funerals and ornate cemeteries,” denounced Miss Mitford as “pro-Communist, anti-American” and speculated that she would donate profits from the book to “the coffers of the Communist Party, U.S.A.”
Books
Jessica wrote the irreverent bestseller, The American Way of Death (1963), after her husband became aware of outrageous death costs borne by working class families. The book enraged funeral directors and the clergy and brought government regulation to the industry, also spurring demand for cremation.
She also wrote an autobiography, Daughters and Rebels (1960), The Trial of Dr. Spock, William Sloan Coffin Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin (1969), five who were accused of aiding and abetting those who sought to violate the Selective Service Act.
She also wrote Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973), finding prisons are wanting in almost everything except brutality; A Fine Old Conflict (1977), about her Communist days; Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979); and The American Way of Birth (1992), in which she accused doctors of doing too many Caesareans and of not paying attention to the possibilities offered by midwifery. It was a scathing indictment of the funeral industry in which undertakers had “successfully turned the tables in recent years to perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.” Undertakers, who now called themselves “funeral directors” and “morticians,” sold coffins which had become “caskets,” supplied hearses which had become “professional cars,” flowers which had become “floral tributes,” for corpses which had become “loved ones.” They did not, however, like cremation’s being referred to as “bake and shake” nor to her description of what went on backstage, where the body . . .
- is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, roughed, and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.
She also revealed information about neighborhood undertakers, to the dismay of the trade, and included a list of anatomy departments and medical schools that have better uses for dead bodies than being embalmed. When she questioned the prices on some of the items being charged, she was told by an undertaker, “How much would it cost you to stay in a good motel for three days?”
The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1997) include her tweaking Waugh about religion. She compared the resurrection of the body to “finding your motor car after a party,” and expressions such as “she must be in Heaven by now” were equated with “she’d caught the 4:45.” Waugh’s displeasure resulted: “Would it not be best always to avoid any reference to the Church or to your Creator? Your intrusions into this strange world are always fatuous.” Not swayed by such reasoning, she continued her mirthful ways, describing, for example, a mix-up at a florist’s and a French lesbian artist’s saying, “My wreath was the kind of thing a trades union sends to the Pres. of the Republic. It took two men to carry it. All the old lesbians looked absolutely astounded & I was treated like the widow by the undertakers.”
As to the Dr. Thomas Holmes who, she wrote, is often affectionately referred to as “the father of American embalming” and who followed early Judeo-Christian beliefs as to the nature of God, man, and the hereafter, Mitford denied the idea. Instead, she said, embalming “originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium B.C. Thereafter, [it] suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.”
Her Agnosticism and Funeral
Although Mitford was nominally an Anglican, she was actually an agnostic, as shown in her letters to Waugh. Late in life, asked what sort of funeral she wanted, she replied an elaborate one that had “six black horses with plumes and one of those marvelous jobs of embalming that take 20 years off.” She added that she wanted “streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued - that sort of thing.” Shortly before her death, Ms. Mitford said to her friend and fellow non-theist Molly Ivins [[1]], “Well, I had a good run, didn’t I?”
Jessica Mitford died at age 78 of lung cancer. After a $475 cremation, a memorial service-only was held in San Francisco, where famous speakers lauded her mordant sense of humor and lifelong unorthodoxy. At her online memorial site is the statement,
- You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
{Richard Severo, The New York Times, 24 July 1996; Molly Ivins, The New York Times, 25 August 1996; Vanity Fair, March 1997}
