Jessica Mitford - Wonderful Woman No. 15

Jessica Mitford - 1917-1996
British-American Author, Journalist, Singer and Political Activist

Added to the album by a wonderful woman called Claire.

After publishing the initial photographs of the album to my Facebook page, my friend Claire commented that she would like to add some suggestions of wonderful women herself. This was a fantastic idea and opened up the album to other people, at the current count there are 173 pictures in the album, mostly of women suggested by friends and friends of friends. Claire's initiative to make her own suggestions has really turned this into a project for me, which I am thoroughly pleased about.

The one draw-back of the album being full of other people's suggestions, is that I find myself writing a blog based on their female influences rather than my own. I can only hope that, in some way, I manage to write something relevant to how the women suggested have effected the lives of those who suggested them.

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Jessica Mitford was born into an aristocratic family and was raised in country houses of rural Britain. Although well read, Jessica and the other infamous Mitford sisters had no formal education, as their mother did not believe young ladies should be schooled. The family were well-known British supporters of Hitler and her sister, Diana, married the country's most renowned fascist, Oswald Mosley. Jessica, though, rejected the idea of fascism and, indeed, her upper-class, privileged place in society, she became a supporter of communism (she has been referred to as the Red Sheep of the family).

After eloping to Spain at the age of nineteen, Jessica and her husband Esmond Romilly (the nephew of Winston Churchill) spent a short time living in London before immigrating to the U.S.A in 1939 (she later became an American citizen). When the second World War started, Esmond enrolled in the Canadian Air Force, he was declared missing in action after an air raid over Germany in 1941. During the war, Jessica worked and in 1943, she met her second husband, Robert Treuhaft (an America Civil Rights Lawyer).

In the years after the war, Jessica spent time working in California (where she had now settled) for a civil rights group. She and Robert were involved in many civil rights campaigns, including the infamous campaign to stop Willie McGee receiving the death penalty (his story later the inspiration for Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird).

For sometime, Jessica and Robert were active members of the American Communist Party, they left the party in 1958, having become disillusioned with the notion of communism after its development in the Soviet Union. Jessica's political attitudes remained firmly on the left, she wrote many essays on socialism and society.

Jessica's first book, was published in 1960, a memoir of life growing up in her aristocratic English home. In much of her work, Jessica was scathing of the class-system in the United Kingdom and, indeed, of her own family's values.

Jessica spent some time in the 1960s and 70s working as an investigative journalist. This saw her caught up in the civil unrest of the time, witnessing first hand a rally headed by Martin Luther King and subsequently being barricaded inside a church as the Ku-Klux-Klan attacked.

In addition to all of the above, Jessica also had a brief career as a singer under the pseudonym Decca and the Dectones, recording two albums and appearing at a number of live events.

All in all, a formidable woman! A great suggestion from Claire, I hope I have managed to fit in all the reasons Claire considers her wonderful.

My most influential writer, without a doubt, is Jessica Mitford. When my great-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine... I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics – she was a self-taught socialist – throughout her life. I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter [Jessica] after her.
J.K. Rowling, Another Wonderful Woman