When Time magazine named her America’s “Queen of the Muckrakers” in 1970, Jessica Mitford was delighted. To this British aristocrat who became an American Communist, the mainstream recognition was a boost, especially since Mitford had only become a writer relatively late in life and was as surprised as anyone by her spectacular success. Most amusing, given her choice to discard wealth and throw over the rank of nobility, was being called a “queen.” She’d known Queen Elizabeth as Princess Lilibet and never been much impressed with the royals. “When the princesses were little, I tried to spread a rumor in London that they’d been born with webbed feet which was why nobody had ever seen them with their shoes off,” she once told her close friend, Maya Angelou. Queenliness combined with muck was a delicious contrast for someone who had a particular affinity for whatever was quirky, unconventional, contradictory, or odd. She also appreciated getting credit for reviving muckraking, a literary form that was nearly moribund when her blockbuster exposé of the funeral business, The American Way of Death, appeared in 1963; it was especially gratifying for someone completely self- taught to be so heralded as an expert.
As a muckraker with what she admitted was a particularly strong “appetite for tracking and destroying the enemy,” Mitford excelled. She was relentless in pursuit of anyone who preyed on the poor. An indefatigable researcher who couldn’t help seeing the funny side of everything, she attacked by deftly combining facts and wit. Her dis- arming ways and upper- crust accent charmed targets into revealing more than they meant to, and she never hesitated to let them hoist themselves by their own petards. She skewered frauds and cheaters. Her readers adored her.
But Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was not raised to muckrake. Decca was born on September 11, 1917, into one of the oddest families in England, as famous for its eccentricities as for its insularity. Even as a curly- haired, blue- eyed child, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm, Decca’s look was quizzical, with raised eyebrows pointing distinctly downwards at the bridge of her small, pert nose. Her father, David Freeman- Mitford, also known as Baron Redesdale, was a right-wing British peer who had more land than cash, wanted women out of Parliament for fear they’d use the bathrooms, believed that schooling would thicken his daughters’ ankles and make them unmarriageable, and kept a pet mongoose. He forced almost everyone out of his house and physically showed the “damn sewers” (as he called his daughters’ young male acquaintances) the door. Decca’s mother, Sydney Bowles Mitford, Baroness Redesdale, loathed doctors, eschewed modern medicine (“The Good Body” would right it- self, she was certain), distrusted refrigeration, pinched pennies, and refused to let her six daughters go to school because “the company of other children [was] unnecessary and overstimulating.” Both parents called everything outside of their home “Elsewhere” and pronounce themselves against it.
In St. Mary’s Church, in the Cotswolds’ Swinbrook Village, the Mitfords sat in the back two pews. They owned the small church, as well as the little village. They chose their seats so that they could watch the congregation unobserved. Behind them, on the dark oak wall, the family crest and motto were carved in a heavy scroll. “God Careth for Us” the wooden banner read. Some pronunciations might stress the second word: “Careth.” But a proper Mitford family pronunciation stresses the last word: “Us”: “God Careth for US.” The family owned the “living” of the church and hired, and fired, the vicar at will. It was their music, their seating, their service. They let their six daughters tow their pets along to services, where goat, dogs, lambs, and sometimes a pony were tied to the iron fence enclosing the adjacent graveyard. From inside the gray stone church, the animals could be heard bleating and barking as the girls giggled and pinched their way through the service. Outside St. Mary’s, the tumult of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the global flu epidemic, unemployment and hunger marches, women’s suffrage, anti-colonialism, and the birth of modern mass-media went unremarked by parents focused on what a very frustrated Decca called a “milk-bland life” of local concerns.
Only Decca would describe her family as “bland.” Behind their backs, they were called the “Mad Mitfords.” Decca was the second youngest of six exceptionally headstrong sisters. The “Mitford Girls,” as they were known, were brilliant, ambitious Beauties: slender, aqua- eyed, and graceful. Denied any of the outlets for their talents that were readily available to their one brother, Tom, and thrown back almost exclusively on one another’s company, they constructed a private world of elaborate games and secret languages. From the nursery, tucked into the top of the house, they encouraged one another’s rebellions and wild schemes. They hid themselves in linen closets and invented extravagant tales. They indulged in endless pranks. They teased one another mercilessly. Their nannies fled the house in tears. They could be a “savage little tribe,” a family friend noted. The Mitford Girls benefited from their parents’ distraction. Decca’s pet sheep, Miranda, was allowed to accompany her anywhere and sleep in her bed. Unity was permitted to shoulder her pet white rat, Ratular, or her snake, Enid, to debutante balls, which had the desired effect of discouraging “chinless wonders” and village squires.
Animal indulgences notwithstanding, the Mitford Girls were cosseted in the extreme. They grew up thwarted and restless. Each pulled an imaginary future down from the air. Each had the grit to make that future happen. Not all their choices were worthy of their willfulness.
Nancy, the eldest, longed to be a famous novelist. Her early novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate were wildly popular, helping create the Mitford family mythology and cement ing what Decca later called “the Mitford Industry.” Second sister, Pamela, spent her life in the country, devoted to her horses and avoiding publicity. Diana left a wealthy husband, Bryan Guinness, to devote her life to Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Unity, Decca’s favorite sister, declared early on that she would be a Nazi. As soon as she was old enough, she decamped to Germany and became Hitler’s intimate. Youngest daughter, Deborah, was desperate to be a duchess. After marrying into one of England’s grandest dukedoms, she restored Chatsworth House (the 126-primary-room ancestral home of the Cavendish family and the Dukes of Devonshire) and lived out her dream as the Duchess of Devonshire. Decca did not want to fulfill her designated mission to marry well and support Britain’s class structure. She wanted to rebel. At eleven years old she opened a “running- away account” at Drummonds Bank, which she used to escape with her second cousin when she was nineteen.
The Mitford Industry has churned out seemingly endless books and movies documenting the sisters’ gorgeous lives. 10 Before Downton Abbey and its many imitators, the Mitford Girls were emblems of a distant world— glamorous, naughty representatives of a vanishing way of life that they lived as if it could last forever.
No aristocracy maintains power through empathy. Aristocracies have always, as historian David Cannadine notes, “accepted, implicitly and absolutely, an unequal and hierarchical society, in which their place was undisputedly at the top. The members of the titled and genteel classes were not merely the lords of the earth, they were also the stars of the firmament.” Normalizing inherited privilege, Cannadine adds, requires generations of aristocrats impervious to how others see them, as well as “to reason, to common sense, and to the historical evidence. Aristocracy, in other words, requires insularity. The Mitfords personified that protocol. As Nancy Mitford once acknowledged, in the face of a rapidly changing world, they all continued to “drink and drive about in large Daimlers. Mitfords are like that.”
Decca was not “like that.” Even as a child, she felt like an outsider. The village poverty that her family took for granted:
worried me and filled me with uneasiness. They [the villagers] lived in ancient, tiny cottages, pathetically decorated with pictures of the Royal Family and little china ornaments. The smell of centuries of overcooked cabbage and strong tea lurked in the very walls. The women were old, and usually toothless, at thirty. Many had goiters, wens [cysts], crooked backs and other deformities associated with generations of poverty. Could these poor creatures be people, like us? What did they think about, what sort of jokes did they think funny, what did they talk about at meals? How did they fill their days? Why were they so poor?
Decca once confronted her mother: “ ‘I say, wouldn’t it be a good idea if all the money in England could be divided up equally among everybody? Then there wouldn’t be any really poor people,’ ” Decca said. Her mother replied: “ ‘Well, that’s what the Socialists want to do . . . It wouldn’t be fair, darling. You wouldn’t like it if you saved up all your pocket money and Debo [sister Deborah] spent hers and I made you give up half your savings to Debo, would you?’ Decca set herself “in headlong opposition” to her family’s unshakable view that “upper class, middle class, and working class were destined to travel forever harmoniously down the ages on parallel tracks which could never meet or cross.” Being against “everything the family stood for” was a “lonely opposition” at first. Decca wasn’t lonely for long. Her inability to suppress her humor—her sisters always turned everything into a joke as well— annoyed a few comrades but appealed to many more. She had a predilection for silliness and a gift for making politics fun. And she kept faith, even as a Communist, with some unusual aristocratic tics and games. That fidelity to her past— what we might now call being true to herself— made her an exotic and unlikely combination to Americans. She was not just an ex-aristocrat. She was an aristocrat-activist, imbuing her later life as a Communist “foot soldier” in Oakland civil rights work with the hijinks of her childhood. Playfulness, joking, wit, clever phrasing, and huge confidence— all the hallmarks of a privileged upbringing— were key aspects of her success. She knew that others saw her as remarkable. She deployed her singularity brilliantly. Most activists who eschew personal privilege move as far from their breeding and background as possible. Many devote their lives to doggedly imitating those for whom they would advocate, giving us the politician who tries to talk like a factory worker, the white activist desperate to dress “street,” the environmentalist attempting a pure, plastic-free life. Decca did none of that. She showed that we need not be like others to care about their struggles.
We are currently living through a crisis of caring so profound that some social commentators contend that we have lost “the critical core skills of not only empathy but connection,” and that our brains need rewiring for sociality. Decca’s life proves that such rewiring is possible. She demonstrates the difficult process through which true empathy can be learned and practiced. Decca lived a wildly productive and sometimes painfully tragic life. Yet, her road map is as much to pleasure as it is to effective political agency. Many writers, including some of muckraking’s best practitioners, have wondered if “shouting at society” really accomplishes very much. Decca was sure that shouting matters. She transformed herself from isolated aristocrat into engaged, effective ally without the benefit of social media, affinity groups, or retreats, before widely circulated essays such as Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” or books such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. She sought out others who had reshaped their lives through personal sacrifice. She read. She listened. She learned from Black activists in Oakland, California, who taught her how to partner with others, although they were justifiably wary of training white women, let alone British Honorables. Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change. So can anyone who would like to start a life over, anyone who would seek a do- over that goes in unanticipated, improbable directions. Decca’s unlikely choices made her the most complex and interesting Mitford Girl of all. Yet, to date, she has received far less attention than her wealthy, beautiful sisters Alone among her sisters, Decca became a fierce advocate and ally for others, finding a lifetime of fulfillment in fighting for social justice. By putting the spotlight on Decca’s unlikely choices, in their larger context, this biography demonstrates not only what Decca’s remarkable self-transformation cost her—all that she gave up to join the social struggle—but equally important, what that transformation from aristocrat to activist brought her in return, and why she always felt the exchange worked so strongly in her favor.
Carla Kaplan is an award-winning writer; the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University; and a Guggenheim and ‘Public Scholar’ Fellow. She is the author of the New York Times Notable Books Miss Anne in Harlem and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, among others.