"Troublemaker" by Carla Kaplan

When you review the life of Jessica Mitford, the activist muckraking journalist who died in 1996, you’re following someone who not only lived through world events but put her body on the line and wrote about them. That list includes the Spanish Civil War (she went to Spain as a 17-year-old adamantly opposed to fascism), World War II, the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, and the Vietnam War.

Carla Kaplan, a professor at Northeastern University, digs into Mitford’s colorful life in Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

“Even as a very young child, she was motivated by a profound sense of fairness. The British class system made no sense to her,” noted Kaplan. As one of six exceptional sisters (all very different) who grew up as members of British aristocracy, Decca, as she was known, had a unique vantage point, said the author. 

She also had a unique life: Disowned by her family, left alone save for an infant daughter after her husband died in World War II, she later moved to Oakland, Calif., married a left-wing lawyer and became a writer, a registered Communist, and a civil rights activist. 

As an investigative reporter in the 1950s, she covered the Freedom Riders and published The American Way of Death in 1963, cowritten with husband Bob Truehaft., She later wrote about the penal system and American obstetric care. 

Mitford was in Birmingham, Ala. in 1961 when civil rights activists took refuge in a church overnight as a seething white mob set fires and overturned cars before the National Guard finally intervened. Mitford was in that church that night, crediting Martin Luther King Jr. for helping maintain order among those confined to the church

The American Way of Death, described by the New York Times as “a scathing exposé of the funeral industry’s pretensions,” was one of a trio of landmark books published by female authors in 1963. The others being The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Mitford’s book outsold both of them that year, noted Kaplan.

Asked to do a profile of actress/singer Julie Andrews for a national magazine in the 1960s, Mitford declined the assignment because she found Andrews too nice. 

Mitford’s high-profile career produced plenty of material for Kaplan to explore. Along with 200 recordings that Mitford made, she left behind 500 boxes of memorabilia. Kaplan also conducted 50 additional interviews with people who knew Mitford. 

Mitford’s indomitable courage and brassiness were all the more effective because of her keen sense of humor, said Kaplan, adding that Decca’s vigilant opposition to fascism is a model that can be appreciated in these tumultuous times.