In 1930 or 1931,[69] Chambers married the artist Esther Shemitz (1900–1986).[1][70] Shemitz, who had studied at the Art Students League and integrated herself into New York City's intellectual circles, met Chambers at the 1926 textile strike at Passaic, New Jersey. They then underwent a courtship that faced resistance from her mentor comrade Grace Hutchins.[1] Shemitz identified as "a pacifist rather than a revolutionary".[71] In the 1920s, she worked for The World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine.[1]
The couple had two children, Ellen and John, during the 1930s. While some Communist leadership expected professional revolutionists to go childless, the couple refused, a choice Chambers cited as part of his gradual disillusionment with communism.[1] His daughter Ellen died in 2017.[72][73][74][75]
In 1978, Allen Weinstein's Perjury revealed that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Chambers described homosexual liaisons during the 1930s.[76] The letter copy states that Chambers gave up the practices in 1938 when he left the underground, which he attributed to his newfound Christianity.[77] The letter has remained controversial from many perspectives.[78]
Chambers's conversion to Christianity was expressed by his baptism and confirmation in the Episcopal Church, but more permanently in he and his family's request for membership in Pipe Creek Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) near their home in Maryland on August 17, 1943; they remained a part of this meeting until long after his death. In 1952 Chambers wrote a memoir, Witness, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. Historian H. Larry Ingle argues that Witness is a "twentieth-century addition to the classic Quaker journals", and that "it is impossible to understand him without taking his religious convictions into consideration".[79]
Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his 300-acre (1.2 km2) farm in Westminster, Maryland.[80][81] He had had angina since the age of 38 and had several heart attacks.[1]
