Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor, CH (19 May 1879-2 May 1964) was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP), serving from 1919 to 1945.
Astor's first husband was American Robert Gould Shaw II; the couple separated after four years and divorced in 1903. She moved to England and married Waldorf Astor. After her husband succeeded to the peerage and entered the House of Lords, she entered politics as a member of the Conservative Party and won his former seat of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, becoming the first woman to sit as an MP in the House of Commons.
She served in Parliament until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down. Astor has been criticized for her antisemitism and sympathetic view of National Socialism.
More information: The History Press
Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born at the Langhorne House in Danville, Virginia. She was the eighth of eleven children born to railroad businessman Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene.
Following the abolition of slavery, Chiswell struggled to make his operations profitable, and with the destruction of the war, the family lived in near-poverty for several years before Nancy was born. After her birth, her father gained a job as a tobacco auctioneer in Danville, the centre of bright leaf tobacco and a major marketing and processing centre.
In 1874, he won a construction contract with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, using former contacts from his service in the Civil War. By 1892, when Nancy was thirteen years old, her father had re-established his wealth and built a sizeable home. Chiswell Langhorne later moved his family to an estate, known as Mirador, in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Nancy Langhorne had four sisters and three brothers who survived childhood. All the sisters were known for their beauty; Nancy and her sister Irene both attended a finishing school in New York City.
There Nancy met her first husband, socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, a first cousin of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first unit in the Union Army to be composed of African Americans. They married in New York City on 27 October 1897, when she was 18.
The marriage was unhappy. Shaw's friends said Nancy became puritanical and rigid after marriage; her friends said that Shaw was an abusive alcoholic. During their four-year marriage, they had one son, Robert Gould Shaw III, called Bobbie. Nancy left Shaw numerous times during their marriage, the first during their honeymoon.
In 1903, Nancy's mother died; at that time, Nancy Shaw gained a divorce and moved back to Mirador to try to run her father's household, but was unsuccessful.
More information: Thought.Co
Nancy Shaw took a tour of England and fell in love with the country. Since she had been so happy there, her father suggested that she move to England. Seeing she was reluctant, her father said this was also her mother's wish; he proposed she takes her younger sister Phyllis. Nancy and Phyllis moved together to England in 1905. Their older sister Irene had married the artist Charles Dana Gibson and became a model for his Gibson Girls.
Several elements of Viscountess Astor's life influenced her first campaign, but she became a candidate after her husband succeeded to the peerage and House of Lords. He had enjoyed a promising political career for various years before World War I in the House of Commons; after his father's death, he succeeded to his father's peerage as the 2nd Viscount Astor. He automatically became a member of the House of Lords, and consequently had to forfeit his seat of Plymouth Sutton in the House of Commons. With this change, Lady Astor decided to contest the by-election for the vacant Parliamentary seat.
Astor had not been connected with the women's suffrage movement in the British Isles. The first woman elected to the British Parliament, Constance Markievicz, said Lady Astor was of the upper classes, out of touch.
Countess Markiewicz had been in Holloway prison for Sinn Féin activities during her election, and other suffragettes had been imprisoned for arson. However, as Astor was met as she arrived at Paddington station on the day after her election by a crowd of suffragettes, including unnamed women who had been imprisoned and on hunger strike, one said, This is the beginning of our era. I am glad to have suffered for this.
Astor was hampered in the popular campaign for her published and at times vocal teetotalism and her ignorance of current political issues.
Astor
appealed to voters on the basis of her earlier work with the Canadian
soldiers, allies of the British, charitable work during the war, her
financial resources for the campaign and her ability to improvise. Her
audiences appreciated her wit and ability to turn the tables on
hecklers.
Once a man asked her what the Astors had done for him, and she responded with, Why, Charlie, you know, and later had a picture taken with him. This informal style baffled yet amused the British public. She rallied the supporters of the current government, moderated her Prohibition views, and used women's meetings to gain the support of female voters.
A by-election was held on 28 November 1919, and she took up her seat in the House on 1 December as a Unionist (also known as Tory) Member of Parliament.
Viscountess Astor was not the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament. That was achieved by Constance Markievicz, who was the first woman MP elected to Westminster in 1918, but as she was an Irish Republican, she did not take her seat. As a result, Lady Astor is sometimes erroneously referred to as the first woman MP, or the first woman elected to the U.K. Parliament, rather than the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament.
Astor was the first woman to be elected through what has been termed the halo effect of women taking over their husband's parliamentary seat, a process which accounted for the election of ten women MPs, nearly a third of the women elected to parliament, between the two world wars.
Astor's Parliamentary career was the most public phase of her life. She gained attention as a woman and as someone who did not follow the rules, often attributed to her American upbringing. On her first day in the House of Commons, she was called to order for chatting with a fellow House member, not realizing that she was the person who was causing the commotion. She learned to dress more sedately and avoided the bars and smoking rooms frequented by the men.
In May 1922, Astor was guest of honour at a Pan-American conference held by the U.S. League of Women Voters in Baltimore, Maryland.
Astor became the first President of the newly formed Electrical Association For Women in 1924.
She chaired the first ever International Conference of Women In Science, Industry and Commerce, a three-day event held in London in July 1925, organized by Caroline Haslett for the Women's Engineering Society in co-operation with other leading women's groups. Astor hosted a large gathering at her home in St James's to enable networking amongst the international delegates, and spoke strongly of her support of and the need for women to work in the fields of science, engineering and technology.
More information: The New York Times
She was concerned about the treatment of juvenile victims of crime: The work of new MPs, such as Nancy Astor, led to a Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People, which reported in 1925.
Astor's friendship with George Bernard Shaw helped her through some of her problems, although his own nonconformity caused friction between them. They held opposing political views and had very different temperaments. However, his own tendency to make controversial statements or put her into awkward situations proved to be a drawback for her political career.
Lady Astor believed her party and her husband caused her retirement in 1945. As the Conservatives believed she had become a political liability in the final years of World War II, her husband said that if she stood for office again the family would not support her. She conceded but, according to contemporary reports, was both irritated and angry about her situation.
Lady Astor struggled in retirement, which put further strain on her marriage. In a speech commemorating her 25 years in parliament, she stated that her retirement was forced on her and that it should please the men of Britain. The couple began travelling separately and soon were living apart. Lord Astor also began moving towards left-wing politics in his last years, and that exacerbated their differences. However, the couple reconciled before his death on 30 September 1952.
Lady Astor's public image suffered, as her ethnic and religious views were increasingly out of touch with cultural changes in Britain.
She expressed a growing paranoia regarding ethnic minorities.
Lady Astor died in 1964 at her daughter Nancy Astor's home at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire. She was cremated and her ashes interred at the Octagon Temple at Cliveden.
More information: English Heritage
Real education should educate us
out of self into something far finer;
into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.
Nancy Astor
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