When Winston Churchill called a snap election in the summer of 1945, just weeks after the war in Europe had ended, Nancy Astor was given a blunt warning by her own party: if she tried to run again, she would have no support. Not from the Conservatives, and not even from her own family. Her husband Waldorf told her that if she stood for office, she would be standing alone. Furious and humiliated, the woman who had made history as the first female member of Parliament to take her seat was forced to step aside.
After twenty-six years in Westminster, her political career ended not with applause but with resentment and regret. It was a long fall for a woman who had once charmed all of British society with a single witty remark. And it had all begun far from London, in the divided world of the American South. Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born at Langhorne House in Danville, Virginia, on May 19, 1879.
She was the eighth of eleven children born to Nancy Witcher Keen and Chiswell Dabney Langhorne. The Langhornes were an old Southern family of considerable wealth, having built their fortunes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on slave labor and the booming production of tobacco and cotton, the backbone of the plantation economy. The family had also expanded into railway construction during the prosperous decades of the 1840s and 1850s. But the Civil War and the abolition of slavery shattered Chiswell Langhorne’s business empire.
By the time Nancy was born in 1879, the family had endured years of hardship for the first time in many decades. Yet Chiswell managed to turn things around. Using the family’s long-established business contacts, he secured significant railway construction contracts in the Southern states during the years of post-war reconstruction, rebuilding the Langhorne wealth through the late 1870s and into the 1880s. By the early 1890s, as Nancy blossomed into her teenage years, the Langhornes had clawed their way back to wealth and social prominence.
Nancy spent much of her time between the family’s new manor in Virginia and their residence in New York, a city where every powerful dynasty of America’s Gilded Age kept a grand home. There she attended a finishing school for young women, trained in everything from the classics and foreign languages to dancing and social graces. The Langhorne sisters would later become famous for both their beauty and their education, and Nancy in particular would prove her sharp intellect in the years to come, though never without stirring her fair share of controversy. While still a teenager in New York, Nancy met Robert Gould Shaw II, an heir to a wealthy Boston family celebrated for its contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War.
They married in Manhattan on October 27, 1897, just months after Nancy had turned eighteen. The marriage was troubled almost from the start. Robert was seven years older than Nancy, but it was not the age difference that caused the problems. Even the birth of a son, Robert Jr.
, in 1898, could not save the union. By 1901, the couple had separated. Friends of Robert painted Nancy as a puritanical control freak who smothered her husband, while Nancy’s acquaintances argued that the marriage ended because Robert was an alcoholic womanizer. In truth, both sides may have been right.
Heartbroken but determined, Nancy set out to reinvent herself, an ambition that would soon carry her across the Atlantic and into history. She did not officially divorce Robert until 1903, a year marked by another heartbreak with the death of her mother. Grieving and adrift, she returned to Virginia to live at her father’s house. In 1904, eager for a fresh start, Nancy set off on a tour of England, bringing her young son Bobby with her, over whom she had gained full custody.
She quickly fell in love with England. Sensing her reluctance and seeing how happy she was abroad, her father encouraged her to move there permanently, telling her it had been her mother’s wish as well. To ease the transition, he even suggested she take her younger sister Phyllis along for the adventure. It was not long before Nancy was known in English society as a witty and intriguing American.
She had arrived at a time when wealthy young American women were famously marrying into the British aristocracy to gain social standing, the so-called dollar princesses. Because of this ongoing trend, she was once asked, “Have you come to get our husbands? ” To which Nancy shot back, “If you knew the trouble I had getting rid of mine. ” The remark instantly charmed the room and hinted at the quick wit that would soon make her a star of London society.
Funnily enough, it was not long before Nancy found herself a new husband. In 1905, she met Waldorf Astor, the son of William Waldorf, Viscount Astor, a major American-British businessman and philanthropist. Waldorf had inherited a significant fortune from his own father, John Jacob Astor III, and later amassed more wealth through various business ventures, most notably a hotel empire that still spans the world today. Coincidentally, Nancy and Waldorf were the exact same age, both born on the same day in 1879, and he had also been born in America, though he had grown up in Britain.
They developed a close relationship and were married in 1906, when they were both twenty-seven. The couple mainly lived in London after marrying, keeping a lavish townhouse on St. James’s Square and splitting their time between there and a large country estate in Buckinghamshire. Unlike her first marriage, Nancy’s relationship with Waldorf was a happy one.
He was a devoted and loving husband, and they eventually had five children together: William Waldorf, born in 1907; Nancy Phyllis, born in 1909; Francis David, born in 1912; Michael, born in 1916; and a fourth boy, John Jacob, born in 1918. When Waldorf’s father passed away in 1919, they became Lord and Lady Astor, a title that would stay with Nancy for the rest of her life. This settled life allowed Nancy to flourish as a prominent hostess among the social elite, but her ambition did not stop there. From early on in their marriage, Nancy had encouraged her husband to attempt a career in politics.
He was successful, and by 1918 he was the MP for Plymouth Sutton. Yet with the death of his father in 1919, Waldorf became the second Viscount Astor and entered the House of Lords, forcing him to give up his seat. This triggered a by-election in the Plymouth Sutton constituency. With the success of the recent suffrage movement in Britain, Nancy seized the opportunity and campaigned for the seat.
At forty years of age, she won the by-election in November 1919, making history as the first woman to take a seat in the British Parliament. In fact, it was Constance Markievicz of Ireland who had been the first female MP, elected to Westminster in 1918, but she never took her seat, as a member of the Sinn Féin party, which refused to sit in London and instead formed a breakaway parliament in Dublin. Nancy Astor was therefore the first to actually sit in the House of Commons. Nancy Astor would hold her seat for the next twenty-six years.
She joined as a member of the Conservative and Unionist Party, known simply as the Conservatives and colloquially as the Tories. In the late 1920s, Lady Astor campaigned on a number of issues: protecting women from mistreatment, advocating for fairer treatment of teenagers in court, and supporting efforts to assist vulnerable women and single mothers in London and other major cities. She also championed other women entering politics, serving from 1924 as the first president of the Electoral Association for Women, which promoted female involvement in politics in Britain and the United States. In the interwar years, she emerged as one of Parliament’s leading feminist figures, her most lasting legacy.
But as the political climate darkened, Lady Astor’s views would take a far more controversial turn. If the 1920s were a period of promise and accomplishment for Nancy in political life, the 1930s were the direct opposite. In an age of growing political extremism across the Western world, she became increasingly vocal in her support for a wide range of controversial positions. For instance, Nancy was fiercely opposed to Roman Catholicism, a prejudice shaped by the wave of Irish and Italian immigration to America between the 1840s and the 1920s.
Her hardline views clashed with the more tolerant and secular attitudes taking hold in Britain. As damaging as her anti-Catholicism was, though, it is eclipsed in retrospect by the controversies surrounding her views on the Jewish people. There is no denying that Nancy Astor was an anti-Semite. This attitude, however, was far from unusual in Europe during the interwar years.
As the Nazi regime escalated its persecution of the Jewish people in the 1930s, both the British and American governments offered only limited support to the refugees fleeing Germany and Austria. But Nancy Astor’s anti-Semitism ran even deeper. She believed in a popular conspiracy theory of the time that claimed Jews were secretly working with socialists and communists to tear down Western society and build a new world order. In the late 1930s, Nancy Astor formed a notorious alliance with Joseph Kennedy Senior, the US ambassador to Britain and father of President John F.
Kennedy. Apparently, Astor even suggested to Kennedy that Nazi persecution of the Jews was not enough to justify dragging Britain and America into war. She also maintained a cordial relationship with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi ambassador to Britain, speaking favorably of him during the late 1930s. These extremist views would eventually push her into political isolation, marking the beginning of the end for her career.
The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and the entry of the United States into the conflict in December 1941 saw Lady Astor cast into the political wilderness as her earlier favorable stance on the Nazis was dragged up by her political opponents. These political difficulties were compounded by personal adversity. She lost family members and had to deal with the increasingly erratic behavior of her son from her first marriage, who had acquired his father’s affinity for excessive drinking. Astor did little to repair her reputation as the war dragged on, and her controversial remarks only fueled public anger.
She was widely criticized for suggesting that British soldiers fighting on the southern front, particularly in Italy, were cowards trying to avoid the more dangerous battles in northern France after D-Day. This, combined with her unrepentant views on ethnic and religious minorities and her stance toward the Jewish people, even as the horrors of the Holocaust were being revealed across Europe in 1944 and 1945, led the Conservative Party leaders to conclude that she was a liability. So when Churchill called that snap election in the summer of 1945, Nancy Astor was forced out. Her retirement from politics left her deeply embittered.
At public events, she often lashed out, blaming the Conservative leadership for forcing her out of Parliament. As Britain grew more liberal, Nancy’s old-fashioned views seemed increasingly out of step, and her bitterness took a heavy toll on her marriage. She and Waldorf began traveling separately and soon were living apart. Yet, despite the rift, the two reconciled shortly before Waldorf’s death on September 30, 1952.
He was seventy-three years old when he passed. Nancy Astor lived to be eighty-four, dying at Grimsthorpe Castle in England on May 2, 1964. Her last years were ones of isolation. All of her many siblings had died before her, and Nancy’s relationship with her children became strange, to the point of having little or no contact with them.
Though her daughter Nancy did care for her in her final illness. Today, Nancy Astor’s legacy is a battlefield of contradictions. To some, she remains a feminist icon and trailblazer who shattered political barriers for women. To others, she is remembered as an unrepentant anti-Semite whose bigotry stains her accomplishments.
The truth is that she was both a pioneer and a deeply flawed character.
