60 Facts About Lady Astor

Nancy Witcher Langhorne Lady Astor, Viscountess Lady Astor, was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament, serving from 1919 to 1945.

Lady Astor's served in Parliament until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down.

Lady Astor has been criticised for her antisemitism and sympathetic view of Nazism.

Lady Astor's was the eighth of eleven children born to railroad businessman Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene.

Lady Astor's did marry an Englishman, albeit one born in the United States, Waldorf Astor; when he was twelve, his father, William Waldorf Astor had moved the family to England, raising his children in the English aristocratic style.

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Nancy Lady Astor developed as a prominent hostess for the social elite.

Lady Astor's tried to convert Hilaire Belloc's daughters to Christian Science, which led to a rift between them.

Lady Astor's attempted to discourage the hiring of Jews or Catholics to senior positions at The Observer, a newspaper owned by her husband.

Several elements of Viscountess Lady Astor's life influenced her first campaign, but she became a candidate after her husband succeeded to the peerage and House of Lords.

Lady Astor had enjoyed a promising political career for several 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.

Lady Astor automatically became a member of the House of Lords and consequently had to forfeit his seat of Plymouth Sutton in the House of Commons.

Lady Astor had not been connected with the women's suffrage movement in the British Isles.

Lady Astor was hampered in the popular campaign for her published and at times vocal teetotalism and her ignorance of current political issues.

Lady 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.

Lady Astor's rallied the supporters of the current government, moderated her Prohibition views, and used women's meetings to gain the support of female voters.

Viscountess Lady Astor was not the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.

Lady 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 between the two world wars.

Lady Astor's gained attention as a woman and as someone who did not follow the rules, often attributed to her American upbringing.

Lady Astor's learned to dress more sedately and avoided the bars and smoking rooms frequented by the men.

Lady Astor capitalised on her opposition to divorce reform and her efforts to maintain wartime alcohol restrictions.

Lady Astor said that the reform bill that she opposed would allow women to have the same kind of divorce she had in America.

Lady Astor made friends among women MPs, including members of the other parties.

Lady Astor befriended Ellen Wilkinson, a member of the Labour Party .

Lady Astor later proposed creating a "Women's Party", but the female Labour MPs opposed that, as their party was then in office and had promised them positions.

Over time, political differences separated the women MPs; by 1931 Lady Astor became hostile to female Labour members such as Susan Lawrence.

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Lady Astor's never held a position with much influence and or any post of ministerial rank although her time in Commons saw four Conservative Prime Ministers in office.

Lady Astor felt if she had more position in the party, she would be less free to criticise her party's government.

Lady Astor's was introduced to the issue by socialist Margaret McMillan, who believed that her late sister helped guide her in life.

Lady Astor was initially skeptical of that aspect, but the two women later became close.

Lady Astor's worked to recruit women into the civil service, the police force, education reform, and the House of Lords.

Lady Astor's was well-liked in her constituency, as well as the United States during the 1920s, but her success is generally believed to have declined in the following decades.

In May 1922, Lady Astor was guest of honour at a Pan-American conference held by the League of Women Voters in Baltimore, Maryland.

Lady Astor became the first President of the newly-formed Electrical Association For Women in 1924.

Lady Astor's chaired the first ever International Conference of Women In Science, Industry and Commerce, a three-day event held London in July 1925, organised by Caroline Haslett for the Women's Engineering Society in co-operation with other leading women's groups.

Lady 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.

Lady Astor made a disastrous speech stating that alcohol use was the reason for England's national cricket team being defeated by the Australian national cricket team.

Lady Astor remained oblivious to her growing unpopularity almost to the end of her career.

Lady Astor was reportedly a supporter of the Nazis as a solution to what she saw as the "world problems" of Jews and communists.

Lady Astor's asked him not to take offence at her anti-Catholic views and wrote, "I'm glad you are smart enough not to take my [views] personally".

Lady Astor's highlighted the fact that she had a number of Catholic friends.

Lady Astor's turned upon him and said, 'Only a Jew like you would dare to be rude to me.

David Feldman of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism has related that whilst attending a dinner at the Savoy Hotel in 1934, Lady Astor asked the League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees whether he believed "that there must be something in the Jews themselves that had brought them persecution throughout the ages".

Lady Astor was deeply involved in the so-called Cliveden Set, a coterie of aristocrats that was described by one journalist as having subscribed to their own form of fascism.

Lady Astor was worried that the group might be viewed as a pro-German conspiracy, and her husband, William Waldorf Lady Astor, wrote in a letter to the Times, "To link our weekends with any particular clique is as absurd as is the allegation that those of us who desire to establish better relations with Germany or Italy are pro-Nazis or pro-Fascists".

At the request of her friend Felix Frankfurter, a future US Supreme Court justice who was Jewish, Lady Astor intervened with the Nazis in Vienna and secured the release of Frankfurter's Jewish uncle, Solomon.

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Lady Astor occasionally met with Nazi officials in keeping with Neville Chamberlain's policies, and she was known to distrust and to dislike British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

Lady Astor's is alleged to have told one Nazi official that she supported German rearmament because the country was "surrounded by Catholics".

Lady Astor's told Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, who later became the foreign minister of Germany, that Hitler looked too much like Charlie Chaplin to be taken seriously.

Lady Astor became increasingly harsh in her anti-Catholic and anti-communist sentiments.

When World War II began, Lady Astor admitted that she had made mistakes, and voted against Chamberlain, but left-wing hostility to her politics remained.

Lady Astor had been her closest Christian Scientist friend even after her husband converted.

Lady Astor's ran a hospital for Canadian soldiers as she had during the First World War, but openly expressed a preference for the earlier soldiers.

Lady Astor believed her party and her husband caused her retirement in 1945.

Lady Astor's 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.

Lord Lady Astor began moving towards left-wing politics in his last years, and that exacerbated their differences.

Lady Astor died in 1964 at her daughter Nancy Astor's home at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire.

Lady Astor's was cremated and her ashes interred at the Octagon Temple at Cliveden.

Lady Astor's was known for exchanges with Winston Churchill, though most of these are not well documented.

Lady Astor's antisemitism has been widely documented and has been criticised in recent years, particularly in light of former Prime Minister Theresa May's 2019 unveiling of a statue in her honour with current Prime Minister Boris Johnson in attendance, and more recently after Labour MP Rachel Reeves commemorated Lady Astor in a series of tweets.