68 Facts About Nancy Astor

Nancy Astor served in Parliament until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down.

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

Nancy Astor Witcher Langhorne was born at the Langhorne House in Danville, Virginia.

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

Nancy Astor Langhorne had four sisters and three brothers who survived childhood.

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Shaw's friends said Nancy Astor became puritanical and rigid after marriage; her friends said that Shaw was an abusive alcoholic.

Nancy Astor left Shaw numerous times during their marriage, the first during their honeymoon.

In 1903, Nancy Astor's mother died; at that time, Nancy Astor Shaw gained a divorce and moved back to Mirador to try to run her father's household, but was unsuccessful.

Nancy Astor Shaw took a tour of England and fell in love with the country.

Nancy Astor Shaw had already become known in English society as an interesting and witty American, at a time when numerous wealthy young American women had married into the aristocracy.

Nancy Astor 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.

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

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

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

Nancy 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.

Nancy 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.

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

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

Nancy 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.

Nancy Astor's audiences appreciated her wit and ability to turn the tables on hecklers.

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

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

Nancy 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy 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 Nancy Astor became hostile to female Labour members such as Susan Lawrence.

Nancy Astor 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy Astor 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.

Nancy 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.

Nancy 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.

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

Nancy Astor's son made many flattering statements about the Soviet Union, and Astor often disparaged it because she did not approve of communism.

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

Nancy Astor 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".

Nancy Astor highlighted the fact that she had a number of Catholic friends.

Nancy Astor 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, Nancy 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".

Nancy 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.

Nancy Astor was worried that the group might be viewed as a pro-German conspiracy, and her husband, William Waldorf Nancy 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, Nancy Astor intervened with the Nazis in Vienna and secured the release of Frankfurter's Jewish uncle, Solomon.

Nancy 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.

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

Nancy Astor 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.

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

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

Nancy Astor's speeches became rambling and incomprehensible; an opponent said that debating her had become "like playing squash with a dish of scrambled eggs".

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

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

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

Nancy Astor conceded but, according to contemporary reports, was both irritated and angry about her situation.

Lady Nancy Astor struggled in retirement, which put further strain on her marriage.

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

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Nancy Astor was cremated and her ashes interred at the Octagon Temple at Cliveden.

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

Nancy 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 Nancy Astor in a series of tweets.