Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor (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 was born in Danville, Virginia, and raised in Greenwood, Virginia. Her first marriage, to socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, was unhappy and ended in divorce. She then moved to England and married American-born Englishman Waldorf Astor in 1906.
After her second husband succeeded to his father's peerage and entered the House of Lords, she entered politics as a member of the Unionist Party (now the Conservative Party) and, at the by-election caused by his elevation, won his former seat of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, becoming the first woman to sit as an MP in the House of Commons. During her time in Parliament, Astor was an advocate for temperance, welfare, education reform and women's rights. She was also an ardent anti-Catholic and anti-communist, and received criticism for her antisemitism and sympathetic view of Nazism.
Astor served in Parliament until 1945 when she was persuaded to step down, as her outspokenness had made her a political liability in the final years of the Second World War. She retired from politics and largely withdrew from public life following the death of her husband. Astor died in 1964 at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire and was interred at her family estate at Cliveden.
Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born at the Langhorne House in Danville, Virginia. She was the eighth of eleven children born to the American railroad businessman Chiswell Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene. Following the abolition of slavery in the US in 1865, Chiswell struggled to make his operations profitable, and due to the destruction caused by the American Civil 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 of the sisters were known for their "good looks". Nancy and her sister Irene both attended St. Catherine's Episcopal School in Richmond, followed by a finishing school in New York City. There Nancy met her first husband, the 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 (Bobbie). Nancy left Shaw numerous times during their marriage, the first during their honeymoon. In 1903, Nancy's mother died; Nancy gained a divorce and moved back to Mirador to try to run her father's household but was unsuccessful.
In 1904, Nancy took a tour of England, taking with her her son Bobbie, of whom she had gained custody. She fell in love with the country. Since she had been so happy there, her father suggested she move to England. Seeing that she was reluctant, Nancy's father said it was also her mother's wish, and he suggested she take her younger sister Phyllis with her. 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.
Nancy Shaw was already known in English society as an interesting and witty American at a time when numerous wealthy young American women had married into the aristocracy. Her tendency to be saucy in conversation but religiously devout and almost prudish in behaviour confused many of the English men but pleased some of the older socialites. Nancy also began to show her skill at winning over critics. She was once asked by an English woman, "Have you come to get our husbands?" Her unexpected response, "If you knew the trouble I had getting rid of mine...", charmed her listeners and displayed the wit for which she became known.
She married 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 and raised his children in the English aristocratic style. The couple were well matched, as both were American expatriates with similar temperaments. They were of the same age and even born on the same day, 19 May 1879. Astor shared some of Nancy's moral attitudes and had a heart condition that may have contributed to his restraint. After the marriage, the Astors moved into Cliveden, a lavish estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames; it was a wedding gift from Astor's father. Nancy Astor developed as a prominent hostess for the social elite.
The Astors also bought a substantial London house, No. 4 St. James's Square, now the premises of the Naval & Military Club. A blue plaque unveiled in 1987 commemorates Astor at St. James's Square. Through her many social connections, Lady Astor became involved in a political circle called Milner's Kindergarten. Considered liberal in their age, the group advocated unity and equality among English-speaking people and a continuance or expansion of the British Empire.
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 in 1919. He 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. 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. However, she was met as she arrived at London Paddington railway 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."
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 Lady Astor is sometimes erroneously referred to as the first woman MP, or the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, rather than the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. Countess Markievicz had been in Holloway prison for Sinn Féin activities during her election; as she was an Irish Republican, she did not take her seat. Markievicz said Lady Astor was "of the upper classes, out of touch".
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. The 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.