Nancy Astor Biography

Nancy Astor	Nancy Witcher Langhorne Born: 1879-05-19 Birthplace: Danville, VA Died: 1964-05-02 Location of Death: Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, England Race: White Religion: Christian Science Field: Politician Famous for: First woman in the House of Commons
Field: Politician

Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor, was the wife of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, and was the first woman to serve as a member of the British House of Commons.

Nancy Astor was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne on May 19, 1879 in Danville, Virginia. Her father had been a small time slave owner damaged by the Civil War. Her first years were spent living in near poverty, although at an early point in her life the family wealth had been regained or even surpassed through her father's skills as an auctioneer and later through his involvement with the railroad. He even bought an impressive estate in the country. Her mother had been less of a figure in her life, but may have been more of an influence on her as a wit. She had four sisters and three brothers.

The main religious influence on her early life was Archdeacon Frederick Neve. This minister received his education at Oxford and came to Virginia to help the poor whites in the interior mountains. Working with him gave her the first taste of a more charitable life. Still, her father's wishes sheltered her from any danger so she dealt mainly with the elderly or crippled.

Her sisters early on showed a skill then deemed appropriate for nineteenth century Southern women: marriage to successful men who allowed them to have success in their own right. Her brothers had mostly been unsuccessful. Her sister Irene served as a model for the Gibson Girl. In this period Irene outshone her in most respects.

This showed most in the time she spent with her in New York. Nancy went to a finishing school there as well. The people of New York City mostly deemed her a rustic fool. Her sister alleviated this by showing her classmates that Nancy had a glamorous sister who would take her to the trendiest parts of New York. Unfortunately that side of New York led to her first husband, Bob Shaw, the most disastrous thing she found in New York.

The reason for her marriage being disastrous is much disputed. Those who side with him insist that she was saucy while dating, but puritanical and rigid once married. Her side contends that soon after the marriage he became a full blown alcoholic who cheated on her. What seems undisputed is that the marriage lasted four years and produced one son. She left him numerous times during the brief marriage, the first time being during the honeymoon. The marriage ended after her initial opposition by the condition that his adultery be stated as the cause of the divorce.

Further tragedy came in 1903 when her mother died. The void she left in the family as a peace maker proved difficult to fill and Nancy lacked the skill to do it. Her attempts to try to run Mirador (the family's home in Virginia) while her mother had been away had been even less successful.

On a tour of England she grew to love the place. She even met the Astor family, but did not yet meet her future husband. Another tie to England came at home in America. A British visitor named Angus McDonnell (1881-1966) son of the sixth Earl of Antrim, grew quite fond of her and eventually even stayed in her brother’s room in Mirador. He adored her in a way that made her uncomfortable, but she used that to her advantage regardless.

These events all led her more and more toward Britain. After initial reluctance she moved there on her father's advice. He suggested it would be in keeping with her mother’s wishes and also would be good for her younger sister Phyllis. These things combined with her own needs convinced her.

This trip to England launched her reputation as an interesting and witty American. Her tendency to be lively and saucy, yet religiously devout and prudish confused many of the English men, but pleased some of the older socialites. They liked the idea of mixing with an exciting American who at the same time mostly conformed to decency and restraint. She also began to show her skill at winning over critics. When asked "Have you come to get our husbands", her response of "If you knew the trouble I had getting rid of mine..." helped win her a fast friend.

Despite such protestations, her second husband, Waldorf, was an Englishman. Born, curiously, on the same day as she was, his temperament complemented hers. He shared some of her moral attitudes, and his heart condition may have encouraged him toward a restraint she found comforting. The marriage therefore had been assured. Through it she gained Cliveden, a lavish estate, and began her life as a prominent hostess for the social elite.

Through these gatherings she even got involved in a kind of political circle, the so called Milner's Kindergarten. Although considered “liberal” in their age most of them believed in the supremacy of the English speaking world and its culture. They leaned toward united equality among English speaking people, and a continuance or expansion of British imperialism. As a rule they accepted, ignored, or rationalized any abuses of the colonized peoples. For Nancy this may have been perfect as it gloried in her beliefs in American-British unity and largely held to the condescending racial views of her youth.

Yet the group’s political significance had been limited; indeed her friendship with Philip Kerr would be its main legacy for her. This had been one of her most significant friendships and it came at a critical juncture for both of them. At that point he suffered from a spiritual crisis regarding his once devout Catholicism. This led them both toward Christian Science and this relationship would lead to perhaps the most consistent elements of her life.

Her conversion came from an unexpected source. Her sister Phyllis had given her Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy because she thought she might find it interesting. At first Nancy had only marginal interest and Phyllis herself never became a Christian Scientist. However after a period of illness and surgery, she decided that that those events had not been what God wanted. As she had been the type of person whose illness had largely been psychosomatic, this belief worked for her. Philip Kerr also converted, after experimenting with Eastern Religion, and became a spiritual advisor for her. Her spiritual mentor, Archdeacon Neve, disapproved of her conversion, and their relationship soured.

Nevertheless her devotion to Christian Science would be more intense than orthodox, and she sent practitioners away for disagreeing with her. However the interpretation of the faith she came up with she stuck to intensely. Many of her letters from then on mentioned Christian Science, and letters to her joked about her efforts to convert peers to it. The influence of Philip Kerr had been there too, especially in her growing hatred of Catholics.

The bitter rejection of Catholicism by Philip Kerr, a fellow convert to Christian Science, intensified her latent Anti-Catholicism. Also a former friend of hers, Hillaire Belloc, had been Catholic. The souring of that friendship, due to his disdain for the rich and her efforts to convert his daughters to Christian Science, further turned her against Catholics.

With the two most consistent things in her life set, Christian Science and Anti-Catholicism, World War I launched her even further towards her future life. During the war Cliveden had been turned into a hospital for Canadian soldiers. Although she did not believe in medicine, she got along well with doctors, especially a surgeon named Colonel Mewburn. She justified her role by helping those who needed non-medical help. Her image as the friend of soldiers proved useful when she ran for office. At the same time, the gas attacks and death of friends turned her against war itself.

The elements of Nancy Astor's life to this point influenced her first campaign, but the reason she became a candidate was mainly her husband's situation. He had had a promising career for several years in the House of Commons by World War I, but then he succeeded to his father's peerage as the 2nd Viscount Astor. This meant that he became a member of the House of Lords, and his seat in the House of Commons was automatically forfeited, so she decided to contest the vacant House of Commons seat, and won. A by-election was held on 28 November 1919, and she took up her seat in the House on 1 December as a Unionist Member of Parliament.

While Nancy Astor was the first female member of the House of Commons who actually took up her seat, she was not the first woman to be elected to the House. That honour belongs to Constance Markievicz, who was elected Member for St Patricks (Ireland) on 14 December 1918 (the first year women had been allowed to vote in Britain). But as a Sinn Féin member of parliament, she refused to take her seat in the British parliament, and instead helped establish the first independent Irish parliament of the modern period, Dáil Éireann, in Dublin.

In the campaign, Nancy Astor had several disadvantages. One of them was her lack of connection with the suffrage movement. The first woman elected to the British Parliament, Constance Markievicz, said Lady Astor was “of the upper classes, out of touch”. Constance had been in prison for Sinn Féin activities during her election, and other suffragettes had been imprisoned for arson. More damaging to Nancy Astor's chance of election was her well-known hostility to alcohol and her lack of knowledge of current political issues. These did not endear her to the people of Plymouth, the district where she ran as a Tory. Perhaps worst of all, her tendency to say odd or outlandish things, even early on, sometimes made her look rather unstable.

However, Nancy Astor also had some positive attributes in her campaign, such as her work for charities during the war, her vast financial resources for the campaign and, most of all, her ability to improvise. Her ability to turn the tables on the hecklers was particularly useful. Once a man asked her what the Astors had done for them 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, was pragmatic enough to moderate her Prohibitionist views, and used women’s meetings to gain the support of female voters. However, when she won, her male opponents were kind to her.

Her parliamentary career was the most public stage of her life, where she was an object of both love and hatred. Her presence almost immediately gained attention, both as a woman and as someone who did not follow the rules. Winston Churchill told her a woman being in the Parliament was like one intruding on him in the bathroom, to which she retorted, "You’re not handsome enough to have such fears". This was one in a series of repartee between the two, such as, "Lady Astor was giving a costume ball and Winston Churchill asked her what disguise she would recommend for him. She replied, 'Why don't you come sober, Mr Prime Minister?'" The most famous such anecdote, however, was:

Lady Astor to Churchill: "If you were my husband, I'd put arsenic in your coffee."
Churchill: "Madam, if I were your husband, I'd drink it!"
Years later, she used the "arsenic in your coffee" line on Senator Joseph McCarthy to somewhat less successful effect.

On her first day in the House of Commons, she got called to order for chatting with a fellow House member, without realising she had been the person who caused the commotion. She did try in some ways to minimize disruption by dressing more sedately than usual and by avoiding the bars and smoking rooms frequented by the men, although that may have just been because she lacked interest in such things.

At an early point in her career, a fellow Member named Horatio Bottomley, who felt she rivalled him in his desire to dominate the “soldier’s friend” issue, sought to ruin her by capitalising on the first substantial controversies she caused, namely her opposition to divorce reform and her efforts to maintain wartime alcohol restrictions. He used these issues to depict her as a hypocrite in his newspaper, saying that the divorce reform bill she opposed allowed women to have the kind of divorce she had had in America. However, a budget crisis and his bitter tone caused this effort to backfire. Later, he ended up in prison for fraud, which made the incident a plus for her in later campaigns.

Among her early political friendships had been the first female candidates to follow her. These friendships began when she had been in office for two years and Ellen Wintringham had been elected. These friendships often involved members of the other parties. The most surprising might have been her friendship with "Red Ellen" Wilkinson, a former Communist representative in the Labour Party. Nancy Astor later proposed creating a "Women’s Party", which the female Labour MPs thought a ridiculous idea as at that point their party had power and promised them positions. She conceded this, but her closeness with women members did dissipate and by 1931 she even became hostile to female Labour members like Susan Lawrence.

Unlike most of those women, Nancy Astor's accomplishments in the House of Commons had been relatively minor. She never really held a position of note. Indeed, the Duchess of Atholl rose in the Tory Party before she did, and this had largely been as she wished it. If she had a position in the party, she would be less free to criticise her party’s government, which had been something she enjoyed. Her main achievement in the House might be the passage of a bill she sponsored to increase the alcohol age to eighteen unless the minor has parental approval.

Some of Nancy Astor's most significant work remained outside the political sphere, although her new position added some weight to these activities. The most famous was her support for nursery schools. This was a slightly surprising involvement, as the woman who got her involved had been a Socialist named Margaret McMillan who believed that her dead sister still had a role in guiding her. Lady Astor had been initially sceptical, but after that they became close and she used her wealth to aid her efforts.

These positive traits do not belie the fact her political life showed some cruelty and callousness. On hearing of the death of a political enemy, she openly expressed her pleasure. When people complained about this, she did not apologize but said, “I’m a Virginian; we shoot to kill”. She told her friend from Virginia, Angus McDonnell, on his maiden speech that he “really must do better than that”. As she had previously criticized him for marrying without her permission, admittedly after he had agreed to get her permission first, this turned him into something of an enemy. She alienated several others with her sharp tongue even in the early days.

The 1920s as a whole had been her most positive period in Parliament. During it she made several effective speeches and introduced a Bill which passed. Although she had not been the ideal first woman in Parliament, her wealth and striking persona added some attention to women in the House. She worked on bringing more women into the civil service and police force as well as reforming education and the House of Lords. In addition, she remained popular in the district and well liked in the U.S. This period of success would not last.

Unlike the 1920s, the 1930s proved something of a disaster for her both personally and professionally. Hints of coming problems came in 1928 when she barely defeated the Labor candidate. However in 1931 her problems became more acute when her son from her first marriage, Bobbie, was arrested for homosexuality. He had already shown enough tendencies toward alcoholism and instability that her friend Philip Kerr, now Marquis Lothian, told her the arrest might be a good thing. She also made a disastrous speech stating that the British cricket team lost to Australians because of alcohol. Both the British and Australian teams turned against this. The signs had begun that her life would soon unravel, although she remained oblivious to them almost to the end.

Her growing friendship with George Bernard Shaw helped her through some of these problems, but in some ways also made things worse. It had been an odd friendship as he had been very different than her in politics and personality. However he liked her as a fellow non-conformist, and she had always liked writers. The negative had been his tendency to make strange pronouncements or put her into unusual situations. Soon after Bobbie’s arrest he invited her with him on his trip to the Soviet Union. This high lighted this negative impact on her as well as her better qualities. Shaw said many flattering statements about Stalinist Russia, but Nancy often disparaged it. She even asked Stalin point blank why he slaughtered so many Russians. Therefore she criticized a genocidal regime when her intellectual friend had not. The negative came from the fact her criticisms had been translated into innocuous statements and even her question to Stalin may have been likewise translated if he had not insisted that he be told what she had actually said. Further Shaw’s rather glowing praise of the USSR made the trip seem like a coup for Soviet propaganda, which had been the motive, and made her presence in it disturbing for the Tories.

The Soviet trip did not compare to what would follow. Although she had criticized the Nazis for devaluing the position of women, she had been adamant against another World War. Her friends, especially Lord Lothian i.e, Philip Kerr, became heavily involved in the appeasement policy.

Her group of friends and associates who supported appeasement became known as the "Cliveden set." The term started in the newspaper run by reformist Claud Cockburn. However after he created the term the excitement over it grew and the allegations grew more elaborate. “Cliveden” was seen as the prime mover for appeasement, or a society that secretly ran the nation, or even as a beach head of Nazism. Nancy had even been viewed as being Hitler’s woman in Britain, or even having hypnotic powers.

Evidence of these allegations is weak, but she did occasionally meet Nazi officials in keeping with Neville Chamberlain's ideals. She told one such Nazi official, who later turned out to be trying to ruin the Nazis from within, that she supported their rearmament. However she did so because Germany was "surrounded by Catholics" in her opinion. Her other statement to German Ambassador and later foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been that Hitler looked too much like Charlie Chaplin to be taken seriously. That appears to be the extent of her Nazi connections, although she distrusted and disliked Anthony Eden, stating that the more she saw of him the "more certain" she was that he would "never be a Disraeli".

Despite that her increasingly puzzling public statements caused difficulties. She became harsher in her Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Communism. After the Munich Agreement she said that if the Czech refugees fleeing Nazi oppression were Communists they should seek asylum with the Soviets instead of the British. Even supporters of appeasement felt this insult of them to be out of line. Her friend Lothian, at this point, went even further and encouraged her attitudes. He railed against the Pope for not supporting Hitler's annexation of Austria and generally influenced her attitudes.

When war did come she admitted she had made a mistake, and even voted against Chamberlain, but hostility remained. Her ability to be taken seriously had greatly declined with some calling her "The Right Honorable Member from Berlin." Her own abilities as an MP had declined with age. Her increasing fear of Catholics led her to make a speech about how a Catholic conspiracy was subverting the foreign office. Her traditional hatred remained against Communists and she insulted Stalin's role as an ally during the war. Her speeches became rambling and incomprehensible. Even her enemies lamented that debating her had become "like playing squash with scrambled eggs." She had become more humorous then hateful to her enemies.

The period from 1937 to the end of the war also saw some severe personal traumas develop. In the period of 1937-8 her sister Phyllis and only surviving brother had died. In 1940 her close friend and spiritual advisor Lord Lothian nee Philip Kerr died. Although his influence had a strong negative side, he had been her closest friend in the faith even after her husband converted. George Bernard Shaw’s wife also died about two years later. During the war she got into a fight with her husband Waldorf about chocolate and soon after he had a heart attack. The pettiness of the argument and her subsequent discomfort with his health problems likely contributed to their marriage growing cold. As in World War I she ran a hospital for Canadians, but openly expressed a preference for the vets of the previous World War.

On a briefly lighter note it is generally believed that it was Nancy Astor who, during a World War II speech, first referred to the men of the 8th Army fighting the Italian campaign as the D-Day Dodgers. Her implication that they had it easy because they were avoiding the real war in France and the future invasion. The allied soldiers in Italy were so incensed, they composed a sarcastic song to the tune of the haunting German song Lili Marlene (popularied in English by Marlene Dietrich) that they called "The Ballad Of The D-Day Dodgers".

The decline seems to have not been obvious to her, as her party and husband forced her retirement. The Tories felt she had become a liability, and wanted her out. Towards the end of the war her husband told her to retire, and that if she ran again the family would not support her. She conceded, but with irritation and anger by all accounts.

Her retirement years proved difficult, especially for her marriage. She made it no secret that her husband forced her to retire. In a speech commemorating her 25 years in office she stated as much, and that it should please the men of Britain. They began travelling separately and living apart. For his part, he began moving politically to the Left in his last years, although they reconciled before his death.

These years proved difficult for her image as well. Her racial views became increasingly out of touch with the times. Her growing paranoia continued as she stated the President had become too dependent on New York City, claiming outright that “Jewish and foreign” influence had greatly concerned her. During her US tour she also told an African-American school that they should aspire to be like the black servants she remembered from her youth. On a later trip she told members of a Black Church they should be grateful for slavery because it introduced them to Christianity. In Rhodesia she proudly told the white minority government that she had been the daughter of a slave owner.

After 1956 she became increasingly isolated and alone. Her sisters had all died, Red Ellen committed suicide in 1947, George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, and she did not take well to widowhood. Her son Bobbie became increasingly combative and after her death committed suicide, her son Jakie had married a prominent Catholic which hurt their relationship, and her other children had largely become estranged from her as well. Ironically these events in some ways mellowed her and she even began to accept Catholics as friends toward the end of her life. However as a whole she expressed clearly that these days had become lonely ones for her.

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

Note: "The House doesn't miss anybody" is a statement in her farewell to Parliament.