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Nancy Astor was not the first woman elected to the UK’s Parliament. The first woman elected was Constance Markievicz, who is the subject of this month’s supporter’s only bonus episode, available through Patreon or Substack.

Constance was never able to take her seat, so the first woman to actually serve Nancy Astor, and no one would have predicted her arrival.

Nancy Langhorne, Southern Belle

Among other objections, Nancy was born American. In 1879, she was the second daughter to arrive in the Langhorne family of Virginia. The Langhorne’s had once been well-to-do, but not since the Civil War. Eventually her father struck gold in railroads, so as teenagers, Nancy and her sisters got to be wealthy Southern belles after all.

The oldest daughter was the beautiful Irene. She had no fewer than sixty-two men propose to her before she accepted the artist, Dana Gibson. Gibson was famous for his drawings of glamorous women, and the original Gibson girl was Irene herself.

Irene was a hard act to follow. Her younger sister Nancy felt out of place at finishing school. She bagged a mere sixteen proposals before she accepted Robert Gould Shaw, from a prominent Boston family. Nancy was eighteen years old.

My sources give conflicting accounts on who promoted this marriage, and who thought it was brilliant, and who knew all along that it wasn’t going to work. What I can say is that it wasn’t going to work. They married in 1897. Within two days, Nancy was back at home where she had to give marriage another try.

The exact nature of the problem was not clearly documented. One source claims that Nancy had been left in total ignorance about sex and she fought back (Rowse, 28). This was written by a man who was a friend of hers, but he neglects to say under what circumstances Nancy told him the details of her first wedding night. It seems unlikely to me that he knew what he was talking about. Other sources say that Shaw was a depressed alcoholic who physically abused her. It’s not clear to me what the sources on that are (Fox, 66).

The marriage limped along and Nancy gave birth to a son. In 1901, Nancy signed an official separation and in 1903, they divorced on grounds of adultery and even bigamy, for Shaw had already married his mistress.

So much for Nancy’s brilliant match.

Starting Over in England

To cheer her up, her parents sent her to Europe. Nancy made a great splash with the fashionable and well-heeled in England. It was the Gilded Age and American heiresses were all the rage among the British upper classes. Nancy soon became known among them for her razor-sharp wit. A British woman once said to her “I suppose you’ve come over to England to take one of our husbands away from us.”

Nancy fired back “If you knew what difficulty I had getting rid of my first one, you wouldn’t say that” (Fox, 80).

As with most of Nancy’s famous remarks, it was spoken off the cuff and recorded later, so all of my sources have slightly different wording and details. This bothers me and my sense of historical accuracy, but it apparently did not bother the suitors were knocking at her door.

It was Waldorf Astor who eventually won the prize. The Astors were neither British nor aristocratic, though that certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. The family fortune had been made in America, beginning with fur trade and then expanding out. William Astor was third generation, rich and dissatisfied with the US, so he moved to England, bought a manor, and sent his son Waldorf to Eton and Oxford, just as if he were a young British gentleman (Fox, 87-88).

Nancy and Waldorf were married on May 3, 1906, in a Church of England ceremony. You may notice that Waldorf married a divorced American socialite, which was exactly what the same Church of England would not allow for royals two decades later. It seems contradictory, but Nancy was fully on the side of the church’s position both times (Harrison, 290).

Waldorf’s father gave the happy couple his British country mansion called Cliveden. If you’ve seen Downton Abbey, this is exactly what we are talking about: a very large house with 100 members of staff.

Over many years, Cliveden became the destination for anyone with political or intellectual talent, regardless of whether their politics aligned with the Astors or not. Winston Churchill’s politics often did not align, but he was a repeat guest. Other famous guests over the years included Mahatma Gandhi, Charlie Chaplin, TE Lawrence, John Singer Sargent, Rudyard Kipling, GK Chesterton, Henry James,  JM Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and Amelia Earhart (Fox, 157). Queen Alexandra once dropped in unannounced, which might have been awkward because another sometimes guest was Alice Keppel, the king’s mistress (Fox, 111, 114).

Nancy loved having all these interesting people at hand, but she liked them best when they participated in the rough banter that she enjoyed. Her most famous quote was the sparring battle that she supposedly had with Winston Churchill. The episode is unconfirmed, but it goes like this: Nancy said, “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.” And he responded, “Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

Whether this exchange actually happened or not, it was right in character for both of them.

Despite such pleasures, Nancy also had episodes of illness and depression and homesickness for Virginia and her family. She also had five more children. None of my sources suggest that pregnancy and postpartum might have contributed to her illness, depression, and homesickness, but it seems pretty likely to me.

Entering Politics as a Supportive Wife

Meanwhile, Waldorf entered politics. At the time, the two parties were the Tories (also known as Conservatives) vs the Liberals. The Labour party was only just getting to its feet at this point. Waldorf’s father was a Conservative, as were most of his friends. It would have been unthinkable for Waldorf to be a Liberal, even though his views were not very conservative. He was offered a safe seat in a reliably conservative area, but that was against his principles. He chose to run in the working-class Liberal city of Plymouth, Sutton district.

Nancy canvassed door to door in the roughest areas, chatting with anyone and everyone. She had found her element. She loved talking to people. All people. She truly believed that as an American she was free of the class distinctions and stuffiness of the British upper class.

Plenty of people in her native Virginia were experiencing class distinctions and stuffiness and worse, but somehow Nancy had missed that fact. She enjoyed meeting people, canvassing in poor neighborhoods, and standing on street corners to make impromptu speeches to dockworkers.

Waldorf lost his first election in 1910, but when he ran again later that same year, he won. He was now an MP or Member of Parliament.

Victory was thrilling, but it did not cure Nancy’s intermittent health worries. However, good health was coming, and Nancy credited it to her conversion to Christian Science. Her younger sister sent her materials on the new religion, and Nancy said “it was just like the conversion of St Paul. Here I found the answer to all my questions, and all I had been looking for. If I was spiritual, I would not have to suffer in the flesh, I learned” (Fox 198).

Her health was much better, which not everyone would credit to her conversion, but Nancy did, and she would remain a fervent Christian Scientist for the rest of her life, sometimes to the annoyance of her family and friends.

The First World War Years

World War I was life-altering. Nancy ran Cliveden House as a war hospital. She had no medical training, but she had plenty of charm, and she showed a surprising talent for cheering up the wounded soldiers. I say surprising because her methods were not what I would have recommended.

For example, one young man had given up entirely. “I’m going to die,” he said.

Nancy said, “Yes, Saunders, you’re going to die. You’re going to die because you have got no guts. If you were a Cockney or a Scot or a Yank, you’d live. But you’re just a Canadian, so you’ll lie down and die! I’ll have them send you up a good supper for your last meal and I bet you this wristwatch you’ll be dead this time tomorrow. You can keep it till then. I’ll get it back when you’re gone.”

Seriously affronted, this young Canadian sat up, ate his supper, and lived to go home. He kept the wristwatch (Grigg, 66).

Besides the agony of watching people die, the Astors had an additional and unexpected source of pain during the war years. On New Year’s Eve 1915, Waldorf’s father William accepted a barony in return for many years of cash gifts and supportive newspaper articles. William viewed this as a great triumph. He was now truly a British aristocrat, just as he always wanted to be.

For Waldorf this was a disaster. The title was hereditary, and it was not legally possible to renounce it. This meant that he, Waldorf, would someday be Lord Astor, and his rising career in the House of Commons would be over. You can’t be in the House of Commons if you’re not a commoner. Nancy wrote to her sister that “Never in my life have I heard of a straight man doing so shabby a trick, you can’t think how dreadful it is” (Fox, 243).

Besides the loss of Waldorf’s career, there was the pure embarrassment. Everyone knew this barony was not a sign of a long and distinguished pedigree as the aristocracy supposedly was. It was a cash exchange. William might think he had elevated himself, but Waldorf and Nancy thought it was pretentious and vulgar. Nancy said, “To be Mr. Astor of New York means a great deal. To suddenly call yourself Lord Astor is quite absurd. It makes one look ridiculous” (Fox, 243).

Waldorf was still a commoner until his father died, so they could only hope that William would live a very long life. But he didn’t. In October 1919, William died of a sudden heart attack. Waldorf became the Right Honorable Viscount Astor.

Entering Politics as Herself

The timing was particularly difficult. Waldorf was mere weeks away from re-election and suddenly he was disqualified. The Conservative party hastily considered their limited options and none of them were good. The option they went with was bold, risky, and brilliant. They asked Nancy to run in Waldorf’s place. She didn’t hold a title.

Nancy was already well-known and well-liked in the district. Her charities were keeping many families afloat. These were the factors in her favor. The factors against her were obvious: she was a woman. No woman had served in Parliament since its inception in the year 1265.

Nancy was surprised by the nomination, but after days of consideration, she accepted. She told her voters “If you want an MP who will be a repetition of the 600 other MPs, don’t vote for me… If you can’t get a fighting man, take a fighting woman” (Fox, 281).

She won her election on November 28, 1919. On December 1, she entered Parliament as the first woman to take a seat there.

Pretty much nobody but her voters wanted her to be there, and her voters weren’t present in the House.

Winston Churchill certainly did not want her to be there. He took every opportunity to snub her, though he had been a frequent guest in her house. When she finally demanded an explanation he said, “I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge.”

To which Nancy responded, “Winston, you’re not handsome enough to have worries of that kind” (Fox, 289).

Other MPS (even of her own party) had their own ways of letting her know she was unwelcome. She could not have a seat on the corner of the bench; she had to climb over their legs to get to her place. They couldn’t find a restroom for her. Before a debate on how to deal with venereal disease, they deliberately brought in the most graphic pictures they could find in hopes that she’d be too embarrassed to stay (Fox, 287).

But having gotten this far, Nancy had no intention of leaving. She dealt with their paltry attacks with her own verbal ripostes, and she was very good at verbal ripostes. She was forever heckling the speakers with interruptions, her own side as well as the opposition.

Nancy’s triumph was irritating to more than just her fellow MPs. The feminists weren’t thrilled either. Yes, they wanted a woman as MP. But a rich American who was just filling in for her husband was not who they had in mind. It was infuriating. Seventeen women had stood for MP in 1918, the first year they were allowed to. Many of them were famous suffragettes, and they lost. (The only exception was Constance Markievicz, who had her own issues. See the bonus episode.) Nancy Astor had never been a suffragette, and the feminists had no confidence that she would do anything for the cause (Grigg, 72).

But in this they were quite wrong. It was true that Nancy had spent her time and energy supporting Waldorf’s political career, not women’s suffrage. But now that she was in office, she intended to prove that she was very much interested in improving life for the women of her district. She would later say that the only clever thing she had done was to invite the leading political women to tea after her election. Nancy flatly admitted them she did not know the details of the issues, but if they would tell her what to advocate for, she would do the advocating. She called them “the best brains trust of any MP, including the Prime Minister” (Fox, 290).

Under their guidance, Nancy pushed for nursery schools, lowering the women’s voting age to twenty-one, better conditions for women and juveniles in prison, fairer distribution of guardianship after divorce, abolition of the death penalty (especially for expectant mothers), slum clearance, outdoor playing spaces for children, and higher safety standards for milk. She advocated for state health care and more housing, the eight-hour workday, trade boards to protect workers, and raising the age at which children could leave school. She did all of this as a Conservative party member, not as a Labour party member. George Bernard Shaw was to call her “a violently radical conservative, a recklessly unladylike Lady” (Fox, 299).

This is not to say that she achieved all those things; merely that she voted and argued for them. Her biggest legislative success was in raising the drinking age at pubs. Temperance was often framed as a woman’s issue because when a man got drunk, it was his wife and children who suffered the most. Domestic violence did not become a crime in the UK until 1976.

Nancy’s vote raised the biggest eyebrows when she voted against divorce reform. She blithely said that women didn’t want easier divorces and men would just use it to abandon their wives. Since she herself was divorced, her critics cried hypocrisy, but she didn’t see it that way. She hadn’t divorced her first husband on grounds of incompatibility or even violence. She had divorced him on grounds of incontrovertible adultery. British women in like circumstances could already get divorced. She saw no reason to change anything.

Throughout the twenties and thirties, the people of Plymouth voted for Nancy Astor again and again.

Hitler and German Rearmament

In the 1930s, the problem for every politician was what to do about Hitler and German rearmament. Nancy was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. When it became inescapably clear that Hitler wasn’t going to keep any of his promises and that a Second World War was inevitable, it was natural that a great many angry people would look for who was responsible for the appeasement policy that permitted Hitler’s rise. Public anger fell on a group called “the Cliveden set,” which meant Nancy and Waldorf Astor and their friends, who supposedly manipulated British government policies because they were pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi traitors.

This theory is still stated as fact in some sources, but it is an enormous overstatement. It is true that Nancy supported appeasement, but so did almost everyone else. Most British people remembered World War I vividly; they were desperate to avoid a repeat. Appeasement seemed very reasonable at the time. Furthermore, Nancy was not alone in thinking that the real threat to European stability was going to come from the Communist Soviet Union. Not from fascist Germany (Fox, 427). She had visited the Soviet Union and criticized Stalin to his face (Fox, 375). If her fears on that subject came true, she expected that Germany and the UK would be allies.

It is also true that Nancy made some negative statements about Jews. So did almost everyone else of her class and generation, but that didn’t mean that she or they thought Jews should be sent to death camps. Nor did they know about the extent of the camps. Many of those details only came out after the war was over. In Nancy’s case, she was not nearly so anti-Semitic as she was anti-Catholic. She was recorded as saying that Germany had a right to rearm because they were surrounded by Catholics. It was statements like that which lent credibility to the Cliveden set theory, even though the theory was wildly overstated.

As for Hitler himself, Nancy never met him, but she did make one of her famous wisecracks against him. She said that no one would take him seriously with that little Charlie Chaplin mustache. He ought to shave it off. It is presumably for that publicized remark that Hitler added her to the list of people to be immediately arrested upon the successful invasion of Great Britain (Fox, 433). It doesn’t sound like he thought she was an ally.

But Hitler’s blacklist wasn’t yet known to the British press; Nancy’s other statements definitely were. So the Cliveden set were well and thoroughly blamed for the policies that had led the UK to do nothing while Germany got more and more powerful. But it’s really just a conspiracy theory. It does not require a secret cabal to enact an extremely popular policy, and appeasement was extremely popular. (Right up until the point when everybody suddenly had always known it was a bad idea.)

Once Nancy understood what Hitler was about, she did her part. In 1939, when Germany took Czechoslovakia, she asked in the House, “Will the Prime Minister lose no time in letting the German Government know with what horror this country regards Germany’s action?” She was flatly confused when a fellow Conservative shouted, “You caused it yourself!” (Fox, 439). She genuinely didn’t know what he was talking about.

She broke with her party to vote Chamberlain out. She promoted Churchill, even though she and he had many disagreements. She just never understood how much people blamed her. Her popularity took a nosedive, and she could never quite accept it for the simple reason that it made no sense.

The bombing of her home district of Plymouth began in late 1940. Far from fleeing to the countryside, Nancy and Waldorf moved into their Plymouth house and turned Cliveden over as a military hospital. Again.

Nationally, Nancy was in disgrace, but many people on the streets of Plymouth loved her. She was very visible, walking through the streets, climbing down down into the rubble, arranging shelter, food, and clothing, even doing cartwheels to cheer people up. Yes, she was in her sixties, and still doing cartwheels (Fox, 444; Harrison, 268).

When Churchill came out to visit and saw the rubble of Plymouth, he spent much of the day in tears. “Men are so emotional,” said Nancy (Fox, 444).

Wisecracks aside, Nancy had emotions too. All of her sons were in the war effort in one way or another. People were dying all around her and the city was crumbling. She wrote to her sister in New York and said, “Oh Irene… I feel sometimes I must have you to lay my head down and weep on your lap… It’s like a nightmare yet I am fortunate and despise myself for even getting blue. I don’t often, just some times… I feel like a one legged woman yet you can’t give in. It would be cowardly. Don’t tell anyone what a coward I am. They think me so brave” (Fox, 444).

Exiting Politics

Things were about to get worse for Nancy. Waldorf had patiently supported her through decades of the career he had wanted for himself, but in 1944, he advised against her standing for election again. Nancy was deeply unpopular. She was a scapegoat, and it was totally unfair, but she was also beginning to ramble in her speeches. Her verbal sparring was no longer seen as clever and ironic. It was merely cruel and bossy.

She still believed in her ultimate goodness. She told a clergyman that “Every day I pray that I shall be really spiritual and that I’ll be able to raise the dead. Then I go out and all I do is raise hell” (Fox, 308).

In that last assessment, she was undoubtedly right and people were tired of it. She wasn’t going to win reelection, and she wasn’t going to be effective even if she did win, but she couldn’t see that. Waldorf was trying to quietly save her from a humiliatingly public defeat, which would have crushed her.

She did not appreciate his motives. “I have said I will not fight in the next election because my husband doesn’t want me to,” she announced publicly. “Isn’t that a triumph for men?” (Fox, 456).

Waldorf responded with an admirable quantity of patience and love, but Nancy could not see that either. It was the beginning of a long estrangement. Her son David said later that “my mother really felt she had been deprived of her life, and my father felt he had no choice… Had he been a more cynical man he would have said ‘Well go on, stand, and see what happens.’ But he couldn’t have done that. My father would have died for my mother any day of the week, and he just wasn’t able to do that”. He paid for it with many years of her blaming him (Grigg, 171; Harrison 276).

Nancy also alienated her children. She disapproved of their spouses and their life choices and their political opinions and their religious affiliations, and she said so.

After the war, she spent years traveling. When Waldorf died in 1952, she wrote to a friend that she regretted “so many wasted years,” but she did not acknowledge that it might have been she who had wasted them (Fox, 460).

She died herself on May 2, 1964.

As of February 2026, the House of Commons reported that a total of 695 women have been elected as MPs. Of those women, 265 are currently serving right now. That’s roughly 40% of all the current MPs, which is the highest percentage there has ever been. With the exception of Constance Markievicz, all of these women benefited from Nancy Astor’s example. They didn’t all agree with her politics or her tactics, but at least the House of Commons knew women existed and could hold their own as politicians.

Selected Sources

Fox, James. Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia. Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Grigg, John. Nancy Astor, a Lady Unashamed. Little, Brown and Company, 1980.

Halperin, John. Eminent Georgians : The Lives of King George v, Elizabeth Bowen, St John Philby and Nancy Astor. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.

Harrison, Rosina. Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor. Penguin, 1975.

Kelly, Richard. “Women Members of Parliament: Background Paper.” Commonslibrary.parliament.uk, May 14, 2021. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06652/.

Kutner, Max. “The Illustrious History of Misquoting Winston Churchill.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 17, 2014. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/illustrious-history-misquoting-winston-churchill-180953634/.

Rowse, A.L. Memories and Glimpses. Methuen, 1986. https://archive.org/details/memoriesglimpses0000rows/page/n3/mode/2up.