Nancy Astor

In 1874, he won a construction contract with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, using former contacts from his service in the Civil War.

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.

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 a finishing school in New York City.

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 (called Bobbie).

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

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

Nancy Shaw took a tour of England and 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 had already become known in English society as an interesting and witty American 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.

She then moved to England and married American-born Englishman Waldorf Astor in 1906.

After her second husband succeeded to the peerage and entered the House of Lords, she entered politics as a member of the Unionist Party (now the Conservative Party) and 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 reforms 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.

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.

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 railroad businessman Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene.

Following the abolition of slavery, Chiswell struggled to make his operations profitable, and with the destruction of the 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.