Cast in Stone

Media metadata | Métadonnées multimédias

Nancy Astor

has biography | a une biographie

First woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Plymouth Sutton from 1919 to 1945. Astor was the daughter of American railroad industrialist Chiswell Langhorne (1843-1919), whose family owned enslaved people and plantations in Lynchburg, Virginia prior to the American Civil War. Langhorne briefly fought in the Confederate Army and later worked in tobacco auctioneering during the war. Astor's mother Nancy Witcher Keene (1848-1903) also came from a slave-owning family.

Born in 1879, fourteen years after the end of the war and the abolition of slavery, Nancy spent her teenage years in an environment firmly shaped by the legacies of American slavery at the “Mirador” family home in Virginia in the 1890s. The Langhornes were one of many white American families whose domestic life rested upon the bedrock of white supremacy. According to her biographer Christopher Sykes, all of the Langhorne’s servants at Mirador were black and many had been formerly enslaved. While Nancy romantically reminisced about these black servants being “part of the family”, there were clear racial and class tensions within this family environment, with Sykes noting a number of conflicts between her father Chiswell and the family’s domestic workforce.

A controversial figure both during her life and in historical memory, Astor has also attracted critical scrutiny for her antisemitism and alleged sympathies with Nazi Germany.

was born | est né

19 May 1879

died in | est mort par

2 May 1964

has nationality | a la nationalité

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

United States of America

has type | est de type

depicted

has association with | a une association avec

Confederate States of America

is referred to by | est référencé par

Wikipedia

Hansard

National Portrait Gallery

Christopher Sykes, Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)

Adrian Fort, Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor (London: Vintage, 2013)