[2][3] 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.

[4] She was the eighth of eleven children born to railroad businessman Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene.

[4] 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.

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.

When he was twelve, his father, William Waldorf Astor had moved the family to England and raised his children in the English aristocratic style.

[citation needed] Considered liberal in their age, the group advocated unity and equality among English-speaking people and a continuance or expansion of the British Empire.

[citation needed] She attempted to discourage the hiring of Jews or Catholics to senior positions at The Observer,[17] a newspaper owned by her husband.

However, she was met as she arrived at Paddington station on the day after her election by a crowd of suffragettes, including unnamed women who had been imprisoned and on hunger strike.

[22][23] Early in her first term, MP Horatio Bottomley wanted to dominate the "soldier's friend" issue[24] and, believing her to be an obstacle, sought to ruin her political career.

Over time, political differences separated the women MPs; by 1931 Astor became hostile to female Labour members such as Susan Lawrence.

Despite defending her seat in five consecutive elections throughout the 1920’s, She never held a position with much influence and or any post of ministerial rank although her time in Commons saw four Conservative Prime Ministers in office.

During this period, Nancy Astor continued to be active outside government by supporting the development and expansion of nursery schools for children's education.

Astor hosted a large gathering at her home in St James's to enable networking amongst the international delegates, and spoke strongly of her support of and the need for women to work in the fields of science, engineering and technology.

[36] She was concerned about the treatment of juvenile victims of crime: "The work of new MPs, such as Nancy Astor, led to a Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People, which reported in 1925.

[11] As her son had previously shown tendencies towards alcoholism and instability, Astor's friend Philip Kerr, now the 11th Marquess of Lothian, suggested the arrest might act as a catalyst for him to change his behaviour, but he was incorrect.

Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world".

[44]Astor commented to Kennedy that Hitler would have to do worse than "give a rough time... to the killers of Christ" for Britain and America to risk "Armageddon to save them.

"[45] Astor made various other documented anti-Semitic comments, such as her complaint that the Observer newspaper, which was owned at the time by her husband, was "full of homosexuals and Jews",[45] and her tense antisemitic exchange with MP Alan Graham in 1938, as described by Harold Nicolson: In the corridor a friend of mine named Alan Graham came up to Nancy and said, 'I do not think you behaved very well' [in a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee].

[46][47]David Feldman of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism has also related that whilst attending a dinner at the Savoy Hotel in 1934, Astor asked the League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees whether he believed "that there must be something in the Jews themselves that had brought them persecution throughout the ages".

[45][48] Some years later, during a visit to New York in 1947, she apparently "clashed" with reporters, renouncing her antisemitism, telling one that she was "not anti-Jewish but gangsterism isn't going to solve the Palestine problem".

[45] Astor was also deeply involved in the so-called Cliveden Set, a coterie of aristocrats that was described by one journalist as having subscribed to their own form of fascism.

[49] In that capacity, Astor was considered a "legendary hostess" for the group that in 1936 welcomed Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who communicated to Hitler regarding the likelihood of an agreement between Germany and England and singled out the Astorgruppe as one of the circles "that want a fresh understanding with Germany and who hold that it would not basically be impossible to achieve".

[51][52] Astor occasionally met with Nazi officials in keeping with Neville Chamberlain's policies, and she was known to distrust and to dislike British Foreign Secretary (later Prime Minister) Anthony Eden.

After the passage of 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.

[55] When World War II began, Astor admitted that she had made mistakes, and voted against Chamberlain, but left-wing hostility to her politics remained.

[58] The period from 1937 to the end of the war was personally difficult for Astor: in January of that year she lost her sister Phyllis, followed by her only surviving brother in 1938.

[63] When told she was one of the people listed to be arrested, imprisoned and face possible execution in "The Black Book" under a German invasion of Britain, Lady Astor commented: "It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist.

As the Conservatives believed she had become a political liability in the final years of World War II, her husband said that if she stood for office again the family would not support her.

[67][68] Lady Astor's public image suffered, as her ethnic and religious views were increasingly out of touch with cultural changes in Britain.

"[71] Lady Astor is also said to have responded to a question from Churchill about what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball by saying, "Why don't you come sober, Prime Minister?