American-born Nancy Langhorne Astor (1879-1964) became the first woman to serve as a member of the British Parliament, a position she held from 1919 to 1945.

Born in Danville, Virginia, on May 19, 1879, Nancy Langhorne grew up in the straitened circumstances of the post-Civil War South. Financial success eluded her father, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, a former Confederate officer, until the 1890s. Then contracts with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad paid off, and thereafter he amassed considerable wealth. In 1892 he bought an estate, Mirador, near Charlottesville, where she spent her adolescence. She had seven brothers and sisters, one of whom, Irene, became the celebrated "Gibson girl" painted by her artist husband, Charles Dana Gibson.

Her family experience provided some of the basis for her later feminism. Her father exerted tyrannical rule, and her mother, Nancy Witcher Langhorne, accepted his authority and the conventional feminine role. Worn out by repeated unwanted pregnancies (she...