Friday, December 2, 2016

Astor, Nancy


Constance Markievicz | First women elected to the House of Commons - HiHu > .

Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor, CH (19 May 1879 – 2 May 1964) was an American-born British politician, a Nazi sympathiser [anti-Stalinist], an anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist and the first female Member of Parliament (MP) to take her seat on 1 December 1919. Sinn Fein's Constance Markievicz was the first elected female MP and had refused to take up her seat the previous year in line with party policy.

Astor was an American citizen who moved to England at age 26 and married [fellow American expat] Waldorf Astor. He succeeded to the peerage and entered the House of Lords; she then entered politics and won his former seat in Plymouth in 1919, becoming the first woman to sit as an MP in the House of Commons. Her first husband was American [alcoholic] Robert Gould Shaw II; the couple separated after four years and divorced in 1903. She served in Parliament as a member of the Conservative Party for Plymouth Sutton until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down.

  • I married beneath me. All women do.
  • In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.
  • My vigour, vitality, and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.
  • One reason why I don’t drink is because I wish to know when I am having a good time.
  • Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.
  • The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything… or nothing.
  • The only thing I like about rich people is their money.
  • The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.
  • Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/my-dear-you-are-ugly-but-tomorrow-i-shall-be-sober-and-you-will-still-be-ugly-winston-churchill-tops-8878622.html .

Cliveden SetThe Cliveden Set were a 1930s, upper class group of prominent people, politically influential in pre-World War II Britain, who were in the circle of Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor. The name comes from Cliveden, the stately home in Buckinghamshire, which was then Astor's country residence.

The "Cliveden Set" tag was coined by Claud Cockburn in his journalism for the Communist newspaper The Week. It has long been widely accepted that this aristocratic Germanophile social network was in favour of friendly relations with Nazi Germany and helped create the policy of appeasement. John L. Spivak, writing in 1939, devotes a chapter to the Set. Norman Rose's 2000 account of the group proposes that, when gathered at Cliveden, it functioned more like a think-tank than a cabal. According to Carroll Quigley, the Cliveden Set had been strongly anti-German before and during World War I. After the end of the war, the discovery of the Nazis' Black Book showed that the group's members were all to be arrested as soon as Britain was invaded; Lady Astor remarked, "It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist."

The actual beliefs and influence of the Cliveden Set are matters of some dispute, and in the late 20th century some historians of the period came to consider the Cliveden Set allegations to be exaggerated. For instance, Christopher Sykes, in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argues that the entire story about the Cliveden Set was an ideologically motivated fabrication by Claud Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by a public looking for scapegoats for British pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler. There are also academic arguments that while Cockburn's account may have not have been entirely accurate, his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed.

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igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum

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