She was born in Danville, Virginia, in 1879, the daughter of a Confederate soldier turned entrepreneur. Nancy Astor was an unlikely first woman to sit in Britain’s Parliament. ![]() “I think it’s a pity that that happened.” “That was lost in the press reporting, which was more interested in mudslinging than fact,” she says. “It overshadowed the message that this wasn’t about the celebration of one individual, with all her flaws and in all her paradoxes it was about celebrating the achievement of women, and highlighting where we need to do better.” Still, she says, the statue was a weapon in a campaign of political point-scoring. Jacqui Turner, a leading Astor scholar at the University of Reading, who was involved in the campaign to erect the statue, stresses that we should not gloss over Astor’s past remarks, or diminish the fight against anti-Semitism. In particular, the notion that Astor loved the Nazis has fascinating, stubborn roots in a viral 1930s conspiracy theory-propagated by Britain’s media at a time of intense geopolitical tension, then pushed out around the world, and down the decades. But it hinted at a rich-and complex-chapter of Astor’s story, and of the transatlantic historical record. In a news cycle full of outrage, the statue episode was relatively fleeting. (Disclosure: my girlfriend used to work for a Labour lawmaker who campaigned for the statue.) ) Claims of racism in Conservative ranks, critics say, have attracted a lesser focus. (The party is currently under formal investigation by Britain’s equalities and human-rights watchdog. Allegations of institutional anti-Semitism have engulfed coverage of the Labour Party in recent years. The outrage about it was a proxy, in part, for contemporary squabbles: May’s involvement nourished the perception, popular on the left, that the British press has a double standard when covering racism in politics. The Astor statue had been drafted into Britain’s 21st-century culture war. UnHerd, a site that aims to “push back against the herd mentality,” asked, “Why not cancel Nancy Astor?” “Oops!” said Vice, “Theresa May Unveiled a Statue to a Racist MP.” Several stories quoted Sir Stafford Cripps, a Parliamentary contemporary of Astor’s, calling her “the member for Berlin.” Many news outlets, too, prominently noted the anti-Semitism and Nazi-sympathy allegations in their stories on the statue. Michael Rosen, a children’s author who also writes regularly for The Guardian, compared Astor to Oswald Mosley, a notorious British fascist leader of the 1930s. Owen Jones, a high-profile Labour-backing columnist for The Guardian, used similar language, as did Mehdi Hasan, of The Intercept. Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at Novara Media, a far-left website, said Astor wasn’t only a “notorious anti-Semite,” but a “Nazi sympathizer,” too. But on Twitter, left-wing pundits condemned the statue, and May for unveiling it. ![]() In real life, this lone act of dissent attracted little attention. One man held up a whiteboard with “LADY ASTOR, ANTI-SEMITE” and a sad face across it-“ASTOR” descended vertically, through the “A” of “LADY” and the “T” of “ANTI-SEMITE.” ![]() ) Plymouth’s town crier heralded May and Astor, to polite applause from the assembled crowd. (Boris Johnson, who replaced May as prime minister earlier this year, was skulking around, too. In Plymouth, Theresa May, Britain’s second female prime minister, also a Conservative, dedicated the statue in a laudatory address outside Astor’s old home, a handsome townhouse on a broad, ocean-facing park. “I think that to ignore history, and not to celebrate and mark in some way the advancement of women, including women I disagree with politically, is a mistake,” Chakrabarti told me. Liz Truss-a Conservative, like Astor-was on board the train, as was Shami Chakrabarti, a senior figure in the left-wing Labour Party. The statue, like the train ride, was a bipartisan endeavor. They went to the unveiling of a statue of Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in Britain’s Parliament, on the centenary of her election to represent Plymouth. Late last month, in the midst of divisive national elections in Britain, officials from across the political spectrum took a private train to Plymouth, in southwest England, on a rare mission of comity.
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