159. Jennie Jerome Churchill

Decades after a band of British colonists in the new world gained independence from the Crown, a funny thing happened: wealthy American women began returning to the ancestral homeland to find impoverished but titled Englishmen needing wives - and cash. It was a match - actually, hundreds of them - made in heaven.

Jeanette "Jennie" Jerome was an American daughter of a banker and a landowner, as well as being a noted beauty of her era. In 1874, at the age of just 20, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill - the two would produce another notable Churchill - and began a fascinating period of decades that saw her involvement and influence in the highest level of British politics and society.

Sources:

The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and British Aristocratic World into Which They Married, by Elizabeth Kehoe (Amazon link)

Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother, by Anne Sebba (Amazon link)

The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York, by Anne de Courcy (Amazon link)

International Churchill Society (winstonchurchill.org)

Million Dollar American Princesses, Smithsonian Channel documentary (smithsonianchannel.com)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.