PLYMOUTH, England — When women finally won the right in 1918 to enter Britain’s Parliament, many expected the first female lawmaker to sit there to come from the ranks of the suffragists, the activists who had fought, often at huge personal cost, for the vote.

Instead, it was someone of wealth and privilege, a well-connected socialite, and an American.

A century after she was elected to Parliament, the achievements of Nancy Astor have been celebrated at several events, including one in Plymouth, the city she represented, where a statue of her was unveiled by Theresa May, one of two women to have been prime minister.

Yet while Lady Astor was a trailblazing feminist, her political reputation was marred by anti-Semitism and by support for the appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, leaving historians divided over her legacy.

In terms of advancing equality, Jacqui Turner, an associate professor at the University of Reading, sees Lady Astor as a pioneer and someone of extraordinary resilience.

“She opened the door,” Dr. Turner said. “If she had given up or said, ‘This is too hard,’ she would have set back the cause by a decade at least.”

But Julie Gottlieb, a professor of modern history at Sheffield University, described her as “a much more problematic figure,” and the centenary commemorations have also provoked pleas for Britons to stand up against racism and prejudice.

Lady Astor was not actually the first woman elected to Parliament. In 1918, the Irish independence campaigner Constance Markievicz fought and won election for a district of Dublin from a cell in Holloway Prison in London. But in line with the policy of her party, Sinn Fein, she never took her seat.

Lady Astor’s arrival in Parliament in 1919 as a Conservative Party lawmaker was nonetheless a landmark, one that generated huge interest on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was not universally welcomed, however. When she entered a crowded and expectant House of Commons on Dec. 1, Lady Astor suspected that many men would resent her but was surprised to be cold-shouldered by some she knew socially, including Winston Churchill.

“We hoped to freeze you out,” he told her years later.

They failed, but Lady Astor also received abuse that sounds wearily familiar to contemporary female politicians threatened or vilified on social media.

“She got 2,000 to 3,000 letters a week from all over the country and the U.S., most of those celebratory and complementary, but she also received hate mail,” said Dr. Turner, who added that one anonymous letter read, “To that blasted American whore: Go home.”

Her remarkable story began in some hardship in Danville, Va., near the North Carolina border, where she was born in 1879. Her once wealthy, slave-owning family had lost its land in the Civil War. But her father’s fortunes improved thereafter, and he made serious money in the booming railroad business.

Nancy married Robert Gould Shaw II, who came from a prominent Massachusetts family but had a reputation for wild behavior and heavy drinking. They had a son, but the union proved disastrous and ended quickly. She returned to the South until her in-laws asked her to grant a divorce to their son, who had decided to remarry.

On a trip to England for the hunting season, Nancy made an instant impact. She was outspoken, confident, witty and had a habit of flouting convention that seemed to appeal to stuffy British aristocrats.

According to Dr. Turner, “One aristocratic British woman said to her, ‘Are you here to take all our husbands?’ to which Nancy replied, ‘If you knew how much trouble I’d had getting rid of mine, you wouldn’t be worried.’”

But another appeared on the horizon (almost literally) when, on a trans-Atlantic liner, she met Waldorf Astor, son of William Astor, a fabulously wealthy Anglophile American who was eventually ennobled by his adopted country. The future Lady Astor charmed William Astor to such an extent that she and Waldorf were given a grand home near London, called Cliveden, as a wedding present. (Meghan Markle spent the night before her marriage to Prince Harry in the main house there, which is now a hotel.)

Waldorf, educated at Eton College and Oxford University, was elected to Parliament in 1910 for the seat of Plymouth Sutton. But in 1919 his father died and he inherited his noble title — which came with a place in the House of Lords, Parliament’s unelected and less powerful upper chamber, and an obligation to quit the House of Commons.

Initially hoping that he could find his way around the restriction, Waldorf urged his wife to seek the seat in the House of Commons. She not only won but held it until 1945. He stayed in the House of Lords.

Despite her natural self-confidence, the early days in Westminster were difficult ones, and Lady Astor sat out a lonely two years until a second woman was elected.

The men would rather have admitted a rattlesnake to the chamber than admit her, she later told the BBC.

“It was a terrifying and paralyzing experience for her to sit in the House of Commons when surrounded by so many men poised for the attack,” wrote Rachel Reeves, a Labour Party politician, in her book “Women of Westminster.” Ms. Reeves added that, despite her apparent composure, Lady Astor admitted that she had been so terrified on her first day in Parliament that she sat for five hours without moving.

Avoiding the smoking room and bars, she confronted the inevitable question of her clothing by adopting a type of uniform — a dark skirt, dark jacket, white blouse and tricorn hat — so as not to detract from her political activities.

She pushed through a law to raise the drinking age to 18 — a restriction that persists today — and kept pressure on the Conservatives to legislate, in 1928, to allow women to vote at 21, rather than 30.

Straddling the worlds of politics and high society, she showed formidable energy. In an entry for 1934, the diarist Henry Channon described her as “breezy and funny,” though he then added: “She is almost a great woman, but I cannot like her. She is warmhearted, a whirlwind and a wit … but an unconscious snob and a hypocrite.”

Her granddaughter Emily Astor recollects someone who kept in touch with her roots in Virginia and had a huge sense of fun. “She was happy, aged 80, to perform a cartwheel,” she recalled.

The anniversary celebrations included one at Paddington Station in London, where a train was named after Lady Astor by the Great Western Railway. This was where she arrived in 1919 from Plymouth on her journey to take up her parliamentary seat, and where she was greeted by well-wishers, among them suffragists who had initially regarded her with suspicion.

Paying tribute, Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of the suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst, noted how she was ignored “by all the men, including by those that she knew personally, because they wanted to squeeze out all women.” She added, “However, she persevered with humor and dignity, with courage and resilience.”

Ms. Pankhurst also drew a lesson for the present. “Is it acceptable that systemic structural barriers continue to block women from becoming members of Parliament and that they are being targeted by particularly vile social media abuse?” she asked.

Admirers at the unveiling of her statue in Plymouth included Frances Phipps, who runs a first-aid training company. “In this city, she is an inspiration to people, a local hero,” she said.

Yet historians differ on how many allowances to make for Lady Astor’s support for appeasement and for other episodes, such as her decision in 1936 to invite Hitler’s ally Joachim von Ribbentrop to a dinner party.

“She made some anti-Semitic statements, she was occasionally anti-Catholic, there were the accusations of appeasement and sympathies with Hitler,” said Dr. Turner, who added that some of these views were far more widely accepted then.

“She was judged much more harshly than men,” she concluded.

Professor Gottlieb notes Lady Astor’s role as the hostess of what became known as the “Cliveden set” — seen as a political hub of appeasement — and her association with American isolationists like Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh.

“She is a complicated figure,” said Professor Gottlieb, “and it is really important for this centenary to celebrate the achievement rather than the person.”

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