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.
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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)
