American dollar princess

The term American dollar princess describes a wealthy American woman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who married into a titled European family, exchanging cash for class. The label can be retrospectively applied to women like Consuelo Vanderbilt[1] or Jennie Jerome.[2] According to a book called Titled Americans (1915), there were 454 marriages between Gilded Age and Progressive Era American women and European aristocrats.[3] The Library of Congress claims in a reference guide that "American heiresses married more than a third of the House of Lords."[3] The Spectator claims that amongst the marriages were 102 "British aristocrats" including "six dukes."[4] Mary Leiter Curzon, a Marshall Field's heiress, became Vicereine of India, making her perhaps the highest-placed American woman in the history of the British Empire until Meghan Markle.[5]

In the early 1920s, Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark, a wealthy widow born Nonie May Stewart in Ohio, who had married the brother of the King of Greece, was described as battling the American dollar princess stereotype.[6][7] A 1928 news report suggested that an unnamed American dollar princess might be last in the running to wed Boris III of Bulgaria.[8]

The Buccaneers, a 1938 novel by Edith Wharton, is set in this milieu.[5] The phrase seems to appear frequently as a trope of fiction, such as in Georgina Norway's Tregarthen (1896):[9]

With Coventry so expensive a man, and Algernon's debts always coming to be paid off, and the girls unmarried, I can assure you that we are awfully poor ourselves. I may tell you, in confidence, strict confidence, that I often dare not send Madame Elise's bills to the earl! But you must must try, my dear. We must look out for an American dollar princess for you. They expect a title, certainly, in general, but we must hope.

A 1909 New York Times review of Hermann Sudermann's The Song of Songs mentions a background character who may be an American dollar princess.[10] A 1920 book review described a new novel as "plot simplicity itself, being concerned essentially with the struggle of two wealthy girls, a vulgar American 'Dollar Princess' and a charming Lancashire lass, for the love of a young farmer baronet who cleaves, like his forefathers, to the old religion."[11] A 2023 Library Journal review of a title in the "Gilded Age Heiresses" romance-novel series describes a plot scenario wherein "American 'Dollar Princess' Camille, now the Dowager Duchess of Hereford after her horrible husband’s death, decides to ask Jacob Thorne, co-owner of an infamous club and the illegitimate son of an earl, for help discovering if she can find pleasure with a man."[12]