Gold-Diggers of 2025

Gold-diggers like Lorelei Lee are one of the great artistic creations of the 20th century. Why not enjoy them?

In the New York Times Magazine, here’s another representative example of 21st Century feminist journalism, subgenre: Social Media Memes Give Me Confusing Feelings; Society Must Be To Blame:

The Gold Digger Was an Archvillain. Now She’s an Aspiration.

What do men and women really want in our fraught new mating economy?

By Amy X. Wang

Aug. 29, 2025

Then some stuff about the wedding in Venice of the new Mrs. Bezos, adventuress Lauren Sanchez.

And then proof that Ms. Wang got an A in Social Construction of Romance and Marriage 308:

… To put finance before romance is actually a faithfully originalist reading of the institution of marriage. For most of its history, marriage in the Western world was never about feelings: It was about elite, landowning families’ joining their children together to strengthen their holdings. Husbands and wives were meant to be business partners.

She also got an A in Social Construction of Heterosexuality 309.

When spouses craved affection, they turned to their friends.

It wasn’t until the early 1800s that Enlightenment ideals about liberty, personal happiness and “love matches” began percolating.

Wasn’t Romeo and Juliet written in the 1590s?

Actually, England was one of Europe’s leaders in normalizing love matches in medieval times. Tory cabinet secretary David Willetts wrote in 2010:

Instead, think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. … Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work …You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. … You can choose your spouse … It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties.

Wang goes on:

…. A booming art form, the novel, glorified these novelly amorous marriages. Jane Austen’s seminal “Pride and Prejudice,” from 1813, features a male suitor who is clever and handsome and, oh, just happens to have a good deal of money upon which the poorer but class-proud Elizabeth Bennet can capitalize.

Nah, people were marrying for love in England for a long time before 1813.

People today get overly focused on arranged marriages at the royal or aristocratic levels and assume the same norms applied among commoners. But most people hadn’t gotten married that way in England for quite a few centuries.

But it is true that “possession of a good fortune” is a lovable trait.

… William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 chronicle of upward mobility, “Vanity Fair,” takes a different spin on this kind of relationship: His female characters are charming seductresses who engineer their way into aristocratic ranks through deliberate conquests of higher-status men.

Becky Sharpe-style gold-diggery was also happening well before 1848.

But while “love matches” became faddish, they fiscally benefited only one party. Then, in the early 20th century, rapid industrial development worsened the gender wealth gap that was already set up by man-favoring policies around property ownership and inheritance. Even among poorer classes, the wartime wage-labor economy caused men’s earning power to soar well above their counterparts’: Suddenly, men had the chance to build fortunes in offices, while most women stayed home and the few who worked were allowed to pursue only lower-paid jobs.

And that was different than Jane Austen’s time … how?

Protective of their newfound riches, more men began viewing marriage through the darker lens anticipated by Thackeray. If relationships were now all about passion, then couldn’t one be duped by passion-fakers? A 1919 play about social-climbing chorus girls called “The Gold Diggers” popularized the pejorative for such women.

Or maybe it turned out that gold-digging chorus girls are a near perfect subject for the musical comedies that were coming to dominate Broadway? (Before Oklahoma! in 1943 made it standard for cowhands or whomever to suddenly break into song, a very large fraction of musicals were set backstage among actors and chorus girls (e.g., Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate”) so that it would be realistic for them to put on big production numbers.)

The term stuck. It became an easy way to scoff at any women not piquing societal approval.

Except that everybody loved Lorelei Lee.

In putting a magnifying glass to financial imbalance, this growing outcry over gold diggers also played down all the other exchanges of capital that can take place in relationships — the trading of one partner’s money against another’s beauty, youth or reputational cachet, for example.

And the tittering over women’s motivations has always erupted the loudest during times of social strife. “The trope, the rhetoric about gold diggers, pops up in moments of crises about marriage or gender,” Brian Donovan, a sociologist and the author of a book on the cultural history of gold diggers, told me, adding that such periods also map onto economic crises: “During the times people should have been blaming men for making decisions that led to financial crises, women were instead scapegoated for being gold diggers.” Through the boom time of the 1950s and 1960s, there was not nearly as much anxiety about gold diggers as during the Great Depression, when comic strips like “Blondie” parodied female greed.

Like the 1953 movie

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