How American heiresses became Dollar Princesses

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  Npr.

• 00:11

  You know, many of us did a lot of binge watching during the thick of the pandemic.

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  That includes economists like Mark Taylor, who's a professor at Washington University in St.

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  Louis.

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  I think I was watching Downton Abbey.

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  So that's the classic British drama set during the early 1900s.

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  And Mark recalls this one scene between the Earl of Grantham and his American wife.

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  They're talking about their daughter.

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  Do you think she would have been.

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  Happy with a fortune hunter?

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  She might have been.

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  I was.

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  It was a little rebuke at pointing out that her fortune had actually saved Downton Abbey from ruin a couple of decades earlier when she married into the family.

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  The family in Downton Abbey is fictional, but for a few decades, beginning in the late 1800s, around 100 real life American women did marry British aristocrats.

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  These brides became known as dollar princesses and their marriages were matches made in economic heaven.

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  This is the Indicator from Planet Money.

• 01:14

  I'm Weylon Wong.

• 01:15

  And I'm Diane Woods.

• 01:16

  It is Love Week on the Indicator, our series about the economics of love and romance.

• 01:22

  There's one commodity that makes all the love birds sing.

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