striver

plural strivers

1. One who strives.

   The company’s namesake, Condé Montrose Nast, was a Gilded Age striver from St. Louis who purchased a sleepy society gazette called Vogue in 1909 and made it an arbiter of women’s fashion […].

   2025 June 27, Michael M. Grynbaum, “The Concorde-and-Caviar Era of Condé Nast, When Magazines Ruled the Earth”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   1 more example

   I am angered not only by such bloodsucking selective memory, but also at another example of how gay "respectability"-strivers try to distance themselves from the nonconformists and fringe members of our movement.

   1984 December 22, Ingrid Sell, “Changing Boston”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 23, page 4