Agency, the Family and the Patriarchal State in Archival Documentation of Australian Second World War Brides

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the intersecting social circumstances of Australian women's intimate, international relationships with American and other foreign allied servicemen during the Second World War, including their experiences of romance, marriage, divorce and subsequent child‐maintenance USA. We explore how the widely varying, often highly personalised, perceptions of the women's raced, classed and ethnic status, across differing legal systems, could impact not only immigration eligibility, but, especially in the case of Indigenous women, the fundamental right to marry. Immigration laws and local authorities worked in discretionary ways, shaped by a range of considerations and interactions, including class, race and gender to limit non‐white people's mobility and freedom. We demonstrate how this unprecedented larger‐scale experience of international and interracial marriage unsettles feminist arguments that underplay the intersection of issues of race, ethnicity and class with gender in the impact of the Second World War and set the scene for subsequent social changes driven by the logics of race inequality. Enlarging on earlier scholarship, we see the Second World War as a site for the ignition of changes in women's economic, cultural and political status, related here not so much to their work experiences, but to their personal and romantic lives, and also transnational raced experiences of exclusion, agency and shared knowledges.