Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches. By Marcia A. Zug. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Abstract

Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches. By Marcia A. Zug. New York: New York University Press, 2016.A book title with the phrase buying a bride implies that men still purchase women, as if the latter were commodities. Buying a Bride challenges this conventional wisdom by explaining why marriage, for immigration purposes, has always been contingent upon multiple factors far beyond the control of the participants. In doing so, this book articulates the logic of such marriage, particularly from the standpoint of a female marital immigrant, who believes that she has more to gain than lose from entering such a legal relationship.Buying a Bride is about why popular attitudes toward the practice, ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative, and our laws and policies towards it, have changed over time. Marcia Zug organizes her narrative to reflect the fact that initially, mail order brides were not looked down upon the way that they too often are today. From the very beginning, such women were not passive. Rather, they used such marriage to improve their lives, despite the uncertainty of moving to a new land and the risks of marrying a stranger. In describing different cases in considerable detail, the author focuses on something that has been neglected: the benefits of being a female marital immigrant. In the Jamestown Colony, such brides could escape the tyranny of coverture in England (p. 23). Around the same time, in other colonies, they had more wealth and power than women in England (p. 28). For others, marital immigration enabled them to leave an unhappy marriage when divorce was not an option (p. 39). In a marriage market characterized by a low supply and high demand for female marital immigrants, women had considerably more bargaining power and used it to their advantage. Some of the women who left France for Quebec to marry decided to remain single after their arrival (p. 42). Much later, California induced women from the East Coast to come West by liberalizing its property and divorce laws (p. 80).The first Part of the book, then, is told as a story of female empowerment. Mail order brides used the opportunity as a means of enhancing their freedom and equality in a male-dominated world. The second Part of the book reveals how public opinion turned against the practice, not out of concern for the well-being of the women, but primarily as a consequence of racist beliefs about the dangers of miscegenation. Early on, as part of their colonization schemes in North America, Great Britain and France recruited women to address the so-called gender imbalance. However, the gender imbalance was an imbalance of too many white male settlers and too few white women, not an imbalance between men and women per se, given the presence of Indigenous women. …