Abstract
Marcia A. Zug’s Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches engages us from the start, meticulously laying out a history of mail-order matches from “Tobacco Wives” of the Jamestown colony all the way up to today’s online mail-order marriages, challenging persistent stereotypes about these marriages along the way. Addressing the stereotypes directly, Zug admits that her project did not begin with “a focus on the advantages of mail-order marriage” (p.3). Instead, she was moved to begin the project after reading a magazine article about a mail-order match that did not end well: Instead of examining his own behavior, Baillie [a successful fashion photographer who wanted a “traditional wife”] looked to an Internet “catalogue” to solve his relationship problems. When he became displeased with the “product” he received, he “returned” her like an ill-fitting pair of pants (p.4).
For Zug, this story only confirmed her worst suspicions about mail-order marriage and contributed to her own assumptions about the deleterious impact of mail-order marriage more generally. Yet, as her research and book demonstrate, a critical analysis of the history of mail-order marriage offers a far more complicated picture, one that shows that these marriages “are typically beneficial and even liberating for women” (p.5). Thus, Buying a Bride offers a critical approach that carefully investigates how mail-order marriages of the colonial and frontier days were and continue to be understood and, perhaps most importantly, how our assumptions about today’s mail-order marriages are often situated in fear and misunderstanding.
Part One, “When Mail-Order Brides Were Heroes,” tells a fascinating and complicated history of early mail-order marriages, one that we don’t often hear in contemporary descriptions of mail-order marriage. A central set of expectations that runs through these narratives points to the following: “[w]ives were needed to create stable family units, produce and care for children, and cement America’s racial and cultural hierarchy” (p.11). Chapter One, titled “Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife,” outlines the connections colonists made between their expectations for a successful colony, what was actually happening in the colonies, and their own racist ideas.
Zug emphasizes a number of issues that the colonists focused on, such as a lack of white women in the colonies, widespread desertion where men continued to leave the colonies, racist ideas that constructed intermarriage as dangerous and counterproductive, and persistent beliefs in racial and cultural purity and superiority, beliefs that constructed the native population as “cruel, irrational, vengeful, treacherous, and barbaric” (p.15). In other words, colonists often justified their actions—particularly with regard to recruiting mail-order brides—via an oblivious commitment to whiteness and cultural purity. Yet, at the same time, Zug shows that the Virginia government’s belief in marriage as “vital to the success of the entire colonial enterprise . . . translated into significant social, economic, and legal benefits for the mail-order brides of Jamestown” (p.5). The stories Zug tells about these benefits for colonial mail-order brides paints an interesting and important picture of some early examples of greater gender equality for these women.
Zug continues to focus on colonial mail-order brides in Chapters Two and Three, analyzing the success of the mail-order program in New France against its counterpart, a failed program in the Louisiana colony. Once again, we learn that colonists in New France and the Louisiana colony had two central concerns: population growth and the lack thereof in their respective colonies and an ongoing, pervasive fear of Indian/white intermarriage and coupling. In Zug’s analysis of the successful filles du roi (“king’s daughters”) program, she begins to highlight how these marriages could and did, in fact, benefit the brides and the colony. For instance, fille du roi Isabelle Hubert required colonist Louis Bolduc to sign a contract that “provided significant protection against the uncertainties of marriage, but such an agreement would have been almost unheard of in France” (p.40). Shifting to mail-order brides of California and the Pacific Northwest in Chapter Four and continuing to highlight benefits of mail-order marriage, Zug analyzes how many immigration incentives resulted in legal and social benefits for women who came out west to marry.
Part Two, “Mail-Order Marriage Acquires a Bad Reputation,” shows how the social construction of mail-order marriage shifted, in large part due to racist perceptions of the brides using mail-order services. Chapter Five begins this discussion with a close examination of matrimonial advertisements; while they remained popular, they were also considered problematic. Outlining how mail-order marriage continued in the post-Civil War period, Chapter Six shows that while the practice remained popular, its negative perception increased substantially.
Chapter Seven continues to provide evidence for the negative perception of mail-order marriage, particularly as it intersected with “undesirable” groups that used mail-order marriage to “circumvent America’s restrictive immigration policies” (p.7). In Chapter Eight, Zug ends her book with some direct challenges to the typical assumptions made about mail-order marriage, such as: most women in these marriages are abused and exploited, these marriages undermine marriage more generally, and gender inequality is a key feature of most mail-order marriages. By challenging each one of these assumptions, Zug convincingly shows that “the harms associated with mail-order marriage have been exaggerated and that the benefits have been underappreciated” (p.7).
Zug’s careful attention to detail and ability to both analyze and tell a good story result inan endlessly fascinating read. As ongoing struggles, tragedies, and debates about immigration overwhelm our global and national news feeds, Zug’s book also offers a timely historical discussion of immigration. For example, her ability to connect early immigration incentives to the gender, race, and class landscapes that formed since the early colonial period and have continued to affect our landscapes today is impressive. By looking back at early immigration practices, Zug offers a window into contemporary practices that, perhaps, haven’t changed as much as we would have hoped.
Building on her historical analysis of immigration, she is also able to construct a stronger case for her argument, showing that the close connection between immigration and marriage has and continues to benefit many of the women/mail-order brides who have married. While Zug only offers preliminary research on mail-order grooms (for same-sex marriages), the fact that she makes a case for the benefits of mail-order marriage opens up space for future research that might use her work to begin to make sense of how mail-order marriages are playing out for same-sex couples.
At the end of Buying a Bride, Zug argues that modern marriage is defined by choice rather than love and mail-order marriages are just another version of this. Choice propels one to marry; and if we conceptualize marriage in this way, we see that mail-order marriage is not markedly different from any other modern marriage. This last point, once again, forces us to reconsider automatic stereotypes we might attach to mail-order marriage. In recent years, feminist scholars have been contributing challenging and significant work on love, marriage, race, and immigration. Buying a Bride is an important and compelling addition.