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. Much later in the United States, the media disseminated propaganda underscoring the danger of marriage scams (p. 123). Buying a Bride is not just an account of how women struggled against gender injustice but also documents how pervasive attitudes of white supremacy caused people to reject a practice that otherwise had been acceptable when it did not involve interracial intimate relationships (p. 156). In fact, even American women “began to worry that benefits [which foreign-born women received from martial immigration] were being achieved at their expense” (p. 180).
Zug does an exemplary job of transforming the historical narrative about marital immigration to reveal how the practice can be beneficial. She draws upon primary documents and court cases to support her view that women were anything but pawns in someone else's game. Buying a Bride advances a compelling case to examine the facts carefully before rendering judgment about the merits of marital immigration. The contemporary questions of political morality that Americans face are not purely normative; they have empirical dimensions. By reconstructing the perspective that a prospective marital immigrant might have taken, Zug turns her into a figure that has agency. She does so by closely examining a wide variety of historical sources from different times and places that demonstrate how women marital immigrants shaped the laws, which they had to live under, as much those laws shaped them, in the struggle for greater gender equality. In that sense, they were proto-feminists.
Today, the United States has very restrictive immigration laws, but one can become a legal resident (and eventually, a citizen) by marrying a U.S. citizen, who can sponsor him (but usually, her). Many Americans are still “highly uncomfortable” with mail-order marriage (p. 189). Their attitudes may be derived from legitimate concerns about female commodification, anti-immigrant sentiment, or a combination of the two. Or as Zug suggests, because mail-order arrangements tend to be explicit economic exchanges, without the veneer of romantic love, they may rub sentimental Americans the wrong way (p. 225).
Buying a Bride provides us with a far more nuanced picture of the history of marital immigration. She shows us, through this historical sweep, that while individual women may have benefited from policies and laws that supported them, and in fact shaped these policies, this was also contingent on national interest. The past can be studied for its own sake. As Zug's book exemplifies, though, history can be put to normative purposes as well. Through using the case of mail-order brides, she asks us to reconsider preconceptions about marital immigration and of the laws that shaped them.
