Harper’s have started posting a lot more of their content online. I wonder if this is connected to Lapham’s handing over editorial responsibility? Anyway, here’s an interesting piece on the mail order bride business:

Shyly, slyly, hopefully, the men around the table smiled; these damaged guys, so desperate to believe.

In one form or another, the so-called mail-order bride has been part of American life since colonial days. Even today, many of New Orleans’ older families claim to be descended from the “casket girls” Louis XV sent from France to wed Louisiana colonists in the early eighteenth century, the term derived from the chests the women were given to carry their few belongings. And although westerns and Harlequin novels have perhaps oversold the ubiquity of mail-order marriages on the frontier—much as the role of gunfighters in those days has been oversold—such unions, whether organized by religious groups or entrepreneurs, did take place throughout the pioneer era. Bachelor farmers wrote in search of wives not only to their support networks back East but all the way to the old country. The men’s magazines of the day advertised the services of marriage brokers right alongside ads for snake-oil miracle cures and such cutting-edge mechanical marvels as the chain-driven bicycle. In turn-of-the-century Chicago alone, police broke up as many as 125 fraudulent marriage agencies, seizing and burning “wagon loads” of photographs of fictitious brides.

During most of the twentieth century, however—what with manifest destiny having been achieved, and the focus of American life having shifted from mining camps and cattle ranges to cities, suburbs, and malls—the phenomenon all but died out, except for a small traffic, impossible to quantify, which seems to have focused on women from Southeast Asia. Companies like A Foreign Affair (AFA) have sprung up only since the mid-1990s, when their founders spotted vast opportunity in the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Internet.

Link

Related Leave a Comment