Marcia A. Zug is Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina.
"Eye-opening and entertaining."
*Foreword Reviews*
"[Buying a Bride] focuses on an area that most of us do not stop to
explore in greater depth, and that exploration leads one to see the
more nuanced faces of the issues."
*Manhattan Book Review*
"Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries."
*Choice Connect*
"Zug upends prevailing views of 'mail-order' marriages as
exploitative, instead finding that women traded oppressive
conditions at home for liberating opportunities abroad...[H]er
well-researched...and conversationally written book will prove
edifying and entertaining to anyone interested in North American or
women's history, or in understanding the modern, mail-order bride
industry against a richly detailed historical backdrop."
*The Historian*
"Marcia Zug’s Buying a Bride is a historical synthesis of what she
refers to as “mail-order marriage.” Largely relying on the
scholarship of others Zug offers her own compelling argument:
contrary to today’s popular opinion, mail-order matches have
historically benefited the brides who contracted them and
contemporaries supported the matches as good for the nation.... Zug
ably debunks most stereotypes about mail-order brides."
*Canadian Journal of History*
"This provocative history of mail-order marriages challenges
stereotypes about women who leave home to wed strangers. Arguing
that our view of the practice is overly influenced by cases of
trafficking, Zug shows us women who have seen it as an
opportunity."
*The New Yorker*
"[S]cholars have tended to view the mail-order marriages of the
seventeenth to nineteenth centuries through the lens of todays
politics is a persuasive one. It is ironic perhaps, that it has
taken a lawyer to remind historians about the dangers of viewing
the past as if it were the present, simply dressed in funny
clothes."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"Mail-order brides have been welcomed, celebrated, stigmatized, and
feared. With its long-term historical perspective, this important
book uncovers the origins of changing public opinion while bringing
into focus the autonomy that many women have sought and some women
have achieved through migration and marriage."
*Donna R. Gabaccia,University of Toronto Scarborough*
"Buying a Bride is a history book like few others, a
carefully-documented critical analysis of mail-order marriages from
the days of the Jamestown colony to modern times. . . . Zug
persuasively and carefully demonstrates how throughout American
history, conceptions of larger national imperatives, namely
settlement of the frontier, marriage, and race deeply influenced
American society's views of mail order brides. The changes have
resulted in the radical transformation of the generally positive
public opinion of such marital arrangements before the Civil War
and increasingly negative views of the practice through to today. .
. . From a feminist perspective, Zug concludes that, despite
significant risks, mail-order marriages are typically beneficial
and even liberating for women. Buying a Bride offers fresh new
insights to anyone interested in love and marriage, race and
immigration, and the fundamental transformation of American social
life over the last 300 years."
*Kevin R. Johnson,UC Davis School of Law*
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