Marcia A. Zug

Quotes

[This book] seeks to explore the consequences of a marital regime that insists love is the only acceptable reason to marry while enacting laws and policies that give Americans so may non-love reasons to wed. (6)

...it wasn't fear that convinced most women to embrace the changing conception of marriage, it was hope.
A husband's love offered the possibility of equality in an inherently unequal relationship. (23)

Suddenly [when the U.S. entered WWII], women didn't need to marry for money. American men should have been thrilled. Tellingly, they were not. Women's potential economic independence made men fearful. Without a financial need for marriage, many worried that women might no longer choose to marry. (41)

Nearly 200 years after the first Widows' Pension Act was passed, the practice of attaching federal benefits to marriage continues....this link between marriage and government benefits continues to perpetuate gender and racial inequality. (73)

]The Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935] excluded most women and people of color. (78)

The SSA amendments were modeled on the traditional marital bargain....Today, the implications of the government's decision to support women through marriage, not employment, remain substantial. (78-79)

Both the tax code and the SSA treat marriage as a solution to female financial inequality and as a cure for female poverty. (81)

Government benefits can incentivize women, particularly poor women, to marry, but most would profit more from policies that directly address the causes of poverty - the lack of livable wages, family leaves, and health care - than those promoting marriage. (85)

...it is no coincidence that opposition to women's suffrage stemmed in part from the fact that the movement sought to base women's political power on their status as individuals rather than as wives. (116)

Marriage helped circumvent gender inequality, while simultaneously helping to perpetuate it. (122)

sole-provider model (123)

American men view caretaking as status lowering, thus men who earn less, help less...Women have long derived status from their husband's achievements. If men also believed they benefited from their wives' successes, they might be more willing to assume supportive roles. (126-127)

...the marriage defense...incentivized highly problematic and dangerous marriages...[the spousal testimonial privilege derives from coverture] (143)

The Davis court believed the testimonial privilege fostered marital harmony, but case law shows it is more likely to perpetuate marital violence. (169)

By encouraging the link between marriage an parenthood, the law neglects unmarried families and exacerbates their vulnerabilities. As child welfare advocates have long argued, children are most protected when they are treated equally, without regard to their parents' marital status. (214)

Legally, the dividing line for compensation [for "housewifely duties"] is marriage. Whether this distinction is equitable is a different question. (227)

It is commonly estimated that services provided by the average stay-at-home mom are worth almost $200,000 per year. Nevertheless, no court will force a husband to make such payments. (235)

The idea that domestic services should be provided gratuitously is a remnant of the deeply gendered doctrine of coverture. (235)

When the government tells low-income women to reply on men for support, it is abdicating its responsibility for solving the problems that contribute to female poverty in the first place. (242)

One of the greatest problems with financial dependency is it creates the perfect conditions for domestic violence. (244)

If marriage were the best solution to America's economic and social problems...[Republican] marriage promotion tactics might be justified, but history has repeatedly shown it is not. At best, marriage is a Band-Aid that Americans have used when society is too sexist, too racist, or just too lazy to implement better solutions.
(246)

Although marriage advocates are correct when they argue that marriage remains highly beneficial, this is only because America has made the deliberate choice to benefit the married. (247)… (más)

Well researched and succinct. I truly enjoyed reading the history provided by the author from the Jameston brides, the filles de roi versus the filles de joie, the contrast between the early Canadian immigration versus the Louisiana immigration, etc... I liked the author's ability to highlight memorable bits of history, from early marriage ad jokes to the serial murderer who poisoned his last wife with arsenic, and pointing out a marriage tax as an incentive to have unofficial or "fleet" marriages. I also liked how the author paints the economic and political background of the period in which the waves of the brides come - extremely critical in understanding the mixed reactions over history and current general suspicion of them. Gender and racial biases clearly impact this history as well. I also like how the author points out that the American notion of romantic marriage is a very recent concept, when viewed over several centuries. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in these issues.… (más)

Zug has managed to put together a very interesting history of a small sub-set of people who have gotten some pretty negative press over the years. It was fascinating to read about the origins of the "mail-order bride" in America in Jamestown, and the sad story of the Filles du Roi in Louisiana. There is also an extensive section on brides from China, Korean and Japan, which introduced me to an entirely new type of mail-order bride I hadn't read about before.

The area that covered the modern era seemed a bit thin though. For the most part it was a treatise on why modern men feel the need to seek mail-order brides when, in America, our population is pretty evenly divided between the sexes. There was also a lot of time spent on exploring the women's perspectives and what they are gaining. All of this was interesting, and essential to understanding the issues as they stand today, but there was minimal time spent on the potential pitfalls inherent in the system aside from protecting these women from abuse. I guess it just felt like an overly cheery picture was being painted, but maybe I'm just another victim of the negative media campaign.

Overall this was a fascinating read, but it ended up feeling light by the time we got to modern day. The historical research and information covering the subject from colonization into industrial period is well presented, I just felt that it fell flat at the end.

Copy courtesy of NYU Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (más)

Zug traces mail-order marriages made by Europeans in North America, first as part of the colonial project/to prevent European men from marrying and becoming loyal to Native American women, and then later to allow American men who feel excluded from the marriage market because of American women’s demands to find women who appreciate what they have to give. She argues that most such marriages are successful, and that, because many of the women who come are well-educated and ambitious, and perceive the most “traditional” of American men as incredibly progressive compared to Russian or Korean etc. men, prejudices against mail-order marriage are bad. Though the participants in today’s versions say they’re not feminists, Zug thinks that’s really code for “not feeling like winners in today’s economy,” as if those are mutually exclusive things.

It is indeed an engaging history, but also frustrating. Questions that, if grappled with, could have made this project better: Does the fact that individual women have really good reasons to do a thing make that thing feminist? If foreign brides are a good way to deal with “unmarriageable” American men, what happens to the now-more-disproportionately-male society they have left? Does the racist history of mail-order bride programs, in which women were imported in order to preserve racial purity so that European men wouldn’t intermarry with Native Americans, have any analog in today’s attempts by mail-order brides and bride-seekers to preserve gender distinctions? Did the successes of those mail-order European brides come at the expense of native women (in some specific cases where native wives and children were cast off, the answer is clearly yes), and would something else have changed in those societies had mail-order brides not relieved some of the pressure?… (más)