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20 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 85 (2012-2013)
Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: The Forgotten History of America's First Mail Order Brides

handle is hein.journals/djglp20 and id is 89 raw text is: Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: The Forgotten History of America's First Mail Order Brides MARCIA ZUG* As Catherine looks out across the water, she wonders what her life will be like when she reaches Virginia. She knows that conditions will be hard, but life in England was also hard. At least in the colony, there is the possibility of improvement. The Virginia Company has assured her and the other women that they will have their choice of marriage partners. They have promised that the men are wealthy, or at least will be wealthy with the women's help. Moreover, in Virginia, as a married woman she has the right to share in her husband's wealth. Catherine knows it is a risk, but she has been assured she can always return home if she changes her mind. Regardless, Catherine expects to stay. There is littlefor her back in England. She will marry a colonist and help found a nation. The first American mail order brides were independent, powerful and respected; they are never described as mail order brides. The term mail order bride is most often reserved for women perceived as victims.' Colonial mail order brides, by contrast, have other names: Jamestown brides, King's daughters, and Casket girls. Nonetheless, the label mail order bride is just as appropriate. Sources describing colonial mail order brides demonstrate that these women immigrated to America for many of the same reasons as their modem counterparts, but the colonial mail order brides received a level of respect and acceptance that typically eludes contemporary mail order brides.2 Distancing today's mail order brides from these lauded forbearers obscures their similarities and perpetuates the one-dimensional treatment of modem mail order brides.3 Re-examining the feminist underpinnings of the first mail order brides * Associate Professor of Law at The University of South Carolina School of Law. I would like to thank Mark Graber, Martha Ertman, David Schleicher, Robin Wilson, Jana Singer, and Michael Greenberger for their helpful suggestions and insights with this piece. 1. See, e.g., Christine Chun, The Mail-Order Bride Industry: The Perpetuation of Transnational Economic Inequalities and Stereotypes, 17 U. PA. J. INT'L ECON. L. 1155 (1996); Donna Lee, Mail Fantasy: Global Sexual Exploitation in the Mail Order Bride Industry and Proposed Legal Solutions, 5 ASIAN L.J. 139, 139 (1998); Eddy Meng, Mail-Order Brides: Gilded Prostitution and the Legal Response, 28 U. MICH. J. oF L. REF. 197, 197 (1994); Vanessa Vergara, Abusive Mail Order Bride Marriage and the Thirteenth Amendment, 94 Nw. U. L. REV. 1547, 1547 (2000). 2. See Daniel Epstein, Romance is Dead: Mail Order Brides as Surrogate Corpses, 17 BUFF. J.GENDER L. & Soc. POL'Y 61, 66 (2009) (likening mail order marriages to necrophilia). 3. See, e.g., Chun, supra note 1, at 1156 (contrasting the original mail order brides who Chun describes as a necessity based on specific historical and cultural conditions with the modern mail-