During the first large wave of Asian immigration in the twentieth century, many Japanese and Korean women came to the United States as picture brides. The picture bride system, according to author Yen Le Espiritu, was a form of “arranged marriage facilitated by the exchange of photographs.” A Japanese or Korean immigrant man would look at a photograph of a potential wife back home and, if he “liked what he saw,” send for her to join him in the United States. Some Japanese and Korean women volunteered to become picture brides, seeing migration to the States as an adventure as well as a chance to escape the restricted life women frequently led in their homelands. As one Korean woman put it, “then I could get to America… that land of freedom with streets paved with gold!”
Nearly a century later, picture brides have been replaced by mail order brides. But the two practices diverge in a substantial way. Whereas Korean and Japanese picture brides generally married men of the same national background, the mail order bride system involves men seeking wives, and women seeking husbands, from ethnic groups other than their own. The homelands of modern mail order brides also differ from those of yesterday’s picture brides. The majority of the former come from the Philippines, Thailand, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, with a smattering of women from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the men who “order” these women live in developed regions, such as Australia, North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
Feminists and minority activists have attacked the mail order bride system as racist and sexist. That it is sexist seems beyond question; after all, the only “mail order groom” site on the Internet turned out to be a joke, featuring one man who wanted a wife between the ages of seven and fifteen and another who couldn’t use the family car without his mother’s permission. Some women’s rights advocates point out that mail order brides are vulnerable to domestic violence. The case of Susana Remerata, a Filipina in Seattle who was murdered by her American husband, is cited as an example.
The charge of racism is not far behind, especially as most of these women come from the Third World. White men who seek mail order brides are often accused of subscribing to stereotypes about the supposed “submissiveness” of non-Western (particularly Asian) women. In her essay “Recipe,” Chinese-Canadian writer C. Allyson Lee gives a humorous description of a fictional client’s search for a submissive Asian woman. She writes: “Attractive Straight White Male, middle-aged business executive looking for that special little China Doll, preferably short, petite and obedient. Object: to fulfill typical fantasies of the stereotype of Oriental ladies anxious to marry a Canadian in order to get out of Hong Kong or the Philippines and willing to do anything to pamper and please her man.”
Mail order bride agencies on the Internet frequently do have something to say about the ethnic traits of the women they feature. For instance, one venue declares that unlike modern-day American women, Filipinas are completely devoted to their husbands and families. The same characteristics are attributed to Latinas on another website. An agency based in Italy states that Filipinas are still “good Catholic girls” — which Italian women apparently no longer are. Some organizations play minority women against each other, touting the superiority of one group. According to an American outfit, women from the Philippines are more beautiful than their counterparts from China and Japan, so much so, the site adds, that Filipinas are often hired to play Chinese and Japanese roles in the movies.
While it’s easy to condemn such pronouncements as sexist, many mail order bride agencies don’t shy away from commenting on the men from these women’s homelands.
But they don’t paint a very flattering picture of them. One site featuring Filipinas purports that Asian men, in contrast to their Western peers, don’t hold doors for women (this certainly wasn’t true of the Asian students at my old university). Another claims that Latin American husbands typically come home drunk and beat their wives. The purpose of such bad-mouthing, of course, is to convince potential clients that by choosing an American (or Australian or Western European) husband, these women are getting a far better deal than what they’d find in their country of birth and will be grateful as a result.
In the end, however, the mail order bride racket can’t be boiled down entirely to race. A good portion of the women signed on with these agencies are white, generally from the former Soviet Union, and some of the men who “order” brides via such venues are not. Among the frequent destinations of Filipinas, for example, is Japan. As well, some American clients who seek wives from the Third World and Eastern Europe are black or Hispanic. The movement of mail order brides is less a flow of women from non-white to white countries than from poor to rich ones. There probably aren’t too many mail order brides going from Japan to Romania, for instance.
Though Romanian men may very well hold the same stereotypes of the “passive Oriental lady” that other white men do, the fact that at the moment Romania is a poor country and Japan a rich one effectively stops the flow of brides between the two nations in its tracks. The predominance of economics over race can also be seen by looking at individual countries. When the mail order bride phenomenon first caught the public’s attention in the 1980’s, most of the women in question were Asian. Yet a glance at any mail order bride website’s headings for industrialized Asian nations such as Singapore and Japan will show that the women featured are primarily Filipinas working there as domestic servants. Japanese and Singaporean women don’t need to go abroad as mail order brides.
In addition, the fact that a mail order bride transaction is intraracial rather than interracial doesn’t mean that ethnic stereotyping isn’t involved. Some agencies supplying Filipina women to Japanese men, for example, contrast the former’s traditional devotion to home and hearth to the modern Japanese woman’s supposed rejection of marriage and motherhood. Others depict Russian mail order brides as uncontaminated by the militant feminism that has allegedly infected America’s female population (why Russian women would be considered June Cleavers is somewhat curious, as at least during the Soviet regime most of them worked outside the home). And just as mail order bride venues often portray Latino and Asian men as boorish compared to their white American counterparts, Eastern European men are described as slobbering drunks who don’t know the meaning of the word “provider.”
In the same way I’m hesitant to reduce the mail order bride business solely to the issue of race, I’m also sceptical of labeling potential or actual brides themselves as deluded victims of racism and/or patriarchy. That’s the viewpoint of many feminists and minority activists. But Carlos Butalid, a Filipino community leader living in the Netherlands, points out the dangers of treating such women as victims. He cites an incident in which Philippine feminist associations berated Filipinas for corresponding as pen pals with European men and asked them how much they were being paid to marry Europeans. The women in question took offense, feeling that “after struggling so hard to earn the respect of their colleagues and their community, all of a sudden they [were] portrayed by Philippine progressives as cheap playthings.”
The feminist groups’ behavior reflects in some sense the general attitude of some progressive Asians toward Asian women becoming involved with white men, mail order brides or not. As I’ve mentioned in previous essays, well-known Filipina-American activist Karin Aguilar-San Juan speaks of Asian female partners of white men as “splaying themselves” at the latter’s feet. She essentially portrays them as C. Allyson Lee’s fictional white male in “Recipe” does. Undoubtedly some Asian women might find Aguilar-San Juan’s description of them insulting, even if it’s meant in their best interests, in the same way I would take offense at Spanish so-called feminist Ana Perez del Campo’s statement that by trying to keep their children, divorced women are driving them into a life of poverty. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Some Asian women feel compelled to explain their choice to go the mail order bride route, and their reasons for doing so aren’t necessarily that they want to act as geishas for white men. In some cases, they actually perceive Western men to be more egalitarian than their own male compatriots (whether this perception is correct or not is another story, of course). One Filipina who runs her own marriage agency explains that “in the Philippines, a man can beat his wife.” In a similar vein, a report on Brazilian women allegedly exploited by European sexual tourism claimed that these women’s European husbands treated them better than their “macho” boyfriends at home.
I nonetheless don’t take an entirely benign view of the mail order bride business. For one, many women get involved in it because of unfavorable economic and/or social conditions in their homelands. Feminists and minority activists are also right to say that women who go abroad as wives of men whom they may hardly know and who wield such enormous economic and often psychological power over them are easy targets for abuse. Finally, I do believe race, and racial stereotyping, play a role in the mail order bride system. Yet the reduction of the system to racism is not necessarily the whole story either.
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I think this article is unfair to some who have a cultural connection to women overseas. Russian women are not homogenous. The can be Slavic: Germanic, Tatar, Mongol, etc. I like the Russian women who I have met in Canada because of their appreciation for the classical arts. They are hardly slave women, and like any relationship compromise and true affection are everything. I agree with your feeling that foreign marriages do not work, but what does this mean of foreign immigration to a majority european country? That their culture will never adapt? There are a lor of issues here, but suffice it to say that a lot of attitudes need a real education.
Sorry for my lousy grammar, keep it up!
Brian
Dear Brian, Thank you for the response. Don’t worry about the grammar; mine is not the best either. I am not saying in any way that foreign marriages do not work (and I don’t think I said so anywhere in the article, just that maybe a woman who’s a foreign national might find it more difficult to leave an abusive husband than a native-born woman). And I don’t think Russian, or women of the other nationalities I mention, are “slave women,” just that the mail order bride business likes to portray them as such to boost their business. I also explain that I don’t entirely agree with so-called progressives view of these women as victims of sexism and/or racism. I know some people want the mail order bride business shut down or outlawed. I don’t. First, I think it would be impossible to do so (the owners could just re-open their business and portray it as a dating agency, same as the ones in Canada or the States for native-born people), and two, I think the women have to have the choice to go on them if they so choose.
I myself like Russian classical music and literature. Maybe that is one thing that might attract Western men to Russian culture and from there its people.
There’s no question the “mail-order bride” concept has changed but the entire social backdrop has changed so it’s no wonder. Compare a “bride” website with a standard “dating” website. The underlying premise is the same: seeking a partner through an impersonal website…
So can you condemn one without condemning the other? Are both racist? If not, why not?
I was reading something recently about the rising percentage of wedded couples who met through dating websites. I put it down to the breakdown of more traditional methods of meeting… through church events, through schools, etc… but I didn’t give it much thought…
You do like tackling different subjects, Emilia Liz!!
Dear Mac,
Thank you for your response. I think the key is that if “mail order bride” sites were banned, as some feminist and left-wing groups have called for, the sites would bill themselves as dating websites, with maybe a few changes along the way. So in that way they’d be harder to either ban or brand as racist.
I suppose one difference between a mail order bride site as opposed to a dating site is that mail-order bride sites “offer” women exclusively (I’ve yet to see a serious mail order groom site!) and that they often bill the women featured as “subservient” or “wifely.”
Well, maybe dating websites have taken the place of church events, schools, etcetera, but even before these came about there were “matchmaking” services, even though they were generally informal.
Emilia Liz
The “bride” websites would be much more objectionable if the participants were, how can I say this politely, unwilling? The chance for an escape from poverty is a powerful draw.
True enough!
Thank you for sharing these information. I just want to know if mail order brides is wrong, isn’t it?
You are confusing the advertisers with the activity. Believing that the men seeking foreign wives want submissives because some website implies that such women are available is like believing that the buyers of SUVs are likely to gun them up mountainsides and through forest streams because the TV ads show them doing this.
Constantly referring to this activity as “ordering” women would be like me referring to you as a “writer”.
Your mention there are no “mail order groom” websites as a means of suggesting that only the men do the choosing shows your ignorance of international dating. Many men do indeed post their profiles on websites seeking romance abroad. One woman who responded to my ad and who I spent time with on two continents was an Asian with an Australian MBA who directed an arm of the World Bank. Later I chose to marry a woman – who also answered my ad – engineer and project manager of multi-million dollar construction projects all over Central Asia and the Middle East. Unfortunately, those who analyze and condemn international relationships never even consider men like me or women like these, prefering instead to claim – always without experience or scientific studies – that the women are desparate and impoverished and the men some sort of losers/abusers. Frankly, I have never dated an American woman as intelligent, educated and bilingual as the women I have dated abroad. And my wife immigrated here with a six-figure bank account. But it would be too radical a concept for some to imagine that we married out of love.
One of the scientific studies always ignored by those who criticize this is a 1999 INS study written by Robert Scholes, himself a feminist, who found that the abuse rate in international marriages fomented by the internet is 1/7 the abuse rate of domestic marriages. And this study also found that the divorce rate is 20%. That fact alone is reason that, if people would consider this issue rationally and not emotionally, international marriages should be supported.
I am always disappointed that those who analyze this activity rely on reports of feminist groups and other ersatz authors (I think some humorist was quoted above), most or all of whom have never even met a happily married international couple, instead of relying on unbiased academic reports by researchers (and feminists) such as Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jennifer Patico of the University of Georgia or Professor of Anthropology Nicole Constable of the University of Pittsburg, each of whom has independently interviewed hundreds of foreign women, American men, dating company owners, women’s group representatives and government officials and written extensively about their findings. (Note: 100% of the womens’ groups attacking international marriage NEVER interview the men involved, happily-married women or dating company owners.) Here’s a few quotes from Constable’s book “Romance on a Global Stage”.
“Men and their perspectives, I learned, are – like the women – often misunderstood or glossed in stark and stereotypical terms.”
“I have come to see the men involved in correspondence relationships as a very diverse group of people; many are decent and well-intentioned human beings who have learned a great deal in the process of their relationships.”
“Many went to great lengths to ensure their partner’s comfort and happiness in the United States.”
“Troubling to some critics is that many women who opt to marry US men express a preference to remain at home and not to work if there is no financial incentive to do so, and a willingness to define themselves primarily as wives and mothers.”
“Mail order brides are often depicted as buying into images of their own subservience and marrying out of economic depression. These views are seriously flawed for their orientalist, essentializing and universalizing tendencies, which reflect many now-outdated feminist views of the 1970s.”
“Anti-trafficking NGOs often include mail order brides among the ranks of trafficked women. Definitions of mail order brides, as discussed below, are often so broad as to be meaningless.”
“Women may quite literally put their best face forward, but the market metaphor [that women are being sold] should not be taken literally in this context. Would this metaphor be applied to western women and men who use dating services or place personal ads, or does it reflect more pejorative assumptions about foreign or Third World women?”
“Assuming that Asian women are objects who are bought and sold…is not only a bad feminist argument, but it is one that fits with the most demeaning and essentializing images of mail order brides. Such images rob women of their ability to express intelligence, resistance, creativity, independence, dignity and strength.”
“Overall I argue that women involved in correspondence relationships are not merely pawns of global political economy or the victims of sexual exploitation, nor are men simply the agents of western sexual imperialism.”
Emilia,
You forget to mention that personal ad columns in newspapers and magazines were a very popular way of meeting eligible singles before the Internet. These venues are the predecessor to modern online dating sites.
The line gets blurred when many of the “type” of women who “fit the profile” of the “mail order bride” also advertise in a more traditional dating column or site. For example, I used to see a lot of Filipinas advertise in the Sheela Wood column, a newspaper personal column published in supermarket magazines. They also advertise in Christian Singles International, a religious matchmaking service that features Christian introductions without any mention of race or ethnicity. They were a magazine personals column before they went online in the mid 90s, and are still online today.
Furthermore, all of the abuses and other issues that so-called “mail order bride” services have been branded with exist across the spectrum of dating venues. In 2007, Jana Claudia Minendez of Peru was murdered by her American husband whom she met through Match.com. Her husband, William Tricket Smith, had a history of violence and a criminal record. You can read the story and comments here: http://www.livinginperu.com/news/4627
In short, you can’t separate “mail order brides” or the services that feature them from the rest of the dating world as easily as you think. To try to regulate or ban one to the exclusion of the rest would create too much controversy, and to restrict all online matchmaking or personals advertising would create the kind of police state that no one would go for. Including, I hope, you!