What Is A Mail Order Bride?

What is a mail order bride? This is a woman who makes publicly known her intention to marry a man from another nation (usually one whose culture and infrastructure is far more developed than her own). The name “mail order bride” comes from the historical situation of being a woman who listed herself in, quite literally, a catalog which was intended for foreign men, who could then pick out the girl whose description pleased them most, and “send away in the post” for her.

This situation almost always involved the man sending money away to an agency located in a foreign country (for example, an American man sending away for an Italian or Norwegian bride), but sometimes could involve citizens of the same country (a lonely male on the Western frontier sending out for a woman from the East coast).

What Is A Mail Order Bride?

Since then, of course, the practice has modernized considerably, with women now being required to submit detailed profiles and photographs which are then commonly downloaded into the computerized database of a (usually) fully incorporated and legitimate “international dating site”. Men searching for the foreign woman of their choice now have considerably more prior knowledge of their prospective bride’s personality, physical features, and general qualifications then their forefathers did in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries.

Many misconceptions surround the practice of a (normally) Western male seeking out a bride from the “exotic” Orient or Eastern Europe, such as the old shibboleth concerning the brutal, drunken, imbecile who simply cannot convince an American woman to stay with him. This mythical lout is forced to turn to the only redeeming qualification he possesses, i.e. his ability to save money, and thus procure himself a desperately poor peasant girl from remote Uzbekistan, who will be happy to endure the twice daily beatings she receives in return for her “magic green card”.

In truth, many women from regions such as Russia and the former Soviet countries are dealing with a chronic shortage of males to marry (this being the enduring legacy of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, which resulted in the deaths of over 27 million citizens, the majority of which were, naturally, men). These women are not so much desperate to escape the “hellish conditions of backward Russia” as they are simply eager to marry and get on with their adult lives.

In short, the modern mail order bride is not the “wide eyed peasant girl”, but an intelligent, motivated, woman who is looking for a new opportunity to prove herself. This is nothing short of the very consummation of the classic American Dream.