Searching for your wife in a catalogue is an American institution older than baseball or Edison’s light bulb. When our foremothers wrote their personal advertisements in a mail-order bride catalogue, hopped on a cross-country train to meet their mate, and arrived in the gold mining towns of the 1840s without a guarantee of lawful matrimony, they were paving the way for Internet-bred international marriages of the 21st century. Word for word, the female pioneers of the American West and the foreign brides of the dotcom-era present themselves to their male counterparts as traditionally feminine, family-orientated, and modest. In fact, the information suspiciously stays the same. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, and taking care of the family seem to be the norm for every woman. This consistent manner of self-advertisement appears to author Erika Johnson of Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband, “as if there was a rumor circulating that those hobbies garnered a positive response from the audiences they were addressing.”
Enter Guy Dominique, audience member. In 2002, Dominique was recently separated from his first wife and began perusing dating sites, looking for women within ten years of his own age. “You have to be reasonable and realistic,” says Dominique. “I looked at thousands of pictures of gorgeous 20 year olds… but I wasn’t interested in getting a daughter. I wanted a wife.” Dominique decided to look online for an international relationship after his coworkers shared stories of their success with “mail order bride” relationships.
During the Christmas holidays Dominique, a systems analyst from Eugene, Oregon, started corresponding with Valentina Moroz, a retail employee from eastern Ukraine through Confidentialconnections.com, a now defunct international matchmaking agency.
This catalog-bride phenomenon developed in situations where men outnumbered their female counterparts, for example in settling the American West. Frontier men in need of wives would receive pictures of potential spouses from their family and friends. This practice eventually transformed into an agency-based business that consolidated the photographs and information of many women into one catalog. Catalogue brides gained popularity among American men in the 1970s, according to Christine Chun, author of The Mail-Order Bride Industry, because they became dissatisfied with the career-oriented American woman and began searching for more “old-fashioned” females.
A successor to Confidentialconnections.com, the Ukraine-based international matchmaking site, UAladys.com, reassures its male users looking for “old world values” that the Ukrainian women they meet will not be concerned with being the leader of the family. “She has much more traditional values and believes that the man's responsibility is to be the main breadwinner,” the About Us section of the website boasts.
Not surprisingly, the women featured on this website advertise themselves as domestic goddesses. From the first twenty-five listings on UAladys.com gallery, nineteen of the women voiced their competence at cooking and cleaning, sometimes twice. “I love cooking, making my flat cozy, everything domestic,” writes Elena Z., pictured with her tanned body leaning over the edge of a blue swimming pool, golden necklace dangling. In 1887, Matrimonial News, a San Francisco matchmaking magazine, featured a young widow identified by the number 221 who spoke for her talents as a “first rate housekeeper.” Today, Natalya S. holds up her blonde highlighted hair with her hands, her push-up bra holding up everything else, and adds to the litany of desired household skills: doing laundry, washing dishes, and ironing.
Online mail-order bride websites allow the male viewers to maintain a voyeuristic gaze, contained only by the limits of their credit card. To conduct research for her book Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband, Johnson bought a “Gold” membership for a mail-order bride website that would allow her to purchase the addresses of multiple women off of the site. Johnson writes of the women she viewed on mail-order websites as “voiceless images to be clicked on, evaluated, and placed in shopping carts.” The author continues, “I was surfing through a veritable catalogue of goods. And I mean literally.” Johnson found that she could customize her search, looking for women new to the site, women from certain regions, women with no children, women who had blond hair, etc. The common thread of these smiling, posing ladies was written in the profiles and echoed in the About Us section of each website: women are made to cook and clean for men.
What really defines traditional values and why do men value them? Sure, Mad Men is a great show to watch, but who really wants to return to the casserole cooking, secretary abusing society of the 60s? The authors of Goodwife.com do. This website claims to be designed to help educate and inform men seeking foreign brides. In the introduction to the site, the authors state that the type of women they are sick of meeting include those with a “‘me first’ feminist agenda,” and ladies who make their man “take a back seat to her desire for power and control.” And what do the authors of this site suggest to men facing these dire marital prospects? Mail order brides.
Guy Dominique says that he tried online dating within American borders, but found the women he talked with to be either too coy or too demanding. Now, sitting at home in their Eugene duplex after seven years of marriage, Valentina, a slender brunette in her mid forties, pipes in that “Russian women are more family oriented. Our responsibility is to cook, and take care of the home.” Dominique adds, “more old-fashioned.” Valentina concludes, “American women are more independent.”
What’s critically important, remark the Dominiques, in searching for a foreign soul mate, is honesty. Dominique recognizes that many women looking to marry internationally are living in dire situations and have good reasons to leave their hometown. But the mix-culture relationships that result from international matchmaking agencies often leave the woman feeling deceived, says Dominique. “They want to paint a really pretty picture,” he says, “but don’t realize in America we still have to struggle.”
Chun writes in her article that international matchmaking organizations (IMOs) rely on economic and social disparities between the consumer-husband and the potential bride, perpetuating racial and gender stereotypes. The women are marketed as “Pearls of the Orient,” or “Hot Russian Girls,” and the headlines are paired with glamour shots that position the women in typical men’s magazine style photos: bare skin, see-through clothing, and gratuitous cleavage. IMO advertising exploits the “exotic” stereotypes of foreign women, but tempers their beauty with professions of domesticity and traditional values, a combination appealing to men who are self-admittedly tired of “career-oriented western women.” Men from developed countries can afford to buy the women featured on international dating websites (the successor to the mail-order bride catalogue), and the relative wealth of the gentlemen gives the females incentive to leave behind their poorer homelands. Whatever grounds women have gained in equality is lost by these unbalanced unions.
In 1999, in response to a Congressional request, the Attorney General in consultation with the office of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted a study of International Matchmaking Organizations. The INS reported that that mail-order bride websites create an uneven “balance of power between the two individuals,” one that is “skewed to empower the male client.” Erika Johnson comments that IMO websites “give the impression that there are literally thousands of beautiful, smiling women who are breathlessly waiting to meet the single man who is surfing alone at his computer, a knight in shining armor who can sweep his bride away to a future of love and economic stability.”
According to the INS’s report to Congress, “the mail-order bride transaction is ‘one where the consumer-husband holds all the cards.’ In using these services, the male customer has access to and chooses from a pool of women about whom personal detail and information are provided, while the women are told virtually nothing about the male customer.” The report goes on to contrast the powers of the male and female participants. The male client may be seen as “purchasing a bride” but the woman “has everything to gain from entering into this arrangement and staying in it, no matter what the circumstances.”
Maybe some of these men looking for foreign brides have been hurt by past relationships, maybe they are too shy to reach out to women around them, maybe they are desperate for companionship and the easiest way to get it, is to pay for it. By not developing successful relationships with American women—by American standards—these men have failed in their masculine role. They cannot fulfill their traditional position as a provider, a father, or head of the household. Instead of admitting failure, the men of Goodwife.com push the blame on to Western women, citing their assertive personalities and lack of “old-fashioned values” as reasons why they, American men, are still single.
The desperation to have companionship, and in doing so prove themselves as men, leads some men to spend thousands of dollars on a woman they are only legally obligated to have met once before marriage. In their eagerness to obtain their soul mate, they disregard the financial cost of their relationship, as well as the emotional cost of the women they are pursuing.