Advertising for Brides in the 19th-Century American West

Advertising for Brides in the 19th-Century American West

This article relates to The Heart in Winter

The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity of their families, or, perhaps most importantly, alleviate their loneliness. According to the US census, Montana in 1890 (the state and decade in which the novel is set) had a population of 85,981 males and 46,178 females. Tom helps illiterate men write letters to women back East with the objective of finding a bride. With this detail, Barry gives us a glimpse into what is often referred to as the mail-order bride system, a phenomenon that shaped the social landscape of the American frontier. (Despite this being the common term used, these particular marriage arrangements did not generally involve an exchange of money.)

Francesca Beauman, who wrote about this subject in her book Matrinomy, Inc., explains, "Newspapers became an essential way that farmers, anyone who was geographically isolated, were going to find a spouse — both for men and women." Initially, people placed personal advertisements in widely circulated newspapers (see some examples here), taking advantage of low mailing costs. In these advertisements, men and women offered brief personal descriptions and expressed their desire to marry, often including their addresses. This practice had already made an appearance in Great Britain in the previous century. In 1695, a British publication featured an advertisement from a gentleman with "a very good estate" who sought "some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £300 or thereabouts." What is believed to be the first personal ad published in America appeared in the Boston Evening Post in 1759. However, it was in 19th-century America that the mail-order bride system became a widespread phenomenon, peaking between the 1880s and the 1910s.

This trend led to the creation of specialized publications like Matrimonial News and The Matrimonial Bazar, which focused almost exclusively on connecting men and women. The editor of the latter stated in 1876: "Our aim is high: To increase the number of home firesides, promote the happiness of other people, in short to do what we can toward mitigating woe and loneliness in any sphere or grade of life." Through these newspapers, men and women began corresponding, and many of these exchanges culminated in marriage. Typically, the woman would travel thousands of miles west to meet her prospective husband, and they would marry almost immediately upon her arrival.

Just as men outnumbered women in the western territories, there was a scarcity of men back East, especially after three million left to fight in the Civil War. And just as men sought help in their labors, women sought economic support and social security in an era in which their societal roles were largely confined to domestic duties. For many women, going west meant economic survival and new opportunities. Widows, divorcees, and single women saw the West as a place for independence and reinvention. Historians offer multiple reasons why women would take the risk to travel west to marry men they did not know: the frontier offered them opportunities for owning land, retaining ownership of their properties, control over their children, liberal divorce laws, and even suffrage. According to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, "Some western states made a deliberate effort to encourage the migration of women by promising them liberal women's legislation."

The article further explains, "Whereas being a mail-order bride for an American woman was usually an act of autonomy, being a picture bride was often a decision made by family members and external circumstances." Picture brides were women living overseas who were introduced to men in the United States by sending their photographs in the mail. In this era, they usually came from Japan (where the term originates), Greece, Italy, Korea, or Armenia. Many married to escape colonization or genocide, to secure the right to work in America and send money back home, or, as the Smithsonian article states, as a "geographical extension" of the arranged marriage tradition prevalent in their home countries. But mail-order brides were "a historical oddity" in that "[t]hey simultaneously break from traditions of arranged marriages and also fail to resemble modern matrimonial customs."

There are no concrete statistics on the total number of marriages arranged through the mail-order system, but it was a significant aspect of frontier life, and points to the unique challenges of those seeking companionship and stability in the American West.

Advertisements for marriage in the San Francisco Call, 1909, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Heart in Winter. It first ran in the July 31, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.