Off-White Brides and the Sanctity of Citizenship: American Marriage and Romantic Love in the Development of Twentieth-Century Immigration Politics

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the histories of early-twentieth century Southern European immigrant picture brides, who from 1907-1924, were women in arranged marriages with emigrant men from their home countries. Whether they came as wives married by proxy or as fiancées engaged via letters and photographs across seas, picture bride women immigrated to the United States and often met their partners for the first time on American soil. Picture marriage has become synonymous with Japanese immigration history, yet the practice was far from unique; it was common in many immigrant groups coming to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, including Koreans, Chinese, Italians, Armenians, Germans, and most prevalently, Greeks. But though practices were similar, there was a vast difference in the public’s reactions to these women.This dissertation argues that the history of Southern European picture brides—women from Italy, Armenia, Turkey, and primarily Greece—is not only significant because it is an untold story, but because it provides critical context for understanding the political climate which targeted and eventually excluded Japanese picture marriage as a racialized practice. Further, picture marriage, as a common tradition between cultures, provides an independent variable to show the relational racial formations of immigrant groups in the United States. While European and Asian American immigration histories have long existed in separate fields of scholarship and communities of thought, I argue picture marriage demonstrates how Japanese and Greek racial identities evolved in relation to one another. This process of what I call “theorizing picture marriage” therefore necessitates a further investigation of marriage as a political and symbolic institution in U.S. culture. Chapters in this dissertation trace the ideological significance of marriage in American discourse and demonstrate how contributions from eugenics and sexology were critical to producing the idea of romantic love as synonymous with consent, free choice, and democratic partnerships. Far from apolitical, this formulation successfully forged a connection between modern whiteness, citizenship, and reproductive heterosexuality that worked as a dialectical foil to immigrant arranged marriages. Thus, in analyzing popular culture sources depicting romance or picture marriage, I demonstrate the quotidian ways that Americans expressed and learned about the racial, gendered politics of citizenship through the lens of marriage and family.