| Susan Zeiger, associate professor of history at Regis College, describes her research on WWII war brides as part of a book-in-progress on the history of intercultural wartime marriage. In the aftermath of WWII, as many as 100,000 war brides followed their American husbands to the United States. Most came from English-speaking countries such as Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. These war brides constituted a new category of immigrant, sometimes welcome and sometimes not. Zeiger mentions that among the marriages found controversial were those to women from occupied countries such as Japan and Germany. Professor Zeiger suggests we think about the war zone as a place where relationships of gender are enacted and where race, national identity, and power come into play to complicate those relationships.
Says Zeiger, "For better or for worse, war is a cross-cultural encounter often under very distorted circumstances, and often women are its most prominent and visible agents."
Consequently, wartime relationships between men and women can complicate diplomatic relations, even galvanizing anti-American sentiment. As a result, the military has been concerned with choreographing these relationships and managing the social lives of men and women in the war zone in different forms, from prohibition to orchestrating supervised and structured events.
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