Susan Zeiger, associate professor of history at Regis College, explains that her current book on war brides focuses on the post-WWII era and on women from countries across the globe. The sources for her research include casework records from social service agencies that worked with war brides, including the Maxwell Fund papers at the Schlesinger Library, as well as military records. Zeiger found the military records rich in policy matters but sparse in details of the individual and the human repercussions of war, matters abundant in the Maxwell Fund papers. Zeiger offers two case histories of war bride experiences. In the first, a British woman immigrates with her infant to the United States in the mid-1940s to be with her American husband. Subsequently, she suffers the dissolution of her marriage and poverty before requesting that she be sent back to Britain with her child. In the second, a Japanese woman engaged to a Hawaiian soldier is permanently separated from him when the US will not reenlist him. Zeiger notes that, while both cases represent a significant subset of war bride marriages, they do represent unions in which a serious imbalance of power places a woman at a great disadvantage.

According to Zeiger, wartime policies reflecting racial inequities also influenced the experience of many war brides, in particular those of Japanese descent. Zeiger cites an Asian exclusion feature of 1947 immigration law which forbade Japanese fiancés from immigrating to the United States, while allowing fiancés from other countries to do so.

This leads Zeiger to introduce another theme of women in the war zone: that of women in war as survivors, advocates for themselves and their children, and not solely as victims of war. Says Zeiger, our tendency is to see war bride marriages either as "love conquers all" romances or as narratives about the exploitation of women. While there are elements of both, the experience of these women is more multidimensional. And that is why listening to women's own war stories is so important for Zeiger—and why we need collections of those stories like those in the Schlesinger Library.