Good War Wives

At the end of World War II, approximately 70,000 British war brides of American servicemen made the long journey to the United States to begin a new phase of their lives. They were the single largest group of foreign war brides, representing about 61 percent of the total number of roughly 115,000 who entered America. Their diaspora was one of the two large British migrations of the post-1945 era; the second was in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Britain’s declining economic condition provoked a further major move to the United States. The war brides comprise a substantial number of the total British immigration to America, estimated at around five million. Their story thus has a legitimate place in U.S. immigration history, one that the author, Jenel Virden, notes should not be slighted just because British and American people speak the same language, a fact that too easily leads scholars to assume that the British have been easily assimilated into the American mainstream. The history of the war brides is offered here as part of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series of immigrant studies from the University of Illinois Press.

The child of a British war bride and an American soldier, Jenel Virden brings her own experience to the subject. Although she is now a lecturer at the University of Hull, England, much of the research was done while Virden was at the University of Washington in Seattle. This leads to a word about the sources for the book, which the author discusses in the appendix. In addition to archival documents, newspapers, books and periodicals, the author in 1989–90 distributed 272 questionnaires to war brides and their husbands. She received completed returns for 105 war brides and 67 husbands; in addition, she conducted in-depth interviews with 9 war brides in the Seattle area. This last sampling may be too restricted. Virden explains the narrow geographic focus on the basis of financial and time constraints, problems that anyone working in the modern university can appreciate. At the same time, a Seattle focus might not elicit representative responses from British immigrants. For one thing, it is one of the very few regions in the United States with a climate similar to Britain’s, damp yet sheltered from extremes of temperature. Also, Seattle is more socially progressive than many American communities, with public services familiar to British people, such as an effective mass transit system. Whatever the causes, the oral histories carried out for the project fail to render a full picture of the immigrant experience; Virden was not able to elicit the range and variety of comment achieved by, say, Elfrieda Berthiaume Shukert and Barbara Smith Scibetta in War Brides of World War II (1988) or the remarkable revelations procured by Studs Terkel in “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (1985). Combined with a tendency in parts of the book to focus rather narrowly on the bureaucratic and logistical mechanics of the migrant trek, this means that we have an incomplete study in which some important questions are not asked and some significant, controversial issues are not probed effectively. With this caveat aside, the book adds to our understanding of how war times radically and permanently alter lives.

The girls who married American servicemen fit a clear profile. They were predominantly from the lower middle and working classes, their average age when they met the GIs was eighteen, most ended their education at the “school leaving age” of fourteen (which was true for 85 percent of British girls), most were employed, had personal opportunities, and freedoms provided by the war that they would not have had in peacetime. It was into this situation of relative flexibility and expanding horizons that the GIs entered. They also tended to be from the lower half of the social scale, had at most a year in high school (which was compatible...