Brides on the move

Women’s stories can be found in Area 08, Italians on the move.

People have different reasons for emigrating and embarking on a new life in new worlds. One of these is their personal life and affections.
This was the case of war brides and proxy marriages.

The practice of marriage by proxy, an act in which one of the two people uniting in marriage is not physically present at the ceremony but is represented by another person, was used by emigrants to reunite with girlfriends left behind in Italy once they had found stability abroad.

Often, especially for long-haul migrations such as to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, it was economically untenable to return to Italy “just” for the wedding. Moreover, a married woman could travel alone without creating a scandal. In some cases, the newlyweds had never seen each other, but only met through letters and exchanges of photographs. Young brides would set off to a foreign country, heartened only by the warm words of relatives and mutual friends, hoping that their groom would really be the way he looked in photographs or the way they remembered him from the few years they had spent together.

War brides, on the other hand, had met and married their husbands, usually US soldiers, during the Second World War. It is estimated that over one hundred thousand war brides came to the United States from all over the world between 1946 and 1950. More than ten thousand marriages took place between Italian women and American soldiers engaged in the 1943-1945 campaign, so much so that special trips were made on Italian ocean liners requisitioned by the Allies to carry these women to the States, sometimes with their very young children.