Entangling Alliances

When American military forces have fought abroad, intercultural romances have been 'a minefield of political, racial and moral sensitivities," as Susan Zeiger shows in her excellent study of the foreign wartime brides of American soldiers in the twentieth century . . . She anchors her work in the study of gender, specifically the ways that women and women's sexuality have been mobilized in the context of war and the postwar period. ~Barbara G. Friedman, The Journal of American History

A wonderful study of twentieth-century war brides and their changing meanings in American society. Zeiger shows how useful it can be to study the United States and the world through the lens of gender. ~Beth Bailey,author of Americas Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force

Americans ambivalence about their (our) place in the world becomes so crystal clear when, guided here by Zeiger, we take seriously the experiences of women who have married U.S. soldiers. Entangling Alliances reveals the perpetual anxieties of both civilians and officials about the innocence of & our boys, seduction, romance, and & their women. I learned so much from every page of this important book. ~Cynthia Enloe,author of The Curious Feminist

Fascinating and far-reaching, exhaustively researched and grippingly readable, Zeigers account of American & war brides shrewdly links geopolitical affairs to intimate ones, and in so doing provides a novel and revealing angle on American nationalism, racism, and expanding sense of world mission during the twentieth century. ~Nancy F. Cott,author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation