Good-bye, Piccadilly: BRITISH WAR BRIDES IN AMERICA (Statue of Liberty Ellis Island) - Softcover

Virden, Jenel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025206528X ISBN 13: 9780252065286

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1996

Synopsis

As much of the world tried to return to normal living and working patterns after World War II, some 70,000 British women chose to be uprooted from the homeland they knew and loved. These were British war brides, a uniformly young group who by marrying American servicemen became part of the largest single group of female immigrants to the United States.
    
Though the women came to the U.S. from all parts of the British Isles, they were an unusually homogeneous group, averaging 23 years of age, from working- or lower-middle-class families and having completed mandatory schooling to the age of fourteen. For the most part they emigrated alone and didn't move into an existing immigrant population.
    
Jenel Virden draws on records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Public Record Office in London, as well as questionnaires and personal interviews, in relating the women's story. Virden finds that the marriages actually took place in spite of, rather than because of, the war.
     
And, while the women benefited from special nonrestrictive immigration legislation--and found public welcomes and a good deal of favorable publicity when they arrived--they also had much in common with other immigrant groups, including a strong sense of ethnic identity.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Jenel Virden is a lecturer in the Department of American Studies at the University of Hull, England.

From Library Journal:

The daughter of a World War II British war bride, Virden has penned a work about the experiences of this overlooked category of immigrants to the United States. Instead of a personal narrative, she has chosen to write a dispassionate analysis of the phenomenon based upon her study of archival material, statistics, questionnaires, and selective interviews. The result is informative but not very involving. That the war brides made huge sacrifices in leaving their homeland to begin new lives with men they hardly knew, that they overcame a mountain of red tape, culture shock, and a degree of anti-British prejudice, and that they felt lost between two worlds are predictable conclusions that need little quantitative substantiation. In-depth case studies or lengthy interviews, rather than the occasional anecdote, could have brought these generalized findings to life. While valuable for sociologists and other academics, this work will have little appeal in public libraries.?Rose M. Cichy, Osterhout Free Lib., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 025206528X
• ISBN 13: 9780252065286
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192