Agency, the Family and the Patriarchal State in Archival Documentation of Australian Second World War Brides

This article examines the intersecting social circumstances of Australian women's intimate, international relationships with American and other foreign allied servicemen during Second World War, including their experiences romance, marriage, divorce subsequent child-maintenance USA. We explore how widely varying, often highly personalised, perceptions raced, classed ethnic status, across differing legal systems, could impact not only immigration eligibility, but, especially in case Indigenous women, fundamental right to marry. Immigration laws local authorities worked discretionary ways, shaped by a range considerations interactions, class, race gender limit non-white people's mobility freedom. demonstrate this unprecedented larger-scale experience interracial marriage unsettles feminist arguments that underplay intersection issues race, ethnicity class War set scene for changes driven logics inequality. Enlarging on earlier scholarship, we see as site ignition economic, cultural political related here so much work experiences, but personal romantic lives, also transnational raced exclusion, agency shared knowledges.