Matrimony, Inc.: From Personal Ads to Swiping Right, a Story of America Looking for Love

By Francesca Beauman

Book Overview

A clever, thoughtful, and funny history that reveals how the Union of states was built on a much more personal union of people.

What do the relationships of homesteaders in 18th century New England have in common with all of us staring at our phones today? At once heartwarming and heartbreaking, Matrimony Inc. reveals the common thread that weaves its way through not just dating, love and marriage over the centuries, but American social history itself: advertising for love.

Amazingly, America's first personal ad appeared in the Boston Evening Post as early as 1759. A "Person who flatters himself that he shall not be thought disagreeable" was in search of a "young lady, between the age of eighteen and twenty-three, of a middling stature, brown hair, of good Morals..." As family-arranged marriages fell out of fashion, "Husband Wanted" or "Seeking Wife" ads were soon to be found in every state in the nation.

From the woman in a Wisconsin newspaper who wanted "no brainless dandy or foppish fool" to the man with a glass eye who placed an ad in the New York Times looking for a woman with a glass eye, the many hundreds of personal ads that author Francesca Beauman has uncovered offer an extraordinary glimpse into the history of people's hearts' desires, as well as a unique insight into American life as the frontier was settled and the cities grew. Personal ads played a surprisingly vital role in the West: couple by couple, shy smile by shy smile, letter by letter from a dusty, exhausted miner in California to a bored, frustrated seamstress in Ohio. Get ready for a new perspective on the making of modern America, a hundred words of typesetter's blurry black ink at a time.

"So anxious are our settlers for wives that they never ask a single lady her age. All they require is teeth," declared the Dubuque Iowa News in 1838 in a state where men outnumbered women three to one. While the dating pools of 21st century New York, Chicago or San Francisco might not be quite so dentally-fixated, Matrimony Inc. will put idly swiping through Tinder into fascinating and vividly fresh historical context. What do women look for in a man? What do men look for in a woman? And how has this changed over the past 250 years?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1643135783
• ISBN13: 9781643135786
• Release Date: October 2020
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"