If this title doesn’t grab you then I don’t know what will! I don’t read a ton of non fiction books but this one jumped out at me and I think it would be a fun read or even a fun gift for the upcoming holidays. This could easily be the book I give me history loving intellectual family members and friends this year!
Back in the late 1990s meeting someone online and dating them sounded so desperate and taboo but now in 2020 it’s how most people meet and fall in love. I don’t think twice when my friends talk about their Tinder matches when in the 1990s I would totally have judged them. Dating someone online was like the 1970s and 80s equivalent to taking out a personal ad. It wreaked of desperation.
That doesn’t mean that I still didn’t read those ads for a good laugh! Also I realize I am dating myself here. I was born in 1981 so the inception of internet dating is right up my ally but growing up in the 1980s I loved reading personal ads even though I didn’t quite know what was going on. I also loved dating shows like The Love Connection.
The never-ending quest for love is fascinating and that’s exactly what this book is about—-how finding love had evolved over the decades and I am absolutely here for it!
Summary
A clever, thoughtful, and funny history that reveals how the Union of states was built on a much more personal union of people.
Have you ever used a dating app or website? Then you have more in common than you know with lonely homesteaders in 18th century New England. At once heartwarming and heartbreaking, Matrimony, Inc. reveals the unifying thread that weaves its way through not just marriage and relationships 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 hoping to meet 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 our 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 right on 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? (summary from Goodreads)
The Lit Bitch 