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LAUNCH: Texas Mail Order Bride by Linda Broday!



I’ve always loved stories about mail order brides and often wondered what drove those women to take such a risk.


  • Need For Security
  • Wanting Adventure
  • To See the West
  • Need For Love
  • Escaping Poverty
  • Escaping the Stigma of Spinsterhood
  • Needed Excitement

One of these probably fit every single woman who answered ads in newspapers and matrimonial magazines that began in 1849.

Men on the frontier outnumbered women nine to 1. 

They recognized that the only way to get the homes and families they yearned for was to try to convince women in the East to come West. Besides, men didn’t have time to start schools, libraries or plant flowers. They were too busy trying to make their fortune. But they missed all those things and wanted the frontier to become more civilized.

Plain and simple, they needed women.

But men weren’t doing all the recruiting though.

A group of women formed The Busy Bee Club in Tucson, Arizona in the mid-1800s specifically to arrange marriages.Marriage was quite a lucrative business.

Online Dating Is Very Similiar

Women and men sign up on a dating site, fill out a profile, slap up a photo and they’re off.

Like mail order brides, couples converse getting to know each other.
Like mail order brides, they may eventually travel to meet.
Like mail order brides, they may decide to marry. Or not.

And like mail order brides, often the marriage doesn’t work out. Only, divorce is easy now where it wasn’t back then.

I agree that it doesn’t seem as risky as in the 1800s where the women usually didn’t have the funds to return home if it didn’t work out. Most of the time they were stuck and forced to make a new life by themselves.

Today is the release of TEXAS MAIL ORDER BRIDE! Delta Dandridge heads to Battle Creek, Texas to marry rancher Cooper Thorne. Only he didn’t send for her. Someone has played a cruel joke and the dyed-in-the-wool bachelor is fit to be tied.

After telling her that he’s not in the market for a wife, Cooper offers to pay her way back to Georgia. Only she refuses to leave.

Delta digs in her heels, takes a room at the boardinghouse and gets a job in the mercantile, which makes Cooper mad enough to spit because she reminds him of everything he's trying to forget.

I’m wondering…have you ever visited a dating site or know someone who has?

I have a friend who was unable to have to children of her own and became very depressed. She yearned for a husband and kids with all her heart. On impulse one night she signed up on a dating site, met a wonderful man with six kids whose wife had died, and they married. Both are happy as larks today.



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Comments

  1. I think those women must have been very brave. Congrats on the release.

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  2. Hi Shana! Thank you for your comment. I'm glad you enjoyed my blog and I agree that they had to have been very brave. I wouldn't have been one of them I'm afraid. I'm not very adventurous.

    Thanks for the congrats and the same to you too. Have an awesome day!

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  3. I love your post Linda! Now I want to dive into your book!

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  4. Great post. I've often thought about how tough life was for frontier women. Harder still if they didn't know their husbands before traveling across the country. Congrats on the release!

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  5. I'm married, but I might consider being a mail order bride if it means escaping the cold up here in CT (no not really). Brrr. Texas sounds good about now, and so does your book, Linda! Congratulations on the new release!

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  6. Hmm, all I can say is Delta must have had some really bad stuff back home she didn't want to have to deal with to stay some place where she knew no one, had no money, no home and no way to make a living (ostensibly). How fortunate that all that just fell into her lap so conveniently so that she could stay. But then, that's the beauty of fiction. We can create our own world with it's own rules. Love it!

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