Image: Elena Scotti/G/O Media
Everyone’s wedding looks the same on Instagram. There’s a barn, church, hotel, museum, beach, or backyard, twinkly and softly lit by tea lights, or string lights, or Edison-bulb-filled candelabras. The bridesmaids wear $300 satin dresses in jewel tones or in a carefully curated mix of complementary pastels, and hold ribbon-wrapped bunches of roses, peonies, or lilies, depending on the season. The cake is an architectural marvel designed more for structural integrity than gustatory enjoyment. Mason jars are often involved, and at least one of the groomsmen wears quirky socks. The bride’s dress is silk or satin, trumpet or A-line, strapless or backless, and somewhere on the paint chip spectrum between Sherwin Williams’s Pure White and Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee. The invariably accomplished bride—a teacher, doctor, software engineer, entrepreneur, take your pick—has spent the last year or more planning every detail of a day she has been conditioned to dream about since she was a girl. Sometimes there are two brides, or two grooms. Sometimes the bridal party is mixed, with groomswomen and bridesmen. Sometimes the bride and groom have chosen to write their own vows, doing away with words like “obey.” Perhaps the groom, too, has played a part in planning for the big day, or both parents are invited to walk the bride down the aisle.
But in most respects, the modern wedding goes on as if feminism never happened. In the past half-century, the mainstreaming of feminist ideals—namely, the insistence that women ought to be seen as more than potential wives and future mothers—has sat uncomfortably alongside the rise of what sociologists have termed the wedding-industrial complex: the ever-increasing significance, over-the-top-ness, and cost of modern American weddings.
Hidden behind the ubiquitous features of the Instagrammable wedding—from chalkboard placards listing the his-and-hers cocktails to personalized DIY centerpieces—modern weddings share another thing in common: a staggering price tag that goes up every year. Across socioeconomic groups, the modern wedding is the single largest expenditure many American families will ever make, other than paying for college and buying a home. (According to a survey by Brides magazine, the average American wedding in 2018 cost $44,000, up from $27,000 just the year before.) Marriage still inspires the biggest, and certainly the most expensive, celebration of a woman’s life.
This isn’t exactly breaking news. Marriage has long been the key to women’s social and economic security, and in many ways, little has changed. Well into the 1960s, an unmarried American woman applying for a home loan would have been laughed out of most lending institutions. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in response to feminist activism in 1974, credit card applications could require a husband co-signer. For generations of American women, marriage promised economic stability, expanded financial opportunities, the potential for property ownership, and a shared claim to a man’s better-paid profession or higher wages. Of course, women today generally have easy access to credit, and women’s professional opportunities have expanded dramatically since the 1970s. But marriage continues to be disproportionately critical to women’s financial prospects. While men’s chances of reaching the wealthiest one percent of Americans correlate closely with career and educational achievements, for women, marriage is the surest route to the top.
marriage continues to be disproportionately critical to women’s financial prospects
Marriage may have been a milestone in a woman’s life, but until very recently the actual wedding wasn’t particularly special. Except for the wealthiest of women, for much of American history a wedding was a relatively low-key community affair, not that far off from a barn-raising or a corn husking: some quilting, a meal, music, dancing, and plenty of brandy or whiskey welcomed the new couple into the community. At the turn of the 20th century, Protestant reformers encouraged Americans to resist the creep towards consumerism in favor of simple nuptials. Brides might have worn white—which, before becoming a symbol of sexual purity, was a demonstration that the family was well-off enough to commission a new dress in an impractical color—but they’d plan to wear the dress again in their everyday life. There would be cake, but one baked at home by someone’s mother or aunt. The bride’s ring would be a plain metal band, invitations would go out a week or two beforehand, and the whole thing would be announced the following Sunday in church. This kind of simplicity did not just appeal to the evangelizing forces of temperance and restraint. Downplaying the significance of an event that had, until very recently, made a woman legally subservient to her husband also fit neatly into the feminism of the turn-of-the-20th-century “New Woman,” who agitated for female autonomy in personal, professional, and economic spheres.
The two years after the end of World War II sent more than 10 million American servicemen home, where they found their economic prospects buoyed by the G.I. Bill, VA Housing loans, and the United States’ new position as the unrivaled leader of the western world. Meanwhile, traditionalist propaganda encouraged women to leave their wartime jobs, hang up their skirt suits, and move to the suburbs as someone’s wife and a future someone’s mother. After all, a 1947 Pyrex ad opined, “successful marriages start in the kitchen.” “The Chef does everything but cook,” a 1961 ad for a stand mixer called the Kenmore Chef agreed, as a smiling couple canoodled by a Kitchen-Aid-like machine— “that’s what wives are for!” Vice President Richard Nixon went so far as to tell the Soviet statesman Nikita Kruschev in a public debate in 1959 that the nuclear family model—with breadwinning husbands and homemaking wives—was key to the American way of life. The intoxicating mix of future economic promise and nostalgia for the past sent couples to the altar in record numbers. By 1960, 72 percent of Americans over 18 were married, compared to less than half of that today. And, contrary to the advice of the prudent turn-of-the-century Protestants, their weddings were flashy, over-the-top affairs.
The postwar years were the heyday of what social scientists call “the white wedding:” long white dress, formal ceremony, champagne toasts, fancy reception. The model for the white wedding originated in Victorian Britain, but it was mid-century Americans who elevated it to its fullest, and most extravagant, form. Jewelers spent the late 1940s convincing grooms-to-be to seal their engagements with a carat or two of pressure-cooked carbon. De Beers, the world’s leader in diamond mining and sales, adopted the slogan “A Diamond is Forever” in 1947, immortal words that became one of the 20th century’s most recognizable marketing campaigns. Jewelers also invented the groom’s wedding band, which was uncommon in the United States until the end of World War II. Advertisements from jewelers like J.R. Wood & Sons told soldiers returning from Europe of a new trend sweeping the nation: “The companion wedding ring. The double ring ceremony has caught on.” Soldiers were the tastemakers of the nation, the ad exclaimed. “Plan now to dramatize this trend!”
By the Korean War, American soldiers had been successfully convinced to wear their hearts on their left hands. Off-the-rack wedding dresses replaced the custom-tailored gowns of decades past, making trains of tulle and satin and lace accessible across classes. By 1975, more than half of first-time brides purchased new, ready-made dresses. Wedding catering took off, and by the mid-1950s, receptions featured on-trend dishes like chicken a la king—a mid-century specialty of diced chicken and mushrooms cooked in a sherry cream sauce and served over noodles—and an elaborate, multi-tiered cake.
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