WEDDINGS

The major elements of the modern American wedding originated among members of the urban upper and upper-middle classes in the nineteenth century. Borrowing practices popularized by Queen Victoria and other elite Britons, increasing numbers of Americans of means married in flower-bedecked churches, wore clothing designed specifically for the wedding day, and enjoyed bountiful meals featuring elaborate cakes. Weddings with these accoutrements were termed "white weddings" in honor of the recommended color of the bride's gown. This once-in-a-lifetime garment symbolized a young woman's sexual innocence as she left maidenhood to become a wife.

The nineteenth-century white wedding contrasted significantly with previous customs. Before European colonization, for instance, Native Americans east of the Mississippi River typically celebrated the union of husband and wife in a two-part ceremony. In the first stage, the families of the betrothed couple privately exchanged gifts in recognition of the reciprocal nature of Native American marriage. In the second portion of the ceremony, which served as a public announcement of the young couple's change in status, the bride and groom enjoyed a feast with all their clan members or perhaps even with their entire village.

As the colonizers who effected the greatest influence on what would later become the United States, British Protestants established a number of long-standing rules for nuptial celebrations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike Catholics, Protestants considered marriage a civil contract rather than a sacrament. At first, New England Puritans even prohibited ministers from performing wedding ceremonies. Instead, couples recited vows in front of a magistrate or justice of the peace. Even after the law allowed clergymen to perform weddings, most colonial couples continued to prefer civil ceremonies, and this practice remained intact after the American Revolution. For example, when Maine midwife Martha Ballard's son and two daughters married in 1792, they did so with little fanfare in civil ceremonies attended only by the few family members who happened to be in the vicinity at the time. After the simple rites, both Ballard daughters continued to live with their parents for several weeks until they accumulated enough necessities to set up independent households with their new husbands.

Changes in the Nineteenth Century

In contrast to the modest marriage rites of their predecessors, Anglo-Americans of the antebellum period generally celebrated their weddings with more flourish. Although weddings still seldom took place in a church, a clergyman now presided more frequently at the ceremony, which usually occurred in front of a few guests at the bride's home. A white gown was not yet the standard costume. Instead brides wore dresses of sedate hues, such as gray or brown. They did not consider their garments one-time-only frocks and typically planned to wear their dresses for subsequent occasions. Unlike their ancestors in the colonial and early republic eras, the antebellum bride and groom either moved to their new home immediately following the wedding ceremony or took a post-wedding trip together before officially setting up housekeeping. If the young couple moved into their new home after the ceremony, they spent the next several weeks receiving visitors there. Couples who embarked on a post-wedding trip visited friends and relatives along the way and frequently invited other family members to join them on the journey. Whether the bride and groom received visitors or made a round of visits themselves, these rituals served to introduce the couple's new marital status to the community.

These new wedding practices reflected the nation's transition from an agrarian to an increasingly urban and industrial society. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most Anglo-American husbands, wives, and children worked together on farms and other rural-based enterprises. Home and workplace were one and the same. In the nineteenth century, at least for members of the growing urban middle class, domestic life and paid employment occurred in two discrete locations. While the middle-class husband toiled at a place of employment to secure the family wage, the middle-class wife presided over the household. Housekeeping was her unpaid profession, and expectations for maintaining a proper middle-class home were high. For the urban housewife, her life as a married woman now represented a distinct departure from life as a spinster. More elaborate wedding celebrations demarcated these phases of a woman's life and eased her transition into the role of responsible matron.

Not all antebellum Americans participated in these new wedding practices. For instance, rural Anglo-American brides continued to marry in much the same fashion as their grandmothers. Their weddings were simple affairs witnessed by the few nearby friends and relatives who could attend. In a departure from the colonial and early republic eras, however, clergymen rather than justices or magistrates usually presided over these ceremonies. In contrast, the marriages of enslaved African Americans lacked any legal standing, but slave men and women frequently sought their masters' permission to hold public commitment ceremonies in front of family and friends. At the end of a celebration, the couple joined hands and jumped over a broom—an African symbol of housekeeping.

The trend toward more elaborate wedding celebrations expanded in urban America as the century progressed. By 1850, many a well-to-do and even middle-class brides, flanked by multiple bridal attendants, followed the lead of Queen Victoria and wore a white gown to her wedding. These particular brides typically sent engraved invitations to numerous guests, who were then expected to give the bridal couples expensive gifts. In the second half of the nineteenth century, these weddings increasingly took place in churches and were followed by private honeymoons to specific destinations, such as Niagara Falls, rather than visits to friends and relatives. National celebrities, such as White House brides Nellie Grant Sartoris and Frances Folsom Cleveland, enhanced the popularity of the formal white wedding.

The Twentieth Century

Between 1880 and 1920, 23.5 million immigrants arrived in the United States to meet the labor needs of the industrializing nation. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe significantly increased the Catholic, Jewish, and Eastern Orthodox populations and the wedding customs unique to those faiths. Even immigrants from predominantly Protestant regions brought wedding rituals that differed from Anglo-American standards. By the time an immigrant family reached its second generation in America, members typically combined old-world customs with at least some elements of the American white wedding. When Nebraskans Sophie BisChoff and Carl Nordhausen married in 1927, for example, the entire local German Lutheran community participated in their wedding reception, dancing to a German oompah band and defying Prohibition by drinking home-brewed beer. But BisChoff wore a white gown that was the height of American flapper fashion.

Cost was a significant factor in the way twentieth-century Americans organized their wedding celebrations. Before World War II, most immigrant and native-born families staged weddings that were a patchwork of home-produced and purchased goods and services. Only upper- and upper-middle-class urbanites could afford to purchase all the elements of a formal white wedding. Not until after the war, with the dramatic rise in average incomes, was the formal wedding affordable to most Americans. Postwar expansion of the synthetic fiber industry enhanced that affordability with the production and sale of reasonably priced white gowns. By 1970, white wedding ceremonies launched approximately 80 percent of first-time marriages.

The final three decades of the twentieth century witnessed tremendous change in American society: development of an influential feminist movement, increased non-European immigration, a burgeoning divorce and remarriage rate, a rise in the average age at first marriage, and the expansion of unmarried cohabitation. Yet none of these factors diminished the popularity of the white wedding. First-time brides more typically married in their middle rather than early twenties and had more education, work, and sexual experience than their predecessors. They often paid at least a portion of their wedding expenses and thus looked at their wedding day as the ultimate opportunity for self-expression. Their choice of gown, cake, and ceremony site often conveyed important information about their lifestyle choices. Many of these brides had cohabitated with their grooms in an arrangement that was becoming a precursor to modern marriage. In an era when half of American marriages ended in divorce, many brides choosing formal weddings were not making their first trips down the aisle. In fact, late twentieth-century etiquette books and members of the wedding industry applauded white weddings for the "encore bride." African Americans and Asian Americans frequently incorporated elements of non-Western culture into their white weddings, and gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies often conformed to the general parameters of the traditional formal wedding. Having adapted to a more tolerant and diverse American culture, the formal white wedding headed full strength into the new millennium.

See also: Dating, Honeymooning, Rites of Passage, Women's Leisure Lifestyles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axtell, James, ed. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Cross, Wilber, and Ann Novotny. White House Weddings. New York: David McKay Company, 1967.

Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Jellison, Katherine. "From the Farmhouse Parlor to the Pink Barn: The Commercialization of Weddings in the Rural Midwest." Iowa Heritage Illustrated 77 (Summer 1996): 50–65.

Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Monsarrat, Ann. And the Bride Wore. . .: The Story of the White Wedding. London: Gentry Books, 1973.

Otnes, Cele C., and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Seligson, Marcia. The Eternal Bliss Machine: America's Way of Wedding. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Katherine Jellison