The Wedding Flowers
Wedding Flowers dictionary of flower names Flowers
Historian Katherine Jellison examines the 20th century birth, rise, and endurance of the traditional
Wednesday Apr 02, 2008
and exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate moustachios and slight but very slight whiskers.”
— and, some historians say, marrying for love — were uncommon curiosities.
According to Ohio University historian Katherine Jellison, not until the early 20th century, with its department stores
lens for our ideas about social class, gender roles, and material values.”
The book, which comes out in March, explores the birth, rise, and unexpected endurance of the American princess bride fantasy in all its forms: from Cinderella to Princess Diana to Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?
During World War II, the Association of Bridal Manufacturers successfully lobbied Congress and the War Production Board for exemption from fabric restrictions. The association, representing the fledging bridal-wear industry, argued that war was fought to protect the American way of life, symbolized by the “traditional” white wedding. In the interest of national morale, they won their right to silk and satin.
“By invoking ‘tradition’ to justify their exemption from wartime restrictions, the association actually promoted a new cultural norm,” Jellison explains in Our Day. “association’s wartime argument served two of the chief purposes of an invented tradition: It established the legitimacy of a particular institution and it socialized the public in the values and conventions of that institution.”
“People tend to invent traditions when they are worried about something,” Coontz says. “In the first three decades of the 20th century, we saw a very big sexual revolution — in some ways bigger than in the 1960s — and the divorce rate tripled. To alleviate anxiety about the future of (the marriage) institution, rituals were created based on myths about its past.”
Thus the ubiquitous white wedding, familiarized through advertising and other mass media, made its way into etiquette books and women’s magazines. In her 1937 etiquette guide, Emily Post counseled that it was “always proper for a bride to wear a white dress and veil,” but allowed that, given that costs of traditional gowns exceeded most budgets of the day, a bride could settle with a traveling dress instead.
In 1942, the first full year of American involvement in the war, the stampede to the altar boosted the marriage rate from a peacetime 11.9 marriages per 1,000 population to a record 13.2 per 1,000. And the results of a 1942 survey showed that 80 percent of women about to marry wanted a formal wedding,” Jellison writes.