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.
Many of the demands that emerged from the feminism of the late ’60s and ’70s have stuck around: equal treatment and pay in the workforce, reproductive freedom, greater support for those who choose to become mothers, and a more equal gendered division of labor at home. And the most basic belief of the second wave—that women should be recognized as more than just mothers and wives—has gone mainstream, at least for everyone to the left of Mike Pence.
The wedding industry was savvy, catering to a new hard-driving, professional, and yet traditionally feminine bride. Since the counter-cultural movement and feminist critiques of the 1960s and ’70s, some women had sought to remake their weddings from the postwar norm to more closely reflect their preferences and values. In some cases, this simply meant marrying somewhere other than a church, perhaps in nature.
If American women had begun to challenge the conventions of weddings in part because of their politics, the bridal industry succeeded in resignifying politics as a matter of tasteThe wedding industry worked hard to assure women that there was no conflict between their executive status in the boardroom, liberated sex lives, and the traditional gender norms and beauty standards on display at their wedding. In fact, they were the necessaryof the woman who “had it all.
But the magic of the white wedding cannot be reduced to class aspirations alone. Cinderella walking down the aisle toward her Prince Charming and her happily ever after is a relatively recent tradition, a conservative fantasy of gender roles that directly contradicts our notions of women’s rights, gender equality, and even of what are now relatively mainstream ideals—if not lived realities—of equality in marriage.
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