Podcast: Stuff You Missed in History Class - History of the White Wedding

Stuff You Missed in History Class, "A Brief History of the 'White Wedding,'" April 25, 2016. Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Frey.  

Queen Victoria's Wedding Portrait

Again from the cultural and historical side of things - this is an episode from one of my very favorite podcasts. The hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class are super organized and hilarious (just the way I like my podcasts to be), with just the right touch of witty back and forth mixed in. 

This podcast addresses numerous "white wedding" traditions. Here are just a few tidbits from it! 

• White wedding dresses were a fashion started by Queen Victoria, who loved her husband Albert in the most passionate and adorable way ever (seriously, I ship them). After his death, she built him a magnificent memorial and wore black the rest of her life.
• Wedding rings date back to Ancient Greece and Rome and may have derived from the tradition of breaking a coin apart at the wedding and giving a half to the bride and a half to the groom. 
• Cakes have been part of weddings for a very long time, but only recently did those actually come to resemble what we actually consider cake today. For a long time, "cake" referred to almost any type of bread good. 
  • Queen Victoria's cake was 10 FEET in diameter and weighed 300 pounds. 
  • Tiered wedding cakes really started in 1851 and piped decorations on cakes weren't really a thing until the 1890s.

 Bonus Material: "How the Women Behind Stuff You Missed in History Class Became Unlikely Celebrities," By Josh Green, Atlanta Magazine (August 2016) - I love this profile of podcast hosts Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Frey and their work and I exceptionally enjoy the accompanying photographs of them in fancy dresses and feathery headpieces.

And of course, this blog post wouldn't be complete without this: 

Book Review: Selfish Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision NOT to Have Kids

So this book pretty much has nothing to do with marriage (I believe it's mentioned a few times?) but it does address something society often thinks goes hand in hand with it: Parenthood. Neither John nor I are currently interested in having children; a stance that fortunately, few people have commented negatively on at this point. However, I'm sure that the closer we get to getting married, the more likely we are to get such comments, so I feel the need to prepare myself by reading up on this whole subject more. Plus I really just wanted to read this book. 

What is this book about? 

Pretty much exactly what it sounds like! It includes short stories from 13 female writers and 3 male writers (some straight, some gay, some non-attached) on their decision not to have children. They're all professional writers so these are all excellently written.

As the introduction says, musing over a version of Leo Tolstoy's famous "happy families" line ("People who want children are all alike. People who don't want children don't want them in their own way."), "..I've come to suspect that the majority of people who have kids are driven by any of just a handful of reasons, most of them connected to old-fashioned biological imperative. Those of us who choose not to become parents are a bit like Unitarieans or nonnative Californians; we tend to arrive at our destination via our own meandering, sometimes agonizing paths." 

Some of them are more torn about their decision than others. A few made their decision as children, while some came very close to having children before deciding it wasn't for them. There are a few which talk about having had abortions. A lot of these stories are tough to read. The introduction also notes, "Some of these essays will no doubt enrage certain readers. Some enraged me in places, which I took as all the more reason they should be included. But all of them, without exception, left me feeling a little bit in love with their authors."

Who would love this book?

Anyone who does not want children, is considering not having children (It feels so weird phrasing it that way, since people have to pretty much take some action to actually have them!), or is open to learning more about the phenomenon.

My Favorite Parts

"You'd be such a good mother, if only you weren't you" by M.G. Lord is so beautiful and sad that it's still haunting me after finishing it over a week ago. It talks quite memorably about the author's experiences with depression so deep that it took away her ability to see color. 

"Babes in the Woods" by Courtney Hodell also left me feeling like I'd been punched in the chest with emotion. I identify with her feelings of being left behind after her beloved older brother had a child so deeply. You aren't supposed to have emotions like that. I read this story and nearly cried afterward; it all felt so familiar.

As she says, "Now my brother was thinking and feeling things I never would. In college he'd taught me how to speak, but this was something I could never say aloud: Don't leave me behind. The only recourse was to love this little scrap of a human, and in the first really adult way I would love anyone. Without expectations of returned affection. Without wounded vanity. With foreknowledge of impending boredom, of exasperation, of anger that I could not allow myself to nurse. In the understanding that I would sometimes be ridiculous in her eyes. Knowing I did not have the rights of parenthood, I could make no demands of her beyond those any grown-up would make of a child: Hold my hand; we're crossing the street."

Does it talk about marital surname changes at all? 

Nope. Not related to the topic of this blog at all. Oh well. Every writer reserves the right to go examine other subjects occasionally.

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Shallow-Self-Absorbed-Sixteen-Decision-ebook/dp/B00JI0W6VE

Excerpt: "Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices"

"Although a seemingly innocuous personal choice, the issue of marriage names sparked considerable debate in America. Many conservatives and religious leaders argued that a woman who does not take her husband's name is not committed to her role as a wife and that a man who does not insist that his wife take his surname is weak. ... Women who chose to retain their maiden name, however, argued that adopting their husband's name would be tantamount to enslaving themselves and foregoing individual rights." 

Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices - "Marriage Names," By Roger Chapman, James Ciment

Unidentified woman in wedding gown, by an unidentified photographer. Public Domain. Repository: Anacostia Community Museum - Available online at www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2583389217/in/photolist-9nta3R-k2aDaP-5jRF7B-4WhxBp-4Sa8vs-9nwTdN

I...have so many issues with all of the above sentiments (which are expressed in lots of studies that I'm trying to get my hands on so I can read them in their original form and write about them for this blog). Because I'm spending so much time on this project, you may think I have strong judgmental views of women who take their husband's names. I don't. I don't care. You do you. I think the argument that a woman loses her identity by taking her husband's name is silly and literally the entire point of the name of this blog is an argument against that. However, I have equal problems with the opposite argument presented here - that women who don't take their husband's name are not committed to their relationships or their "role as wife."* I'm sorry, what? Pretty sure my relationship with my husband will not be less than another person's if I choose not to take his last name. I just want to be able to make my own decision without people judging me. (Yes, I'm aware that will never happen, but a girl can dream). 

The thing is, the vast majority of arguments on either side of this issue get super personal and offensive very quickly. Can't we all just be friends and talk about these issues reasonably with an eye to historical and cultural context without fighting? ("No," the Internet whispers.)

Also - I really want to find a copy of this book to read at some point, it looks pretty fascinating. It is for sale on Amazon but I haven't found a way to justify buying it yet (I've accumulated so many books in the course of this project already - it's a problem). 

*What does that actually mean anyway? Please explain. What does it mean to be "a wife?" Merriam Webster defines it as - "a female partner in a marriage." It's apparently derives from the Middle English/Old English "wif" and the Old High German "wib." I get a little more disturbed when the synonyms include "helpmate" and "helpmeet," which literally means "one who is a companion and helper, especially a wife," but is used in the sentences often to refer to people in more of an assistant type role.

Another George Bernard Shaw Quote

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

"In this 1935 photograph, botanist Wilmatte Porter Cockerell (1871-1957) is shown with biologist Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866-1948), whom she married in 1900. In 1901, he named the ultramarine blue chromodorid Mexichromis porterae in her honor. Before and after their marriage in 1900, they frequently went on collecting expeditions together and assembled a large private library of natural history films, which they showed to schoolchildren and public audiences to promote the cause of environmental conservation." Unidentified Photographer. Public Domain. Available online here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/3378207203/in/photolist-4WhxBp-9nw5JN-9nw5M1-69AjNm-69wciM

Stephanie Coontz's A History of Marriage used this quote as an intro to Chapter 1: The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love and pointed out: 

"Shaw's comment was amusing when he wrote it at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it still makes us smile today, because it pokes fun at the unrealistic expectations that spring from a deeply held cultural ideal--that marriage should be based on intense, profound love and a couple should maintain their ardor until death do them part. But for thousands of years the joke would have fallen flat.

For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage. ...

People have always fallen in love and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply. But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order." 

Womenless Weddings Used to be a Thing

When 'Womanless Weddings' Were Trendy, By Linton Weeks, June 16, 2015 - NPR.org 

So it definitely used to be a trend in the 1800s and early 1900s to hold fake comedic male-only weddings as fundraisers for charity (they hung around a bit in the latter half of the 1900s but they're pretty rare now). You can read more at the link below about them - it's a pretty straightforward article - but this part toward the end of the article really stuck out for me.

"So, when all the 'I do's' are said and done, what were womanless weddings all about? In his book, Friend suggests that the womanless wedding was a "ritual of inversion" created not to undermine, but to reaffirm community values.

Photo from 1918, in the Public Domain.

'In mocking the very ritual they found most central to communal stability,' he writes, 'organizers and participants in womanless weddings raised questions about the society in which they lived. In the play, they called attention to real social change and its effects on marriage.'

But, Thompson adds, 'even as it reversed and violated the ideal, the womanless wedding replicated and buttressed reality.'"

You can find a lot of videos of these on YouTube, including one below. 

It's definitely...something. The NPR article ends with Stephanie Coontz (writer of "Marriage: A History") opining that they're out of fashion now because they're not very compatible with a society that now accepts same-sex marriage. The counter argument to that may be the existence and wide acceptance of drag queens in LGBTQIA culture. I guess the distinction is that 1. I don't know the statistics but I imagine the vast majority of drag queens or kings are at least accepting of LGBTQIA people, if they don't identify as part of that community, and 2. People participating in "womenless weddings" may not have been. Perhaps it could still be a thing in the right context, time and place, but I can definitely understand why it's gone out of style now.

Review: One Perfect Day - The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead

What is this book about?

This book takes an in-depth look at the wedding industry, traveling from Disneyworld and wedding chapels in Gatlinburg, Tennessee to wedding planner and videographer conventions to wedding dress factories in China. It really looks at the goods and services offered to brides, the "traditions" behind them, and asks how the American wedding industry came to this point.

As a former journalist, I naturally loved Mead's approach to this book. Parts of it are quite poetically written; the prose is gorgeous. It is easy to read; I read through it considerably faster than the previous academic books I've read for this project. 

Who would love this book?

People who like knowing the story behind the curtain and don't mind learning about the dark sides of things as well. Like people who enjoy VH1's Behind the Music.

My Favorite Parts

This is a wonderful book but it's not exactly a happy one; it often points out the extreme cynicism at the heart of most wedding professionals. There were several parts that made me go "ooooooooo" in the sense of a voyeur finding out something secret and scandalous. For example, one interview subject stated about bridal registries: "'It is very simple...Eighty-five percent of brides who register with your brand will remain loyal to your brand for the next fifty years.' The bride...'is a marketers' target. She is a slam dunk." (side note: I wonder how true this still is today, with the advent of online shopping changing the entire way your average person consumes goods). 

Mead herself also has a hilarious style, such as this sentence about her visit to the Chicago bridal dress market: "After a few hours I was overcome by a condition known among retailers as "white blindness," a reeling, dumbfounded state in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between an Empire-waisted gown with alencon lace appliques and a bias-cut spaghetting-strap shift with crystal detail, and in the exhausted grip of which I wanted only to lie down and be quietly smothered by the fluffy weight of it all, like Scott of the Antarctic." 

She also made this witty observation after an encounter with a New Age wedding officiant who had examined her aura. "Hours later, at home, I realized with a start that she had neglected to zip up my aura again, and I had been walking around with it open all that time." 

The book ends on a lovely and progressive note that made me wistful and happy: "What would the American wedding look like if all Americans approached their weddings with the same consciousness as that demanded of gay couples? What if getting married was not simply something the average American-having found a suitable spouse-could do when he or she pleased and in the manner he or she desired, but was a right that had been argued over and fought for? What if every wedding was a cherished victory won?"

Does it talk about marital surname changes at all? 

No - It's really more about the wedding industry than the marriage or couples involved themselves.

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling-American/dp/0143113844

Podcast: What would a feminist do? Keep your last name or take your spouse's?

By swirlingthoughts on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons License. Available at

"What would a feminist do? Keep your last name or take your spouse's?" 21 minutes, Host: Jessica Valenti, guest sociologist Laurie Scheuble, May 26, 2016

A friend recommended this podcast via Facebook and I found it incredibly interesting and helpful.

UPDATED POST with review 

Summary:  

Valenti starts out the podcast with a monologue wondering about people's hesitance in admitting that the tradition of a woman taking her husband's name upon marriage is a sexist tradition. As she says, "I think we all negotiate living in a sexist world in different ways," and she doesn't judge anyone for taking such actions, but claiming it's not a sexist tradition is disingenuous. She also points out that though women who change their names often discuss how much they dislike their last name, you never hear the same thing said by men with terrible last names, and it's entirely possible to change your last name before marriage. (I question this a bit actually - you can change your name before marriage but it's made very difficult by most states. It costs a considerable amount of money, there's usually a publication requirement, and you have to appear in court. It's all about preventing people from changing their names just to commit fraud and avoid debts). 

In the main podcast, where Valenti speaks to Scheuble, the sociologist opines, "[T]here's no norm that operates as strongly as women changing their last name when they get married. ...it's so structured. We have convinced men and women that 1. If a woman loves a man she'll change her name and 2. The guy is obviously convinced that this is what people do, why are you even questioning this?" She doesn't foresee any shift in this phenomenon any time soon. She's also seen a great deal of defensiveness and rationalization among women who change their name. 

Valenti and Scheuble discuss numerous other topics, including people's intense hatred for hyphenation (Why do people hate hyphenation so much anyway? I need to know.) There's also a touching segment that includes viewpoints from a variety of women, including one woman who said she wanted to take her husband's name so she'd have the same name as her children after she saw her aunt struggle with picking up her kids at the airport due to having a different then them.*

Scheuble wraps things up by pointing to a few interesting facts. She's currently conducting a study that does seem to indicate that men identify and attach more to children with their last names, with the effect appearing particularly strong in sons. There haven't really been any studies on surname trends among married homosexual couples yet, pretty much because gay marriage is so new in America still, but statistics that are out there do seem to indicate that people in same sex marriages are less likely to change their surnames. Scheuble surmises that this could be the result of the fact that these couples are generally older than your average heterosexual married couple and have simply had more life experience with their birth name.

 My Thoughts:

I find the entire podcast to be mostly nonjudgmental of women's decisions, but there definitely is a bit of a bias toward women who keep their birth name. Both the host and the expert kept their names and do tend to come at the issue from that standpoint. I do love that Valenti straight-up notes that this is a sexist tradition. It's hard to deny that, but people do it all the time. It may have a different meaning in your life and in your relationship, but there's no denying that its roots are problematic.

Similarly, wearing a wedding dress has sexist roots, as does wearing a wedding ring and any number of traditions in both weddings and day to day life. I am wearing a white dress on my wedding day. I also quite proudly wear my engagement ring and I really enjoy engaging in several feminine traditions that originated and are continued partly because of sexism, including wearing makeup and pretty clothes and keeping a lovely house. However, there are several traditions I reject as too sexist for me to handle - such as having my dad walk me down the aisle or the entire garter thing. Again - "We all negotiate living in a sexist world in different ways." (Can you tell I really like this quote?) I'd rather have my eyes open to all these things, think them through, and then make my choice about which traditions to embrace and engage with in my own life than to just pretend there aren't any problematic histories involved with them. Others may prefer to take a different approach, and that's fine too. We don't all need to overthink things as much as I do (I fully admit that I'm a little eccentric in wanting to know everything about everything. It's also just plain exhausting sometimes. You are welcome to live a less examined life and probably sleep better at night than I do, neurotic as I am.). Either way, I'm not going to judge you. 

*I've really wondered about this. I never had trouble growing up with a mom with a different last name then me, but people can be much more paranoid about security now than they were in the 90s when I was a young'un. Is this a real problem now? 

"Conjugal Rights" and the Right to Refuse to Have Sex

As yet another reminder of "Dear God am I happy I was born when I was and not a few hundred years ago," married women in England only gained the right to refuse to have sex with their husbands fairly recently. These excerpts outline how that situation evolved.

Detail from The Courtship by John Collet (1766)

"A husband's right to sexual intercourse was assured by law in several ways. Firstly, by the law and custom of marriage. Sir Matthew Hale commented in 1736 that it was impossible for a husband to be tried for rape, because by marrying the wife had 'given herself up' sexually to her husband and could never retract that consent.

Secondly, an ancient right under canon law allowed either party to claim restoration of 'conjugal rights' (i.e. cohabitation). Under the 1857 Divorce Act, refusal to cohabit after being ordered to do so by a judge was contempt of court and could entail a prison sentence. Once a woman was cohabiting with her husband he could rape her with impunity. As Oswald Dawson put it in 1895, a wife was 'at the mercy of the carnal appetite of the man ... at all times and without regard to the state of her health, or any other considerations', he continued, 'This slavery of compulsory cohabitation is surely chattel-like'. He concluded, 'until a woman who is a wife can say, at least at certain times....'I wish to sleep alone'... she can never consider herself free'.

The Matrimonial Causes Act 1884 reformed the law so that a refusal to restore conjugal rights no longer led to imprisonment but was deemed to be desertion, which was then grounds for divorce. From then, wives are found applying to court for 'the restitution of conjugal rights', not because they wanted their husbands to move back in, but as the first step towards getting a divorce." Excerpt from  History of Women: Marriage, by Helena Wojtczak (an excellent website that you should go read!) 

The Court of Chancery in the early 19th century (1808) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Chancery#/media/File:Court_of_Chancery_edited.jpg

"The 1884 Act thus gave effect to the policy that it was oppressive and unnecessary to imprison those who preferred to live apart from their spouses. But the extent to which the courts were prepared to recognise the existence of legally enforceable ‘rights’ in the family context remained unclear. Only a few years later, a sensational case illustrated the difficulty:

In R v. Jackson a husband applied for and obtained a decree for restitution of conjugal rights against his newly married wife, and set about enforcing it. Assisted by two young men (one a solicitor’s articled clerk) he seized her as she was leaving church in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe and forced her into a carriage, claiming to have used no more force than was absolutely necessary to separate her from the sister he believed to be responsible for what had happened. Mrs Jackson was kept in the husband’s house in Blackburn in charge of her sister and a nurse and she was visited by a doctor. The husband claimed that he showed her every kindness and consideration and that she had the free run of the house,  ‘doing just as she pleased, save leaving the house’; and that he ‘had offered several times to take her for a drive, but she had declined to go’. The wife’s relatives instituted habeas corpus proceedings; and the Court of Appeals rejected the husband’s argument that a husband had the right to enforce the ‘general dominion’ he had over his wife by imprisoning her if she refused him the conjugal rights to which a court had declared him entitled. Lord Esher MR regarded the 1884 Act as the ‘strongest possible evidence to shew that the legislature had no idea that a power would remain in the husband to imprison the wife for himself, not least because to accept this view would result in his being allowed to act as party judge and executioner.

The Jackson decision was at the time unpopular in some quarters, and it was certainly widely misunderstood. But it is a landmark in family law: the decision recognises that the ‘rights’ which exist between husband and wife are of a different order than (say) the rights of the parties to a commercial contract. But the question of ‘how different’ remained difficult." 

Legal Consequences of marriage: Conjugal Rights and Remedies (an excerpt from Stephen Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History, Oxford University Press (2003))

Fun fact: Under English law, women only gained the right to divorce her husband on the grounds of adultery alone in 1923. Men previously were the only ones to have that right.

The action of restitution of conjugal rights was only abolished in 1970, though at that point it was rarely used. The equivalent legal actions in Scotland and Ireland were abolished in 1984 and 1988, respectively. 

"Getting Married": George Bernard Shaw on Marriage

"MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend.

Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a man's or woman's affection for twenty minutes, much less twenty years. Even the most affectionate couples must have moments during which they are far more conscious of one another's faults than of one another's attractions. There are couples who dislike one another furiously for several hours at a time; there are couples who dislike one another permanently; and there are couples who never dislike one another; but these last are people who are incapable of disliking anybody. If they do not quarrel, it is not because they are married, but because they are not quarrelsome. The people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their husbands and wives just as easily as with their servants and relatives and acquaintances: marriage makes no difference.

Those who talk and write and legislate as if all this could be prevented by making solemn vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere, insane, or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense in a contract to perform or abstain from actions that are reasonably within voluntary control; but such contracts are only needed to provide against the possibility of either party being no longer desirous of the specified performance or abstention. A person proposing or accepting a contract not only to do something but to like doing it would be certified as mad. Yet popular superstition credits the wedding rite with the power of fixing our fancies or affections for life even under the most unnatural conditions."

The entire play and its amazing preface is available for free online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5604/5604-h/5604-h.htm

Well that's a little terrifying

Source: A World of Ways to Say "I Do," Noah Benshea & Jordan Benshea