As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America

4. “Lots of Young People Today Are Doing This”: The White Wedding Revived

102 • 4 “Lots of Young People Today Are Doing This” THE WHITE WEDDING REVIVED In 1978, a young Barnard College graduate began the process of planning her wedding. As the bride-to-be—a working woman and vocal feminist—filled out the paperwork for her wedding license, she was surprised to find that there was no place on the form for her occupation . When she asked the clerk at City Hall where she should provide that information, the woman responded, “Oh, we don’t ask the girls for their occupations.” The bride insisted her profession be recorded, and the kindly clerk willingly obliged. “Well, we’ve never done that before,” she said, “but . . . all right, sweetheart, what is it?” Twenty-six-year old Anna Quindlen—future columnist for the New York Times and Newsweek , novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winner—asked the woman to type in “newspaper reporting.” “Well, isn’t that exciting,” the clerk proclaimed. She then asked, “Have you quit your job now that you’re tying the knot?”1 New weddings may have raised questions about the white wedding ’s staying power, but old ideas held strong. Chronicling the months leading up to her wedding in the pages of Ms. magazine—the publication born of women’s liberation—Anna Quindlen grappled with the inevitable tension faced by someone who “LOTS OF YOuNG PEOPLE TODAY ARE DOING THIS” • 103 was both a feminist and a woman raised in an American culture that venerated the white wedding. Like Robin Morgan before her, Quindlen recognized and admitted to the often ridiculous nature of the wedding process. Wryly reporting on the process of choosing a wedding dress, the bride-to-be concluded, “There is no serious way to shop for a wedding gown.” But even as she noted the silliness of bridal consultants who had “only a first name with the word ‘Miss’ in front of it,” and filled their days seeing one grown woman after another clad only in their undergarments , Quindlen also recognized that these women bore witness to the intimate, sometimes heartbreaking moments that only took place in anticipation of a wedding. “They hear daughters tell their mothers that they don’t want to marry their fiancés,” Quindlen wrote, “and they also hear mothers tell their daughters that the caterer’s deposit is nonrefundable.” Quindlen realized some American brides celebrated a white wedding for reasons other than expectations of connubial bliss— to experience the excitement of the day, to legitimate a pregnancy, to join the adult married world, to make their families proud. Even as she wrote of these women with a sense of melancholy, she was undeterred by the less romantic vision of the American wedding. Like the alternative wedding brides and grooms that had come before, Anna Quindlen and her fiancé, Gerald Krovatin, would have the wedding they wanted. But their desires were somewhat different than their recent predecessors : they would celebrate their marriage with a white wedding.2 Quindlen explicitly expressed her disinterest in the possibility of a new wedding celebration. In her Ms. article, she highlighted the wedding ’s cultural cachet and the ways it had affected her ideas about the ceremony. Pointing specifically to the influence of the Madame Alexander “bride doll,” Quindlen was clear about the power of this childhood ideal: “[I]t shaped my adult life, emerging as the primary reason why I did not want to wear a sensible suit, a chaste column of crepe, or a Mexican dress for my wedding. I wanted to be a Madame Alexander doll.” But if she knew exactly what she wanted, she was just as specific in realizing what she did not want: “monogrammed cocktail napkins, a new name, an umbrella with streamers on it, life insurance, a Merry Widow undergarment, and engraved stationary from Tiffany’s.”3 Quindlen wanted the white wedding she wanted. Rather than following each suggested detail to a tee, she would pick and choose, making the 104 • “LOTS OF YOuNG PEOPLE TODAY ARE DOING THIS” wedding specific to herself and her husband-to-be. Admitting publicly and unabashedly to Ms. readers that she had dreamed of her wedding gown since girlhood, Quindlen proclaimed her desire to have it all: “What I wanted was to be the feminist I’d always been, the journalist I’d managed to become, and the—let’s face it—vision of loveliness I’d always hoped for one shot at being...