Gettin’ Hitched: Marriage in America
African-American wedding, 1908. Library of Congress
Last month, President Obama became the first American president to publicly support same-sex marriage. And other Americans’ views of what makes a marriage are changing, too. The public today is just about evenly divided between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage — a huge shift from fifteen years ago, when more than two thirds of Americans opposed it.
So for this hour of BackStory, we dig into how Americans have defined marriage over the years — and how those definitions have changed. Who’s allowed to marry, and what’s at stake when couples break the rules? Over the years, all kinds of marriages have been contested or banned outright: interracial marriages, polygamous marriages, child marriages, same-sex marriages, marriages of enslaved people, and marriages between Americans and foreigners. So why have some disagreements about marriage melted away while others have become more contentious? How have the rules we make about marriage changed our families and our society?
Please help us shape this show! How is your marriage different from your parents’? Is marriage less important now than it used to be? And why are American so devoted to marriage…yet so prone to divorce?
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I’m wondering about the history of the wedding industry: when and how weddings evolved into elaborate, vendor-run events, when the wedding dress industry developed and where the idea of a white dress came from, and whether there is anything unique about the American wedding industry and the popular image of the wedding in America in contrast to other Western countries.
QuoteI think that industry question is a good one. I guess I’m interested to connect what I know about arranged marriages in India to America. Marriage is seen as the connection between two families not as just a union between two people. Was marriage arranged historically in America? Or, was there ever a time when it was considered more of a union between two families or when extended families had more of a say in marriages?
QuoteI’d like to hear about any relationship between marriage-ways and moments of xenophobia — whether controversies over freethinking, Catholic immigration, Mormon polygamy, etc. cha[lle]nged American expectations for marriage and family life. We talk a lot about the idealization of middle-class family life as a haven from the workplace and marketplace; how about a haven from alien ideas and ways of living?
QuoteThere is a difference in some cultures in-terms of dresses. For example, in some Asian countries, like Japan because the “lucky/colors that denote a more favorable outcome and do not represent death” are different than ours. In Japan black is considered to represent life and white death and most women would favor a black “formal” or they even have kimonos especially made for “weddings” and not white, so as not to bring them bad luck on their “special day”. The black kimonos worn by both men and women who prefer to have a Shinto wedding, which is an older and more traditional style of wedding and usually the most expensive because of the high cost of the kimonos, renting of the traditional shrine and priest to perform the service, etc. as it is not a preferred practice anymore, usually due to cost and some of the younger generations straying from tradition(s) and opting for a more cost effective western white wedding. In China the “lucky” colors are red/gold and most women favor prefer gold and/or red. In the old days of Chinese wedding dress culture the brides from the Northern part of the country would wear a traditional wedding dress called a Qai Pao. In the Southern hemisphere brides would wear dresses called Qun Gua, Kwa or Cheongsam. In modern times Chinese brides typically change dresses 3 times a day during “civil” ceremonies. At the civil ceremony they wear the traditional white dress, when it is time to serve food, cake, tea and the meal they change into the traditional kimono and do the tea pouring and some of the serving. Then at the true reception when it’s time for the first dance and to mingle with the guests they change into a cocktail dress. The white dress is an invention of American and English culture, as we view white as life and death as black, but in truth it is purely American, but influenced by English dress designs. Americans in olden times viewed that the colors currently used did not represent the purity and innocents of marriage that represented new life being brought into full and new union and so they viewed the simplicity and beauty of white, which also represented the true essence of life to do that and thus the white dress was born. However, since it was born from times when English dress designs were still popular when the dresses came to be they were based on English designs. In current times when brides wanted something less traditional colored options and designs looking like cocktail dresses and not the traditional flowing bridal dresses came to be. In Scottish weddings of today, most men will still tend to wear traditional “wedding” kilts. As for women, they may opt for the traditional wedding garb that was either worn in their region of the highlands and/or by their clan and/or both or opt for a more “modern” wedding dress.
QuotePlease, please, PLEASE showcase the diversity of marriage customs in America, not only over time but over place and people. Class, region, race/culture have all played roles in our highly diverse immigrant culture, to say nothing of those, as far as we know, of the various native cultures.
QuoteThis is my layman’s opinion, but big weddings have always been around, but it usually had to do with the wealth of the families involved and the traditions of the family. With the emergence of credit cards, lavish spending, thinking 1980s, it is a lot more common now then it used to be, Also with the emergence of the media and the many ways we now get information has made lavish weddings more accessable to the masses.
QuoteSo, I didn’t get my question in on the record date due to a lost connection with the vast, silent army of cell towers, but I thought I’d bring up a few comments here, regardless.
Marriage has been primarily under the jurisdiction of churches, mostly as religions have (for not entirely evil reasons, I’ll concede) needed control over persons’ sexuality, education/social mobility and status, and property. Far from being the only organizations exercising these influences, Churches share these ‘responsibilities’, if you will, with governments and legal systems. Is it somehow dangerous to acknowledge the many secular improvements to marriage and, further, allow this to be a civil issue by law, on paper – and a religious or spiritual matter in the hearts of those who wish it to be?
The changes in how even the Catholic church has viewed marriage, it’s means and it’s ends, are fascinating. Our most modern development – the notion of two people’s union as being an emotional concern over and above procreative & economic, was only adopted by the Catholic church in 1968 – and undeniably through a long and frustrating conversation with the embedding cultures it finds itself in.
So, though I may have my personal reasons for seeing the US as having a strong secular history, I wonder what, more or less, those historical developments in social justice, mature balance between personal rights and public responsibility, and economic and political thinking that we all owe to secular philosophers, thinkers, citizens. Again, I see it clearly that it is often the case that non-religious institutions and persons are ahead in Ethics class, so why should it be the case at all that Churches in the US own the issue of marriage equality? Furthermore, it is an example of a fundamental precept here in the States that a woman may be called to act upon her faith by not using contraception or covering her hair, but in the US, she can not deny others coitus interuptus or the breeze through your hair, even if she says it’s not her religious beliefs that motivate restricting others. Why change this rule for one issue?
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