{"id":2063,"date":"2019-09-03T09:35:43","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T14:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2019-09-03T09:35:43","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T14:35:43","slug":"the-fall-wedding-season-is-upon-us-but-outdated-gendered-traditions-dont-have-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2019\/09\/03\/the-fall-wedding-season-is-upon-us-but-outdated-gendered-traditions-dont-have-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall wedding season is upon us \u2014 but outdated, gendered traditions don’t have to be"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
\"\"<\/a>
Image by StockSnap<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict. <\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Originally Posted at NBC News<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Few events in modern life are wrapped in as much \u201ctradition\u201d as engagements and weddings \u2014 especially for heterosexual couples. Surprise proposals from men on bended knees; diamond rings; virginal white dresses with flowing trains; proud fathers walking glowing daughters down the aisle to waiting grooms.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Not all traditions match modern tastes, of course. Instead of a cake, for example, it was customary in the\u00a0Middle Ages to serve a \u201cbride pye\u201d at wedding celebrations<\/a>. The earliest recorded recipe for such a pie included lamb testicles, oysters, sweetbreads, fruit, butter, egg yolks and lemon.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

While many of the rituals we embrace today \u2014 or have thrust on us by\u00a0wedding planners<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste, especially when they reinforce the notion that marriage is the biggest day in a woman\u2019s life and becoming a wife the most important identity she will ever acquire. You see, even when we \u201cjust play\u201d at stereotypes, we absorb some of them \u2014 and they affect other people\u2019s expectations of us. Studies show, for example, that when a\u00a0woman is described to people as a wife<\/a>, rather than, say, a friend or colleague, they expect her to take major responsibility for cleaning, even if they know she works full-time. They hold a \u201cwife\u201d to higher standards of cleanliness than a man or a single woman, even a cohabiting one, and judge her more harshly when she doesn\u2019t meet those standards.,<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Far be it for me to suggest that women give up white dresses, dispense with the father-daughter dance, or even challenge the convention that the man must surprise the woman with an elaborate proposal. Still, it\u2019s worth updating some of these traditions or seeking out others that offer more realistic visions of the marital partnership most couples now hope to establish.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

To craft a wedding that takes the best of different traditions and integrates those with the values of contemporary couples, it helps to reflect on where those traditions came from, when they came into being and what alternative traditions they pushed aside. Take the custom of the man asking the woman\u2019s father for her hand in marriage, a tradition that\u00a0wedding industry analysts claim<\/a>\u00a0has recently come back in style.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The tradition of the father \u201cgiving\u201d the bride to the groom reflects the fact that until the middle of the 19th century,\u00a0marriage permanently transferred legal authority<\/a>\u00a0of a woman from her father to her husband. An unmarried woman could escape her father\u2019s control over her finances only once she turned 21. But in the 1950s and \u201960s the majority of women married before turning 21, and for them the transfer from father to husband meant they never became fully adult in the eyes of the law. Until the mid-1970s,\u00a0a wife still needed her husband\u2019s permission<\/a>\u00a0to take out a loan, sign a lease, open a business or even apply for a credit card.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Some couples have modernized this ritual by asking both sets of parents to approve the match and get to know each other as in-laws. In one marriage I attended, the bride and groom, accompanied by their entire families, walked to meet each other, and then the couple proceeded together to face the officiant.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Such modifications actually draw on a very different, and even more ancient, marital tradition. Among the earliest hunting and gathering bands of the Paleolithic world, and still today among some of their descendants, marriage was a way of turning strangers into relatives. Weddings were about creating ever-widening relationships and mutual obligations among new in-laws and neighboring communities. At my son\u2019s wedding, he and his bride \u201cgave\u201d both sets of parents away to each other, having us exchange leis to symbolize our commitment to the new network of relatives we had acquired.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Many of the most popular \u201ctraditional\u201d wedding customs today actually come from a small sliver of history when women were bring pushed out of their central roles in economic and social life and offered idealization of their beauty and purity as (rather scant) compensation. The gasp of surprise, pretended or not, when presented with a ring; the emphasis on the size of the ring and the beauty of the bridal gown, the father walking the bride to the waiting groom, and later the groom lifting her over the threshold \u2014 all these rituals come from a time when women had to rely on men to take the initiative in all things and hope that their husbands would provide for them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

That\u2019s not how medieval and early modern Europeans regarded marriage. Everyone knew that a man could not run a farm or business on his own, and in colonial America it could be hard for a man to get a license to open an inn unless he had a wife to be his co-worker. Wives were sometimes called \u201cyoke-mates.\u201d The\u00a0old German wedding custom of\u00a0Baumstamm s\u00e4gen<\/em><\/a>\u00a0nicely sums up the idea that marriage depends on the woman\u2019s contributions as well as the man\u2019s. There, the first thing a bride and groom do after the ceremony is to each take hold of one end of a cross-cut saw and vigorously saw the log in half to demonstrate they can work together.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The word\u00a0\u201cMrs.\u201d was originally derived from the female equivalent\u00a0<\/a>of the title \u201cmaster.\u201d It designated a \u201cmistress\u201d \u2014 a woman \u201cwho governs\u201d \u2014 whether married or unmarried. Only in the 19th century, at the height of what\u00a0historians call \u201cthe cult of female domesticity,\u201d<\/a>did \u201cMrs.\u201d came to indicate a woman\u2019s marital status rather than her socioeconomic status. And that marital status was considered far more important than any of her individual achievements. Women\u00a0increasingly lost even their first names<\/a>\u00a0when they wed, becoming only \u201cMrs. John Smith.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Women\u2019s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

A name was not all women lost. As the perceptive French writer Alexis de Tocqueville explained, 19th-century\u00a0American women \u201cirrevocably\u201d surrendered<\/a>\u00a0their legal independence and access to public life once they entered the bonds of matrimony. When one man heard that his childhood friend was engaged,\u00a0he confided to his diary\u00a0<\/a>that the \u201cidea of her being married seems to me much the same as her being buried.\u201d Many women recorded similar fears in their own diaries.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Women\u2019s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine. When\u00a0Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840<\/a>, her ornate white wedding dress\u00a0with its long train created a sensation<\/a>. Being a real queen, Victoria had to propose to Albert, a piece of pageantry that few women have adopted even now. But copying Victoria\u2019s wedding dress \u2014 and later the three-tiered white wedding cakes that were introduced at her daughters\u2019 weddings \u2014 was a different matter.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s often suggested that the white wedding dress caught on because it stood for purity, signaling that the bride had protected her maidenhood until the ceremony. But probably more important was its role as a uniquely female status symbol in a world where women could no longer become entrepreneurs or \u201cmistresses\u201d in their own right. Dresses with trains at least three yards long were what women wore when in attendance at the royal court, and white was the color debutantes wore when presented to the queen. The fact that white dresses were expensive to make and exceptionally difficult to keep clean in a world where rooms continually accumulated soot from fireplaces and most streets were unpaved only added to their cachet. As\u00a0Bride\u2019s Magazine put it in 1949<\/a>, wearing such a dress could make a woman \u201cqueen of the day, surrounded by your ladies-in-waiting.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Fifty years ago, wedding rituals that reinforced stereotypes of men as protectors and providers and women as delicate homebodies worked well for many couples. As late as the 1970s and \u201980s, couples who followed stereotyped gender scripts after marriage\u00a0reported higher relationship satisfaction<\/a>\u00a0than couples who experimented with nontraditional arrangements such as shared breadwinning, housework and childcare. But today, egalitarianism is an increasingly important predictor of marital satisfaction. The good news is that in marriages formed since the early 1990s, couples who share child care and housework equally\u00a0report the highest relationship and sexual satisfaction<\/a>. The bad news is that couples who follow traditional ideas about what a wife should do\u00a0report the least satisfaction and the most conflict<\/a>. So couples looking for happiness in the years after their wedding day might consider updating old ceremonies, or crafting new ones, that reinforce their commitment to equality from Day One.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Stephanie Coontz<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is the author of “<\/em>Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage”\u00a0<\/em><\/a>and is Director of Research at the\u00a0<\/em>Council on Contemporary Families.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict. Originally Posted at NBC News Few events in modern life are wrapped in as much \u201ctradition\u201d as engagements and weddings \u2014 especially for heterosexual couples. Surprise proposals from men on bended knees; diamond rings; virginal white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2063"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2078,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}