As Long as We Both Shall Love

The White Wedding in Postwar America

Karen M. Dunak

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814760444
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

· “A very engaging account of the stunning cultural malleability of the wedding… [Dunak] deserves great praise… Dunak compels us as no one else has.” – Christina Simmons, University of Windsor

“[A] sophisticated undertaking… Innovative research.” – Elizabeth Pleck, Professor Emerita, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

1
“Linking the Past with the Future”

ORIGINS OF THE POSTWAR WHITE WEDDING

In the midst of the planning for Kay Banks’s 1948 wedding, her father Stanley mused to himself: “It should have been so simple. Boy and girl meet, fall in love, marry, have babies—who eventually grow up, meet other babies, fall in love, marry. Looked at from this angle, it was not only simple, it was positively monotonous. Why then must Kay’s wedding assume the organizational complexity of a major political campaign?”¹ Stanley’s bewilderment at the wedding process indicated the changing nature of the celebration in post–World War II America. Edward Streeter’s Father of the Bride chronicled the events leading up to the wedding of Kay Banks and Buckley Dunstan. The book gave readers an in-depth account of a newly democratized style of wedding celebration: the increasingly typical white wedding. A national best-seller, Streeter’s 1948 novel struck such a chord among the American public that it soon became a Hollywood film starring Spencer Tracy as the ever-baffled Stanley Banks and Elizabeth Taylor as his daughter, Kay.² Although told from a father’s perspective, Father of the Bride resonated with readers and viewers alike, regardless of previous wedding role or experience. Americans learned that in order to achieve an ideal white wedding, the newly requisite style of postwar celebration, no detail could be spared. As the 1940s and 1950s progressed, a series of requirements marked the white wedding: acceptance of idealized gender roles, market participation, religious expression, and industry-approved traditions. As the white wedding took its place as the seemingly agreed-upon ideal, Father of the Bride suggested that the path to the altar was often far from smooth.

Even while her parents supported her and paid for the celebration, from the first moment of her engagement, Kay continually insisted the wedding was her day. She would have the final say on all decisions. As such, she believed that her personal desires should be fulfilled and her opinions should carry the most weight. The views of others—including her groom-to-be—were secondary. In one representative scene, Stanley reported that a friend, having “married off” four daughters, indicated that a wedding was “either confined to the bosom of the family or held in Madison Square Garden.” There were either “thirty or three hundred” guests, no in between. Kay rejected this notion out of hand:

Pops, if you mean that you’re crazy. I know what you and Mom want. You want every old fogy in town so that you can hear them say, “Yes, she really was too lovely. And the most beautiful dress, my dear.” Well I just won’t have it. This is my wedding and it’s going to be my friends.³

In Kay’s mind, her personal relationships, particularly those with her peers, superseded her parents’ relationships with members of the community. No longer privileging the family and community participation that had long marked the wedding celebration, Kay’s wedding vision represented a departure from past tradition and a move toward a modern celebration style.⁴ In Kay’s view, parents were necessary for financial and moral support. They could help with the planning and the logistics, but in major wedding-related decisions, their opinions ranked behind the bride’s.

Kay’s parents had other ideas for the wedding. They were determined to have a voice in the planning. Both the book and film featured scene after scene in which Stanley Banks struggled to understand the seeming necessity of the white wedding, while his wife, Ellie, embraced the chance to host the ultimate in wedding celebrations. Mrs. Banks, Streeter wrote, “looked at the matter more from the point of view of a stage manager. How long would it take to prepare the costumes, build the scenery, and collect the props? She concluded that, working day and night, the production might be staged in three months—not a minute earlier.”⁵ Attempts to limit the guest list failed as Stanley, Ellie, and even Kay realized that they “had too many dear, close, loyal, lifelong friends, to all of whom they seemed to be indebted.”⁶ For the modern bride, a small wedding seemed an impossible feat. Multiple publics had to be considered. In spite of Kay’s assertion of the wedding as her day, various interests still had to be taken into consideration.

Kay inhabited dual roles during her three-month engagement: she was Stanley and Ellie’s daughter, but she was soon to be Buckley Dunstan’s wife. On the one hand, she relied on her parents to support her until marriage and to finance the wedding that would mark her entry to married life. But, at the same time, she had started to shift her alliance to Buckley. She increasingly agreed with Buckley’s points of view and defended these points to her father. Kay struggled to establish independence from her nuclear family as she planned to start her own. The wedding provided Kay with a trial run at demonstrating personal authority and the newly achieved maturity associated with married life. Other brides of the time, and throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, would embrace their weddings in a similar style. For the most part, grooms of the time, like Buckley, played second fiddle. They accepted their supporting role in wedding planning and on the wedding day.

The larger struggle was between the generations. Kay and her parents consistently butted heads over their conflicting views of what the wedding should be. While Kay insisted on the prominence and preeminence of her role, she felt pressure from various sources that undermined her independence even as she attempted to exert it. On Kay’s wedding day, Stanley found her crying. He insisted that she should be happy; no girl should cry on her wedding day. Kay despondently replied, “Oh, I know it, Pops. That’s just the trouble. It’s my wedding day, but it isn’t. It’s everybody else’s wedding day but it just isn’t mine.”⁷ Other brides of the time—and in the future—would find themselves in similar predicaments as they fought for the wedding as a day they could call their own.

While Stanley believed he was providing his daughter with an elaborate celebration, Kay and Buckley’s wedding was but a hint of what was to come. The Bankses presented Kay with a substantial trousseau, and friends and family contributed numerous wedding gifts. Kay wore a white, sweetheart wedding gown and her bridesmaids wore matching dresses.⁸ The wedding took place in a church, filled with flowers. The reception, however, was held at the Bankses’ home, and while catered, it was not a sit-down meal.⁹ An orchestra played but there was little dancing. In the decades following World War II, home weddings would become less common. Dinner and dancing would become key parts of the white wedding style. Kay Banks’s wedding demonstrated how postwar brides negotiated the modern and the traditional. She included elements of wedding celebration that were growing increasingly common, and, according to the growing wedding industry, increasingly necessary. Simultaneously, she made room for wedding elements insisted upon by her parents and designed to satisfy the broader expectations of family and community.

Kay Banks’s wedding represented—in a primitive form—the new white wedding that became the standard style of wedding celebration in the decades following World War II. Like other brides in the booming postwar economy, Kay Banks stood at the center of the newly democratized white wedding and held unprecedented authority over its direction. Her wedding preparations showcased the influences that would inform the shape of the wedding for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: desire for personal authority and autonomy, increased participation in the consumer marketplace, and the influence of an ever-stronger peer culture. The overlap and interrelationship of these components further enhanced the white wedding’s power and appeal as brides and, to a lesser extent, their grooms, used the wedding to express their views about modern American life and their place within it. The astounding popularity of Father of the Bride, both as novel and film, suggested the growing influence of mass media as a wedding model for the celebrations of young couples. From the late 1940s on, the white wedding would be the wedding style against which all others were measured. Father of the Bride predicted the growth of the white wedding’s popularity. The tale likewise foreshadowed contests that would mark this new wedding style and postwar American life more broadly.

* * *

While a wedding such as Kay Banks and Buckley Dunstan’s would be described as “traditional,” their celebration marked a sharp departure from weddings of the American past. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans wed in a variety of celebration styles. Some men and women enjoyed the splendor of the white wedding, but for many Americans, the wedding day was just another day. It was rare for a ceremony to have been planned months in advance or that wedding planning would consume the majority of one’s time and focus in the months prior. When Inez Chase married in September 1941, she recorded in her diary, “Rainned morning & evening. Will & I were married.”¹⁰ The weather, not the wedding, merited first mention. As Mrs. Banks recalled her own wedding, she described a front parlor ceremony during which she wore a simple blue suit. The white wedding, for a variety of reasons, had been beyond the grasp of many Americans just several decades before.¹¹ Affected by Americans’ cultural affiliations, social views, and economic status, the white wedding’s path to prevalence was marked by a series of stops and starts.

White weddings had long been the province of the American elite and upper-middle class. Elaborate celebrations signified wealth and social distinction. The rich showcased their connections via their wedding celebrations. Those with the economic means and social status had celebrated in this elaborate style since the mid-nineteenth century, when merchants began to play an important role in wedding ceremonies. Specially designed gowns, professional catering and wait staffs, and expertly arranged flowers and wedding décor were luxuries enjoyed primarily by the urban upper-middle class and elite. Postwar couples of privileged backgrounds could claim a link to the white wedding as they embraced such goods and services in their own celebrations. But those of middle-class, working-class, or rural backgrounds were unlikely to have had parents or grandparents who celebrated with the kind of wedding that rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.¹²

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, variation in region, ethnicity, race, and class differentiated one wedding celebration from another. Weddings ranged from inauspicious visits to a county justice of the peace to quiet home ceremonies to festive communitywide ethnic celebrations. Families and communities passed along celebration styles and helped young couples as they prepared to celebrate their weddings in ways familiar to those of similar background and social standing. “Traditional” weddings linked participants to a variety of shared ethnic or regional pasts. As couples followed diverse practices handed down by family or community members, no single American tradition emerged.¹³

Upper-middle-class and elite weddings might be marked by lavish consumer expenditure, but weddings of middle-class, working-class, or rural men and women were more likely to be a blend of carefully selected purchases and home craft or entirely homespun affairs. Essie Simmons’s Arkansas wedding demonstrated the importance of the family’s willing participation to a successful rural celebration. Married at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 16, 1921, Simmons celebrated her wedding with the help of family, in a simply decorated home. “Jim had four nieces,” Simmons recalled, “and they had gone out and found autumn leaves and flowers and decorated the whole house. The women of the family had cooked a wonderful wedding supper, and they had invited some of the family. … The girls had decorated the fireplace with all this beautiful foliage. And that was my wedding.”¹⁴

Emphasizing the importance of family and place, Simmons remembered, “Jim’s father said to me after the marriage ceremony, ‘Jim was married on the exact same spot he was born.’”¹⁵ Essie Simmons’s father-in-law’s emphasis on the home and local community suggests just how strong a role region and background played in a couple’s relationship during the first decades of the twentieth century. Family and community influence and approval weighed heavily on prospective brides and grooms.¹⁶ While couples of the postwar years often would experience a different relationship to place and extended family, during the first half of the twentieth century, the bride and the groom served as a link between or a demonstration of strength within a community.

Ethnic communities likewise used the wedding celebration as a time to demonstrate the strong connection between the couple and their respective backgrounds and kin. During the first decades of the twentieth century, extended family, community, and ethnic association all played important roles in the Romanian-American weddings of Lake County, Indiana. Local influence created a standard of celebration, one that future generations might follow in their weddings. Receptions featured typical ethnic fare, often prepared by women of the neighborhood or church. Emilia Apolzan indicated that this trend was common, as she noted of her own wedding, “The women prepared sarmale [stuffed cabbage], different salads, flat cakes, with apples, cheese and farina fillings.” Traditional community practices that involved many members of the extended family and community helped a couple to prepare for their wedding day. Elizabeth Drag remembered, “They used to have a basket that they carried and each house used to give you a couple of eggs. When they came back to the bride’s house the eggs were used in baking for the wedding. They baked the colac [sweet bread], nutroll and whatever else needed to be baked.”¹⁷ The willing assistance of friends and family—and the expectation that they would assist—made the commercial services of a baker or caterer unnecessary. Guests were not incidental, but rather, were a fundamental part of the wedding planning and the wedding celebration.

The beginnings of the modern wedding industry developed during the 1920s with the first wave of mass American consumption. Business promoted the white wedding as a standard to which all Americans could aspire. Department stores, jewelers, florists, photographers, and the growing field of “wedding experts” attempted to convince (often with great success) engaged men and women that their weddings should follow a “traditional” format, one that imbued their union with the sanctity it and they deserved. The business of weddings participated in a clear “invention of tradition,” a process designed so businesses might profit from a couple’s desire to make their special day as special as they could afford. As with other manifestations of the emerging consumer society, the wedding industry shaped the wants and needs of the population. Wedding practices formerly relegated to fantasy became commonplace. Those with an eye to fashion, in particular, relied on the advice of the burgeoning wedding industry to learn how they could arrange to have a perfect “traditional” wedding.¹⁸ While the industry maintained some power even during the Great Depression and war years, many couples faced financial and material obstacles that prevented the white wedding style of celebration. While large celebrations were considered improper during wartime, circumstance beyond a couple’s control just as often prevented a white wedding celebration.¹⁹

Wartime weddings, by their very nature, were often rushed affairs. In the early years of World War II, June Lundy’s fiancé, Herbert Boyd, was stationed in Denver. Learning he had wanted to marry her on his last furlough home to Iowa, she found a substitute to teach her grammar school class and hopped a train to take her to Denver. Arriving on Saturday, Lundy did a whirlwind round of wedding preparation: she visited a doctor to procure a statement testifying to her health (a legal r...