As long as we both shall love?: Individuality, authority, and the wedding in postwar America

This dissertation establishes the white wedding as the modern wedding celebration style of post-World War II America and argues that the wedding retained its cultural significance due to the basic flexibility of assumed wedding traditions. The white wedding - an event marked by conspicuous consumption, adherence to prescribed gender roles and responsibilities, declaration of religious belonging, and self-conscious embrace of "traditions" such as formal dress, proper vows, and a post-ceremony reception - has survived, and even thrived, because of couples' ability to personalize the celebration and exert personal authority over its shape. Often described as "traditional," the modern wedding actually lent itself to fluidity and alteration. This was true even in its budding form during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Embodying the postwar focus on stability, consumerism, and domesticity, the white wedding appealed to many couples as they moved beyond a past filled with depression, sacrifice, and war. While "tradition" was part of the wedding's allure, the celebration allowed for a demonstration of modern American notions of love and matrimony. Their weddings appeared conventional, but couples of the early postwar years actually did something quite new with their celebrations.;Brides and grooms of the 1960s and 1970s expressed a desire for individuality and personal expression that was not so different from the impetus of brides and grooms of the immediately preceding decades. Challenges to what had become the standard wedding celebration - such as the hippie or alternative weddings of the late 1960s and 1970s and, later, the queer weddings of the 1990s and 2000s - demonstrated more explicitly the possibility that weddings could be sites of personal expression. Individual couples could challenge social norms and reinterpret the wedding and wedding tradition in ways that matched cultural and political views. The wedding's ability to withstand and even absorb challenges has given the celebration its cultural salience. The evolution of the postwar wedding celebration points to the increased emphasis on individualism and the greater desire for self-fulfillment in modern American life. The growing power of these demands highlights the continuity of the postwar decades and links generations typically assumed to have been at odds.