Deep down do women want to be housewives?

In a memoir detailing her engagement, wedding, and early married life, Something New: Reflections on the Beginnings of a Marriage, Amanda Beesley describes a moment of clarity in which the economics of her planned event came into sharp focus: she had spent a month’s rent on her dress, and “the ‘deluxe’ Porta-Johns, with mirrors and running water,” that she had selected “would have paid off two months’ worth of my student loan.” Setting aside the advisability of buying an expensive dress for anything that is going to involve Porta-Johns, no matter how whiz-bang, the confession is hardly unusual: young people routinely engineer weddings that are well beyond their means.

How did we get here? The idea that the formal white wedding might not be within the purview solely of society types began during the postwar rush to the altar, which saw droves of working people—who finally had a bit of money in their pockets — having weddings more elaborate than their parents’. The first American book devoted to bridal etiquette was published in 1948, heralding the notion that one might clip from an entire volume of social convention a single attractive chapter.

The hugely influential 1950 movie Father of the Bride traded on the new national interest in the particulars of this kind of event, and it portrayed the shift toward grander weddings. Although the bride’s parents are well-off, they were married simply, “in your front parlor,” Mr. Banks reminds his wife. She is unmoved by this memory or by her husband’s pride in having worn a plain blue suit rather than a cutaway. Despite the old man’s remonstrations, it is decided that their daughter, iconically played by Elizabeth Taylor, will not follow this family tradition. She will have a different kind of wedding, “with bridesmaids and churches and automobiles and flowers and all that.” (Although the film’s wedding provided a specific fantasy for a generation of young women, many of today’s brides would turn up their noses at it. Refreshments consisted of finger sandwiches, ice cream, and tea cakes.) Facilitating the new preference for such affairs was the growing availability in the fifties of both mass-produced wedding gowns and rented formal wear for men. This kind of institutionalized formality, however, had a difficult time coexisting with the social upheaval of the sixties, and by the seventies the big white wedding (along with its dud pal, marriage) was in a period of retrenchment. Tricia Nixon’s 1971 wedding in the Rose Garden was considered by many to be Squaresville itself.

The lights came back on in the summer of 1981, when alarm clocks rang in the dead of night so that millions of Americans could witness Charles and Diana plighting their troth in real time. The doings of the British royal family may constitute a poor template for contemporary American life, but the timing was right. The Reagans had just begun their stylish reign, and lavish entertaining had made a triumphant return. The wedding world changed and has stayed changed.

The problem is that we put the formal white wedding into cold storage for so long that we’re a little unclear about what, exactly, is involved. Further, the social changes that have so profoundly reshaped American life in the past half century have mowed down virtually every institution that the traditional wedding once sanctified. To stage a white wedding as the form was originally conceived requires a woman young enough that her very age suggests a measure of innocence, the still-married parents who have harbored her up to this point, and a young man of like religious affiliation who is willing to assume responsibility for her keep. Trying to pull off this piece of theater in light of the divorce culture, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, and the acceptability of mixed and later marriages threatens to make a complete mockery of the thing. It’s like trying to stage a nativity pageant without a baby and a donkey: you can do it, but you’re going to need one hell of a manger.

The modern bride, of course, doesn’t dwell on any of this. She is, after all, the daughter of one of the most profound cultural shifts in American history, and this is part of her birthright: the freedom to sample, on an à la carte basis, the various liberties that young womanhood offers. She can gratefully accept a handful of condoms from her guidance counselor and also be assured that no one will laugh when she shows up at her wedding, on her father’s arm, wearing a floor-length beaded white gown. And besides, there’s no time to think about all this — there’s so much to do! Sending welcome baskets to the hotel rooms of out-of-town guests, learning the precise way to tether a gold band to the ring bearer’s satin pillow, discerning which participants must be thanked not only with a note but also with a gift — there’s no end to it.

Excerpted from “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife” by Caitlin Flanagan. Copyright © 2006 by Caitlin Flanagan. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Time Warner Book Group Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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