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A History of Courtship and Weddings, 1830-1990

Today we are pleased to introduce Leslie Bellais as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. Leslie is the Wisconsin Historical Society’s curator of social history, and she’s been working for the society for 27 years. As the curator of social history, she oversees the society’s collections of costumes, textiles, and personal artifacts, which includes around 2,000 dresses, 250 men’s suits and coats, children’s clothing, and jewelry, among many other things. Here today to share a history if courtship and weddings, please join me in welcoming Leslie Bellais. (applause)

– Thank you very much, Katie. So today I’m going to talk about rituals of romance. This is based on an exhibit I did. It’s the first exhibit I did 27 years ago. This was my probationary exhibit to see if I could do exhibits. Obviously, since I’m still here, I passed. So I just wanted to give you, let you know about that. And also to re-say what Katie said, this covers 1830 to 1990. So I don’t go into the near present. So I also want to point out that this is, what I’m going to talk about today are based on trends. This is the overall trends of what’s happened since 1830 to about 1990. It may not reflect your family’s actual experience because there are outliers and people who did different things. But this is– What I’m going to show you today is basically what was presented today, basically what was done in general. So first I want to point out that this is a ritual, what I’m going to be talking today is a ritual of romance.

American rituals of romance are fairly new, beginning between about 1830 and 1850. They arose at a time when a number of factors came together to affect the way men and women courted and married. And there are four factors that are really most important. One is women’s changing roles, which I’ll go over later, the urbanization of communities, the availability of more man-made products, and a new concept of romanticism. So rituals generally do not illustrate natural human behavior. Instead, they are prescribed actions that feel natural because they are constantly repeated and often learned in childhood. So, if you think about it, wedding rituals, for example, have been deeply ingrained into young girls from getting like Barbie bridal dolls or other kind of wedding dolls fairly early on. That they sort of learn that this is something that they should strive for or want to accomplish.

So the primary function of rituals of romance is to create predictable chain of events that protect the participants from the unexpected, especially during moments of transition. They also provide an expression of solidarity. A feeling among participants that they belong to a unique group bigger than themselves. And I just want to point out the pictures that you’re seeing here are mainly from our Wisconsin Historical Images collection. So they tend to– I’ve tried to mainly do Wisconsin images. This is a church in Milwaukee. Rituals also have other reasons for existing. One is that they give a sense of dignity and importance to events with the pageantry and their formality. And they also link the past and future with the present. Because they have been preordained, they’ve been done before, and they’re expected to endure, that’s how they link the future and the past.

But they are malleable and each generation can choose to change or retain the rituals to fit their peculiar circumstances. All these reasons explain why rituals have surrounded courtship and the wedding ceremonies, the rites of passage that transform people from single to married status. These rites are important events for most societies because the married couple goes on usually to create a family and that continues and those families continue the life of the society. So I’m going to start by talking about courtship rituals. And the first step on the road to marriage– I think I’ll stay here– is meeting a suitable partner. And courtship has been sometimes a scary and uncomfortable process that has used rituals to give the procedure structure an And making love at this time does not mean what it means today. It was sort of just being romantic together and just making out is how we would call it at this point.

So movies were a great place to go to do something like that. And, obviously, people knew about that, that was happening, or you wouldn’t have sheet music with that so blatantly made obvious. So during the 1920s and 1930s, dating began to be seen as an economic act. One where a man asked a woman out on a date, and the thought was that women were kind of selling their company which men could buy by taking them out on a date. And I have a quote that one young man from the 1930s commented that he rarely got his money’s worth. (laughter) Ooo, yes. So here’s a dance hall with young couples in it from 1914. You might notice it says exhibit seven or 71 above it. I’ll see if I can point that out, right there. This is actually from a trial. This was used in a trial to show that this bartender or this owner of this tavern or dance hall was allowing underage kids into the hall and letting them drink. So these are kids who are in the 14- to 16-year range, breaking the law so to speak. But they’re having a good time, and they’re out on a date. So, and just to kind of reinforce the thought that this was an economic act, I found this cartoon from 1939 in Life magazine that says: “Wear any old dress you care to, Dolores, “they won’t pay for better than second balcony seats.” (laughter)

Both men and women were seeing these as kind of an economic act of scarcity and abundance. Now, during the 1920s, this competitive process was viewed as a training ground for success-bound youth. It was a way to practice being kind of a business person, a successful business person in that scarcity and abundance issues that were going on within dating. And the other thing we know is that during this time period, especially during the 1920s, the college students decided that the number of one’s dates designated a person’s status and popularity, so it’s not important to have one, you know, single person that you dated all the time, but to have many dates kind of filter, you know, filter through your life. And, in fact, one etiquette book at the time suggested that if a girl got stuck with one man at the dance, which meant that no one cut in while they were dancing, it was best to go home than be labeled unpopular. (laughter) So these are definitely seen as economic acts.

By the 1930s, the Depression accepted competitive energies denied elsewhere, at least that’s how social historians have seen this. And that social success compensated for fears that other avenues of competition were closed off. And here’s dating in the 1920s and 1930s. We have a Saturday Evening Post cover called “Going Out,” where little sister is watching big sister get ready. And then we also have the University of Wisconsin’s junior prom from 1924. It was held in the State Capitol until the Union was built. The Memorial Union was built in ’27-’28. So here they are in the Capitol Rotunda area. So the next thing that happened is we had World War II and the Depression. It really changed courtship rituals of the 1940s and 1950s by decreasing dating’s traditional competitiveness.

Teenagers in the ’40s and ’50s wanted security. They didn’t want to have to worry about having lots of dates. So they adopted a new type of dating called going steady, which is a ritual that, dating ritual that closely resembled marriage. And couples became exclusive pairs, and no one in these couples had to worry about having a date for the Saturday night dance. And we do know that parents disliked the concept of going steady when it first emerged because it limited the number of people from the opposite sex a young person would meet.

And they also greatly feared that it would lead to premarital sex. Now, for a couple to go steady, a pseudo-betrothal was required. And so they usually consisted of the boy giving the girl his school ring, letter jacket, letter sweater, or, in this case, we’re seeing here the fraternity pin. There it is. This fraternity pin was actually used for pinning a girl. And it was from Lawrence College in the late ’50s, early 1960s. The person who donated it to us told us he gave it to a girl and pinned her and they became a couple. Later on she gave it back, which is why he had it. And he went on to marry someone else. But it’s kind of– Accepting this fraternity pin into the collection was really exciting because we knew it had this history to it. So the act of pinning a girl often meant that the couple considered themselves engaged to be engaged. And the thing to keep in mind is these were activities of school-aged youth.

Once you’re out of school in the ’40s and ’50s, you didn’t practice marriage, you got married. So in the ’40s and’ 50s, this is that baby boom era, post-World War II era. This is the youngest ages people ever got married were during those about 15 years, between ’46 and ’61, when the average age was for women to get married at age 20 and men at 22. even before this, in the Victorian era, the average age was closer to 24 and 26. So, the age of getting married dropped dramatically at this time. Now, in the mid-1960s, the practice of going steady began to disappear as a new generation rejected their parents traditional dating rituals. I should just point out before I move on that this is a movie poster from a movie called “Going Steady” from 1958.

And this is a comic book series called “Going Steady.” We have a number of their issues. But I thought this one seemed to really capture what going steady is all about. And you can maybe tell that they have pins of each other on their shirts. So, in the mid-1960s, a new generation rejected this concept of going steady because instead of security, they valued freedom. And so what you begin to see is that the sexual revolution and the women’s movement of the late ’60s dramatically altered courtship rituals by challenging the traditional rules of dating. The result was a new freedom for couples but also a new confusion. People didn’t know how to meet other people. How do I make this happen?

And so, at the same time, we also know that there are high divorce rates. This is the beginning of high divorce rates, more educational opportunities, especially for women, and marriage is occurring later in life. And what this created was a new generation, a fairly large new generation of older singles who are not in school. So these singles did not have organized activities like they would have had in school bringing them together. So their confusion and isolation led to participating in a new set of ventures, including singles clubs, computer dating, and personal advertising. Now, personal advertisements had existed before.

They dated back as long as newspapers have been around, though usually they were asking for, looking for a wife or husband not a dating partner or someone to spend time with. So disco dancing, as you can see in this Benson & Hedges ad from 1977, was a fad of the late ’70s that brought men and women together at night clubs. And by the early ’80s, we know that 25% of couples met at bars, discos, or singles clubs. So, yes, I don’t know if you can see it. It says, “If you got bopped during the bump with your soft pack, try our hard pack.” (laughter) So dating services also became more popular, especially computer dating. Computer dating, if you remember at this time, and I assume most of you remember this era, you didn’t have a computer at home. You’d have to go to a computer dating business, input your information, and they would put it through the computer and tell you who you might work with. So I picked these all up between–

These are all flyers from Madison computer dating businesses from about 1990-1991, as I was putting this exhibit together. So we know that about 14% of men and 18% of women in 1980 found their significant others through dating services of which included computer dating services. But, in fact, most people in this late era met people the way they’ve always met people, which is through friends and family. So 35% in 1980 met their significant other through friends and family. Now, historically, the reason most people court is to find a life partner, someone to marry. And the unique feature of this 200-year period under discussion is that the majority of people marrying felt that love and individual happiness were the necessary elements for marital success. Before this, you’re thinking late 18th century and earlier, family perpetuation, security, and economic considerations were the primary reasons people got married. Being an old maid put you in a financially uncomfortable position and made you a burden to your family. So getting married was fairly important. Now, after the age of enlightenment, the age of enlightenment put more emphasis on the individual than it did on the group behavior, where the individual sort of gets prized over the group.

So the way I kind of think of it is that if you know your Star Trek, it’s like the Borg is no longer the strength. It’s the single individual who’s the strength of the community. So individual preference, individual happiness now becomes more important. The other thing is after the age of enlightenment, what follows is the age of romanticism. And so emotions over reason now are more important. So how you feel emotionally becomes a significant part of your personality and how you interact in society. So what we do know, though, is that once you start anticipating eternal love and happiness, which creates high expectations, you start stressing over whether those expectations are going to be met. So we know that beginning in the second quarter of the 19th century when other expectations ar This is the top of the line wedding you could have in Wisconsin in the 1880s and it’s not surprising that she wore a white wedding dress drenched in lace.

The one on the right is from Darlington, which is Lafayette County, 1898. So here we are at the turn of the century in a rural community wearing a white wedding dress. Now, this woman also I found her description of her wedding in the– not the Darlington paper but the county newspaper. And it was described as one of the biggest events of Darlington for years past. So she’s fairly prominent within her community, and she does choose to wear a white wedding gown, though she’s trimmed it with chiffon and not lace. Now, during– The concept of wearing a wedding dress that follows fashion, continued through the 1920s. So wedding dresses are generally supposed to be white dresses in the latest fashion. So as we move into the 1920s and dresses get shorter, so do wedding dresses.

Almost all wedding dresses from the 1920s are below the knee to mid-calf, like you’re seeing in these two. And the one on– Well, no. One on the left we don’t have any information about, but the one on the right is from Mount Horeb in the 1920s. So this is the last gasp. The 1920s is the last gasp of when fashion and wedding fashion are hand in hand. In the 1930s, that changes. And what happens is the introduction of ready-to-wear clothes for women really takes off in the ’20s and follows into the ’30s. Up to this point, most clothes were made, custom-made for the person. And, also, there’s a creation of a separate wedding dress industry. There’s actually a creation of a whole bridal industry for everything you need for the wedding, but the wedding dress industry also appears at this time. And they create a separate look for wedding dresses, which is essentially a chased evening gown.

So evening gowns are usually low cut, off the shoulder, and long. So now we’ve gone to a long dress but it’s chased. It’s covering up the arms and it covers up the dcolletage. Interestingly, that changed around the 1990s where often today’s brides are almost always strapless, off the shoulder something. So they’re going for a sexy look. This was not to be sexy. This was supposed to be chased and demur. And so once these were worn, there was no other place to wear them because they don’t, they had no other purpose. A chased evening gown in white has no other purpose except to be a wedding gown. And so they become keepsakes of the wedding instead of something you could wear again. And, in fact, I think the wedding dress supports what was considered, I think, the traditional wedding dress supports the image of a bride as a young, demur, graceful, happy, and serene woman, like you’re seeing on the cover of this Ladies’ Home Journal from 1910.

The other thing that helps– Well, I should say that the concept of traditional weddings, with all of its rituals, remained mainly untouched, has remained mainly untouched since the late 19th century. But it was not unchallenged. And the main challenge came in the late ’60s and early ’70s when people or couples not only rejected the rituals of courtship of their parents, but also their wedding rituals. And they rebelled against what they thought was false emotion, obsession with material things, hollow rituals, and competitiveness that they thought distinguished the traditional wedding in their eyes.

So they created the alternative, or new wedding as it was called at the time. And these weddings were characterized by individuality and spontaneity. And they emphasized vows and commitment over tradition and ritual. They often had the following traits: an outdoor location, untraditional wedding clothes, organic and healthy reception food, guests who may be asked to participate in the ceremony, and often couple-written vows. The dress that you’re seeing on the left was worn at an alternative wedding by a former staff member. She was married on a farm in Dane County that included having her dog and a mime as part of the ceremony. (laughter)

But I couldn’t find really good pictures of alternative weddings in Wisconsin, so you’re seeing one from West Virginia and one from Alameda, California. Now, what happens is that we know that in 1971, at the height of this alternative wedding, that 80% of brides still opted to have the traditional ceremony. And so the question became why is this new wedding failing? In fact, in 1973, this is just two years later, it was described as having fallen into a predictable, repetitive mold. And we feel that– Historians now feel that the reason it did this is because– Why it failed is because it didn’t connect with the past. It often excluded older family members who didn’t get it or felt uncomfortable in that situation, it did not have the pageantry, formality, and solemnity that gave weddings their importance as a rite of passage.

And so, ultimately, it was not something that was accepted by most women or most brides. But the question still remains is why would women who viewed themselves or were viewing themselves in the late 1960s, early 1970s, as a new type of woman. We we And I just want to follow up with one last ritual that I think is fairly important to this time period, and that is wedding presents. So the change in women’s roles was a major catalyst in bringing about the traditional wedding, but the flood of mass manufactured goods available and the emerging consumer-oriented society of the 19th century also had a tremendous effect on wedding rituals. After the Civil War, requirements for a comfortable standard of living rose, and this usually meant owning more stuff than previous generations.

And the wedding became the time when most couples acquired the bulk of their possessions, either as part of the trousseau or as wedding presents. And here you’re seeing a domestic sewing machine ad on the left, showing a couple, a wedding couple looking at their presents, and you can see one of the prized gifts is a domestic sewing machine. On the right is a painting called “Wedding Gifts,” where grandma, mom, and the bride, I believe it goes, this is grandma, mom, and the bride, are looking over the wedding gifts. And before, we know that before 1830s, a wedding gift was usually land or money from the parents. You didn’t get lots of fancy wedding gifts from friends and family.

But by the 1870s, not only were close friends and family giving presents, but also distant relatives, acquaintances, coworkers, everyone was expected to give a wedding gift. And the nature of gifts changed from being kind of necessities, like land and money, to unessential luxuries directed towards the bride. And that’s what you’re seeing in the painting. So gift-givers assume that the parents would take care of the necessities and it would be offensive and tactless to offer them as presents. So, many upper and middle class brides cataloged and displayed their gifts in the parlor. And putting pressure on givers not to give anything cheap or unimpressive because people would come to your house and look over who gave what. And, as you can see, there’s a lot of silver involved here.

And some of the– Actually a lot of the gifts were geared to entertaining. So you might get things like asparagus serving sets or crumb trays or celery servers or oyster forks, fish knives, and often fancy flatware, china, glass and linens. During the 20th century, that changed to small appliances, like blenders, toasters, and mixers, for example. So this is actually a stereopticon slide showing a silver anniversary wedding.

I thought it was a wedding gift at first, but then I did some research on the family and on this picture and found out it was their silver anniversary wedding where they got more stuff. So it helped bolster up what they had. Now, we do know that the China Hall store in Rochester, Minnesota, created the first bridal registry in 1901. And the idea, of course, was to prevent the duplication of gifts, but it also encouraged wedding guests to patronize that particular store. However, it’s not until the 1930s that the bridal registry truly became popular. And by 1984, 65% of couples we know registered for gifts. Now, other industries besides department stores, like Prange’s, which I realize is no longer around, but this is a gift registry that I actually needed to print out in 1991. So that was useful. And I put it on exhibit. Other industries, not necessarily bridal industries, got into the wedding gift advertising, realizing that the wedding guest is a prime candidate for purchases.

So here we’re seeing three ads. One for the wedding gift that keeps on giving. It turns out to be an iron. The one in the middle is ringed with thoughts of you, showing a wedding ring surrounding a toaster. And then the one on the right says, “gifts with a long and happy future,” and its toasters and irons that they’re pushing there. So wedding gift-giving in the late Victorian era reinforced a predominant Victorian belief that material goods provided happiness. So having more stuff made you more happy. And we know this continued into the 20th century because here’s a Saturday Evening Post cover of a couple dreaming of their future. I think they’re a newly engaged couple dreaming of their future. And I hope you can see in the picture that they are dreaming of stereos and radio console sets, TVs, refrigerators, washers and dryers, pianos, two cars, a house, a pool, a couple kids, well actually three kids, one, two, and three, with a nanny, and plus all the appliances up front. So, like I said, this belief of stuff continued into the 20th century.

But what I want to conclude by saying is that American rituals of romance had their roots in the early Victorian era, a time when society changed dramatically. These rituals helped couples, but especially women, adjust to a new set of expectations. We now live in a period of history in which many rituals have become obsolete and disappeared or altered form completely, and courtship rituals have been susceptible to fluctuations in American society. And each generation has modified them to fit their values and needs. On the other hand, traditional weddings survived almost untouched, partly because the bridal and related wedding industries have fossilized and sold the traditions of the 19th century to succeeding generations.

More importantly, however, the traditional wedding’s formality, pageantry, and opulence gives this rite of passage an aura of importance and uniqueness. Weddings connect us to our ancestors and provide opportunities for widely scattered families to come together. The traditional wedding will probably continue to survive as long as it satisfies these basic needs. I’m finishing with an advertisement from the Saturday Evening Post from Ponderosa Pine Woodwork, who also found a way to sell their products to newly-married couples. You can see it says, “Just Married” on the car, and it says, “They’ll live happily ever after “with Ponderosa Pine Woodwork.” (laughter) So, thank you very much. (applause)