Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

The growing wedding industry figured out that the best way to get people to accept the new, performative norms of nuptial excess was to tell women—as Godey’s Lady’s Book had done in 1849 with the white wedding dress—that all of this excess was extremely traditional. “Jewelers, department stores, fashion designers, bridal consultants, and many others became experts on inventing tradition,” Howard writes, “creating their own versions of the past to legitimize new rituals and help overcome cultural resistance to the lavish affair.”

In 1938, a De Beers representative wrote to the ad agency N. W. Ayer & Son, asking if “the use of propaganda in various forms” could juice the engagement-ring market. In 1947, the N. W. Ayer copywriter Frances Gerety coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever,” and ever since then, diamond engagement rings have been all but mandatory—an $11 billion industry in America as of 2012.

Attempts to market engagement rings for men had previously flopped, as such rings were incompatible with the still-prevalent idea that engagement is a thing that men do to women. But in a war context, the male wedding band started to seem logical: with a wedding band, men could cross the ocean wearing a reminder of wife, country, and home. A tradition of bride and groom exchanging rings at the ceremony was rapidly invented. By the fifties, it was as if the double-ring ceremony had existed since the beginning of time.

Despite the economic precarity that has threatened the American population since the 2008 recession, weddings have only been getting more expensive. They remain an industry-dictated “theme park of upward mobility,” as Naomi Wolf put it: a world defined by the illusion that everyone within it is upper-middle class.

Historically, marriage has mostly been bad for women and fantastic for men. Confucius defined a wife as “someone who submits to another.” Assyrian law declared, “A man may flog his wife, pluck her hair, strike her and mutilate her ears. There is no guilt.” In early modern Europe, writes Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History, a husband “could force sex upon [his wife], beat her, and imprison her in the family home, while it was she who endowed him with all her worldly goods. The minute he placed that ring upon her finger he controlled any land she brought to the marriage and he owned outright all her movable property as well as any income she later earned.” The legal doctrine of coverture, which held that, as Sir William Blackstone put it in 1753, “the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband,” was implemented in the Middle Ages and was not fully dismantled in America until the late twentieth century. Until 1974, women were frequently required to bring their husbands with them while applying for a credit card. Until the eighties, legal codes in many states specified that husbands could not be held responsible for raping their wives.

Married men report better mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married women report worse mental health, and die earlier, than single women. (These statistics do not suggest that the act of getting married is some sort of gendered hex: rather, they reflect the way that, when a man and a woman combine their unpaid domestic obligations under the aegis of tradition, the woman usually ends up doing most of the work—a fact that is greatly exacerbated by the advent of kids.)

The first woman in America to keep her birth name after marriage was the feminist Lucy Stone, who wed Henry Blackwell in 1855. The two of them published their vows, which doubled as a protest against marriage laws that “refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.” (Stone was later barred from voting in a school board election under her maiden name.)

It took until the 1975 Tennessee State Supreme Court case Dunn v. Palermo for the final law to this effect to be struck down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and privileges of citizenship.” A requirement that a woman take her husband’s name “would stifle and chill virtually all progress in the rapidly expanding field of human liberties. We live in a new day. We cannot create and continue conditions and then defend their existence by reliance on the custom thus created.” Women began keeping their names in the seventies, when it became broadly possible to do so. In 1986, The New York Times began using the honorific “Ms.” to refer to women whose marital status was unknown, as well as to married women who wished to use their birth names.

Women believe that their names are personal, not political—in large part because the decision-making around them remains so culturally restricted and curtailed. A woman keeping her name is making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons. (And in fact, a Louisiana law still requires the child of a married couple to bear the husband’s last name in order for a birth certificate to be issued.) We find it inappropriate for women to treat their names the way that men, by default, feel entitled to. On this front, as on so many others, a woman is allowed to assert her independence as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else.

Like any social construct, marriage is most flexible when it is new.

And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms.

Here, our culture says, is an event that will center you absolutely—that will crystallize your image when you were young and gorgeous, admired and beloved, with the whole world rolling out in front of you like an endless meadow, like a plush red carpet, sparklers lighting up your irises and petals drifting through your lavish, elegant hair. In exchange, from that point forward, in the eyes of the state and everyone around you, your needs will slowly cease to exist. This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids.

Underneath the confectionary spectacle of the wedding is a case study in how inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as compensation for making us disappear.

If I object to the wife’s diminishment for the same reason that I object to the bride’s glorification, maybe this reason is much simpler and more obvious than I’ve imagined: I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.