April 25, 2016 • 35 mins
Have you ever wondered why so many of today's weddings feature white dresses, tiered cakes and registries for silver and dishes? Queen Victoria (and the rest of her era) get a lot of the credit.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trecb will Sit and I'm Holly Fry. So usually
on our show you've been listening for a while, you
know this. We try to take a broad look at
(00:22):
history and encompass as much of the world as we can,
and we especially try to do this when we're talking
about the history of something like colors are knitting or
peanut butter, and even when we've talked about the something
being an American product, like spam, we've also tried to
look at how spam made its way into other cultures
and cuisines. So today's episode is really not that uh.
(00:45):
For about the last eighteen months, various folks have asked
us to talk about wedding history, either a complete history
of marriage, which is way too broad for a thirty
minutes show, or sort of a history of various wedding
traditions and where they come from. So I started trying
to research that one, and the research led me in
a little bit of a different direction, which is a
(01:06):
brief history of the so called white wedding. So the
term white wedding was first coined in the spring of
eighteen forty in the British monthly Metropolitan magazine, and at
the time a white wedding was just the wedding in
which the bride were a white dress, but since then
it's come to suggest some other particular rituals and kind
of trappings. So that's we're gonna talk about today. We
(01:28):
definitely know that they are all kinds of beautiful and
touching and fascinating wedding traditions from all over the world
and all over history, and even within the United States.
There are tons and tons of regional and cultural and
religious specifics. But what we're really talking about today is
this idea of the white wedding, particularly in Britain and
the United States, and some of the things that have
become most closely associated with it. First up the piece,
(01:51):
most listeners probably know the very basics of already white
wedding dresses are just about ubiquitous today because Queen Victoria
got married in one in eighteen forty. Before that, there
was a lot more variety and wedding dresses, including white ones,
and most people, particularly outside of the aristocracy, basically got
married in the best clothing that they owned. It was
(02:12):
often their church clothes or a new dress that they
intended to use for special events going forward from their wedding.
You did not get married in a white dress. Heck no,
I'm a spiller. No, I got married in a red
dress because I got married at Christmas and I'm ridiculous
and I spill things, so anything pale was going to
be a danger. So for people that thought it was
(02:34):
like a big cultural statement on my part, and I
was doing some Jezebel jam. I just spilled stuff and
I don't look great in white, So that was pretty
much the motivation. And you're actually not getting married in white.
I'm also not getting married in white. I'm getting married
in blue because I want to and because it's beautiful
(02:55):
on you. Oh, thank you. So a little about the
couple of Victor Area and Albert before we get to
their actual wedding and what she was wearing, because this
wedding is going to come up again. Victoria met her
future husband, Albert of Saxe cober Gota in eighteen thirty six,
when she was sixteen and not yet on the throne.
He had been invited to London for her seventeenth birthday celebration.
(03:18):
Albert and Victoria were cousins, and Albert had actually heard
when he was small that probably he ought to get
married to Victoria one day, so that was an idea
that was already in his head. And at this first meeting,
Victoria was immediately taken with him. She thought he was handsome,
and the two of them spent a lot of time
together during this visit. Victoria was terribly sad when Albert
(03:41):
left for Brussels that June, and she wrote his father
Leopold a letter saying quote, I must thank you, my
beloved uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have
contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert.
Allow me, then, my dearest uncle, to tell you how
delighted I am with him, and how much I like
him in every way. He possesses every quality that could
(04:02):
be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible,
so kind, and so good and so amiable to he
has besides the most pleasing and delightful exterior in appearance
you can possibly see. And from there she basically admonishes
her uncle to keep her cousin safe for her. She
liked him a She liked him heat. It's one of
(04:22):
the things that makes me love Victoria is just her
adoration of Albert. Uh, It's so touching and sweet to me. Yeah. So,
once she had ascended to the throne and decided she
was getting ready to get married, which she didn't do immediately,
she invited Albert and his brother Ernst to Windsor Castle
in October of eighteen thirty nine, essentially to choose between
(04:43):
the two of them for the sake of strengthening political ties.
And she was basically set on Albert to be her
husband the minute she saw him again, probably to be honest,
even before that. She proposed a few days later, and
then wrote in her diary, Oh to feel I was
and am love by such an angel as Albert was
too great delight to describe. He is perfection. Oh how
(05:06):
I love and adore him? I cannot say. Yeah, And
just in case anybody uh raised an eyebrow, I bet
most of our listeners would know. But she had to
propose to him, Yeah, people try to would not have
been cool for a non a man who was not
her equal to propose to her as queen. Sometimes people
(05:27):
like sort of describe that as as a feminist statement
in some way. No, she was the monarch. Yeah, it
just would have been completely inappropriate for him to to
ask her to marry him, right. That was That was
the protocol. That was how it went. Uh. And they
married on February tenth, eighteen forty, with Albert in a
British Field Marshal's uniform. And here's how Victoria described her
(05:51):
own wedding outfit in her diary quote, I wore a
white satin dress with a deep flounce of hunted and
lace and imitation of an old design. My jewels were
my Turkish diamond necklace and earrings, and Dear Albert's beautiful
sapphire brooch. She also had a wreath of orange blossoms
on her head, and the dress had a long train
which twelve train bearers carried, and these train bearers were
(06:12):
also in white, with wreaths of roses in their hair.
There are paintings of the wedding, or there are photos
of her in the dress later on, but in terms
of the wedding itself, most of what exists now is paintings.
It definitely looks like a capital W, capital D wedding dress, Like, yeah,
for sure, you can put it on a bride today,
(06:33):
it would be right at home. Yeah, No one would
be like, that doesn't look like a wedding dress. They
would be like, that looks like a very stylized wedding dress.
But it clearly reads as a wedding dress. And apart
from the fact that Victoria tended to be a trend
setter in terms of things that we now think of
as traditional, including, for example, Christmas trees, this wedding dress
was a big deal and it was a huge public spectacle.
(06:53):
The last time a reigning Queen of England had gotten
married was fifteen fifty four, so you can imagine how
much anticipation surrounded this wedding, and it was of course
a big deal for the couple too. They were apart
for much of their engagement because Albert had to settle
his affairs before he could move to London permanently. Victoria
certainly was not the first woman ever in history to
(07:15):
get married in a white dress. She was not even
the first royal woman to get married in a white dress,
but it quickly became the fashion among England's most affluent women,
and from there it started to spread out into the
rest of British society, and then onto the United States
and elsewhere within about a decade. This is what really
cracks me up. People were writing about white wedding dresses
(07:36):
as though they had always been the standard thing to wear.
In August of eighteen forty nine, when covering the Etiquette
of the Trousseau, H. Goadie's Ladies Book began with quote,
custom has decided from the earliest ages that white is
the most fitting hue. And at this point, Victoria's white
wedding dress was only nine years in the past. It
was definitely not back to the earliest ages. Yeah, there's
(07:59):
definitely um uh uh, some flowery pros around it that
gives it some fake history, and that will happen again
more times in this episode. Yeah. That same piece that
Tracy dis referenced also advocates white flowers for the bride,
preferably orange blossoms, which Queen Victoria had worn in her hair,
(08:19):
or white rosebuds and blast bouquets as an awkward fashion
meant to solve the problem of what to do with
your hands during the ceremony. Orange blossoms continue to be
a very popular wedding flower throughout the Victorian era. I
don't think they really are. I don't know about it
in Britain, but in the US when you look at
lists of most popular wedding flowers, like, you don't really
(08:40):
have orange blossoms up at the top anymore. No, you
can hear a little more about Victoria and Albert's wedding
as well as for other historical weddings in the past.
Episode five show Stopping Historical Weddings, which was hosted by
a pretty rare pairing of past hosts of Stuffy Miss
and History Class. It is Sarah and Candice, so it
(09:02):
is post Katie Predablina in the host arc of our show. Uh.
And after we have a brief sponsor break, we're gonna
talk about cake. Now a cake. Yes, cakes have been
(09:26):
part of wedding celebrations across many cultures, going all the
way back to antiquity, although to be clear, sometimes the
word cake has been a catch all kind of term
for all kinds of cakey, bready, biscuity kind of things,
so it didn't necessarily mean cake, uh like people think
of today. But today the stereotypical wedding cake is this
(09:49):
teared confection. It is often white. Sometimes there are pillars
between the tears, and there's usually a topper on top,
and we once again look to the Victorians for that pattern.
Do you have a topp around your cake? Well, yes
and no, uh we we are not having a tiered
(10:10):
wedding cake. We have a thing that will serve as
a topper, but it's probably going to be a table
decoration and not physically on the cake because the cakes
are being brought by our caterer and uh, we won't
necessarily have somebody on hand to touch up the frosting
or whatever, just just curious. We will, in the fact,
(10:34):
have four cakes. One of them, when you eat it
will turn your teeth and tongue and lips blue because
it is very, very blue in color. I can't wait.
We had a Star Wars action figures. I know a
couple of people who have done that. I'm not going
to spoil what what it is, but uh, it's not.
(10:55):
It's not out of place in the realm of a
world where people have Star Wars action figures as their topper.
But back to our story. In eighteenth century Britain, the
typical wedding cake was a plum cake. And when we
say plum, what that means is dried fruits, not just plums,
and that had ties to foods that had been around
since the medieval period. It was one low layer of
(11:18):
fruitcake covered in almond paste and topped with a stiff
white sugar icing. And this is the traditional cake served
at weddings in Britain for at least a century. Learning
this answered a question that had always confused me, which
is that we would be watching a movie or a
TV show or something that was set in in in
(11:39):
Britain and it had a wedding as a scene, and
somebody would say they didn't like wedding cake, and I
would always be like, what do you mean you don't
like wedding cake? It is cake at a wedding. How
I don't understand, And it's because, uh, like in Britain
wedding cake is a different thing than like birthday cake,
or at least it was that. Well, it's just so
(12:01):
you can still I don't actually know if if if
today most people use um like a plum cake, is
their wedding cake in Britain or not? You definitely there
are lots of recipes and stuff online if you're interested
in seeing what the ingredients are like. So Anyway, this
idea of a sort of low flat plum cake as
a wedding cake started changing after the French Revolution. With
(12:22):
this influx of French chefs and French foods into Britain
and towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially
in aristocratic families, food including the food that was served
at weddings, increasingly became a mark of status. Bigger, fancier foods,
ideally prepared by a French master chef, was really just
the thing to do, and French chefs started experimenting with
(12:43):
more elaborate cakes. Queen Victoria's cake was a lavishly decorated
plum cake. It was ten ft in diameter. It weighed
three hundred pounds. That's a lot of cake. It was
technically a one layer cake, although it's topper did have
a teared look, and decor rations on the cake included
a sculpture of Britannia blessing the couple, who were dressed
(13:05):
in Roman clothing and surrounded by children and animals. It
was also covered in the hard white sugar icing that,
thanks to its association with Victoria's wedding cake, you would
now recognize under the name of royal icing. The first
tiered wedding cake debut at London's Crystal Palace in eighteen
fifty one. We've had an episode about the Crystal Palace
(13:25):
in the Arcove. And by the time Victoria and Albert
Albert's children started to get married, the idea of wedding
cake in Britain was quite established as this multiple tiered
plum cake. When her oldest daughter, Princess Victoria married Frederick
Wilhelm of Prussia in eighteen fifty eight, that couple's cake
was a colossally tall and heavily adorned triple layer cake,
(13:45):
although only the bottom layer was actually cake. The upper
ones were really made of this icing and not meant
to be eaten less you loved eating plain royal icing.
I was just gonna say I would totally eat this. Uh.
At King George, the fifth wedding in that cake had
four tiers separated by columns. By the nineties, cake decorators
(14:08):
were also using piping to decorate cakes, and that was
a technique that had been around since the middle of
the century, but it really hadn't fallen into heavy use
until then. Wedding cake in Britain continued to be this
tiered fruit cake with royal icing until the nineteen eighties,
at which points softer icing and sugar flowers started to
become more popular than the really stiff royal icing had
(14:29):
been before, and the United States really followed Britain's trend
in terms of the basic shape of a wedding cake
with tears and sometimes columns. I think columns seem to
be kind of out of fashion now, but I know
when I was a child and people would talk about
weddings like columns between the tears. It's a really big thing.
In the eighties it was huge. Yeah, But you know,
(14:54):
in the United States, the cake itself has normally been cake,
not um cake like cake made of flour and sugar
and things, and not lots of dried fruit in there. Yeah.
And things are also loosening up a lot around wedding
cake designs. A lot of them are still the same
basic tiered shapes, but colors and decorations have really branched out.
(15:14):
I'm sure people have seen online those um pieces of
footage of cakes that have projections onto them so that
before you cut into it. Disney does them for some
of their weddings, and I've seen them at at other
events where there are things that are like animated dancing
around the cake before you cut into it. But that's
that's obviously not on the cake. It's projected. That's fun. Yeah,
(15:36):
But the idea of a groom's cake emerged in Britain
in the seventeenth century, but it eventually fell out of
favor there. It was basically smaller than the bride's cake,
also full of fruit, and it was cut up and
given to guests to take home as a symbol of
good luck. The groom's cake morphed into a cake that
was decorated according to the groom's tastes, often stereotypically masculine
(15:58):
hobbies in the United States. Eight, we're not having a
groom's cake because, as we said before, having four normal cakes,
not a wedding cake. Yeah, we didn't have a groom's
cake either, but part of that was a space issue.
We got married in a movie theater, like a little
arthouse cinema, and there just wasn't that much space to
lay out food, so we had to be pretty judicious
(16:19):
in our choices. Nice. Yeah, you want to talk about
wedding rings now, Yeah, we're gonna talk about wedding rings,
and these have really also been around like cakes since antiquity.
We know that wedding rings existed in ancient Grease and
and in Rome, and they may have evolved from the
practice of breaking a coin in half, with one half
of the coin going to each half of the couple.
(16:40):
There's been huge variation through the ages about how rings
have been worn, what they were made of, whether they
had stones and if so, what kind, and whether they
were part of the wedding ceremony at all. Some religions
wedding services have included exchanges of rings or giving a
ring to the bride from the groom, while others have
strictly forbidden that practice as being a mark of vanity.
(17:03):
So basically, throughout most of history, rings have been associated
with weddings and a lot of the world, but they
were not standardized and for a very long time. And
the same is actually true of engagement rings. So like
white wedding dresses, today they seem almost ubiquitous, but at
various points in history they have almost entirely disappeared. Often
(17:23):
rings have still been given as a token of affection,
but not necessarily as a formal sign of engagement. This
sort of uh, non standard all over the place, whatever
you want. Treatment of rings and engagement rings really started
to shift in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
following the following the discovery of diamond mines in South Africa.
(17:44):
That is when jewelry makers started advertising engagement rings as
a necessity, and that included an attempt to establish engagement
rings for men as a standard, but that didn't really
ever take off. In de Beers hired n W. A
er And as its advertising agency, and the agency began
positioning diamonds as rare, important family heirlooms. By nineteen forty three,
(18:08):
a clear majority of women in the US for being
given diamond engagement rings. In Night, copywriter Francis Garrity coined
the slogan a diamond is Forever that is still being
used today, basically cementing the idea that the diamond was
the only stone suitable for an engagement ring, and with
that came the idea that when a woman got married,
her wedding ring would be worn alongside her diamond engagement ring.
(18:31):
Also in the nineteen forties was a marketing push by
jewelers to get couples to buy two rings one for
the bride and one for the groom, and to have
a ceremony that included the exchange of both rings. This
gradually caught on both through deliberate efforts to educate people,
which were carried out by the jewelry companies, and through
people simply going to weddings where their friends and family
members exchanged rings with each other, rather than just the
(18:54):
groom giving the ring to the bride. By the nineteen fifties,
the double ring ceremony was pretty common across most denominations,
at least in the United States. I know when my
parents got married in the sixties, they had a double
ring ceremony. Oh, I just have no idea because I mean,
I guess they both were rings, but I never thought
about it with my parents. But so the point is
(19:16):
that the double ring ceremony and the diamond engagement ring
are really pretty recent inventions, but they're ones that have
been made to seem like this is a long and
lasting tradition, basically the same thing that happened with the
white dress. And even if they're not actually ubiquitous, business
and marketers talk about them as though this is the
standard and only way. The idea of standardizing things is
(19:38):
a big part of why the word wedding for a
lot of people conjures up so much very specific imagery.
And we're going to talk about how that standardization came
to be after another brief word from a spotzer. So.
I have recently made probably the last pre wedding update
(19:59):
to the website that I built on squarespace, the one,
the one where literally two weeks before the wedding, I
was like, oh, I should take off this part that
says save the date, and I should put in part
about important details that people actually need on the day.
There you go. I was super super easy changed to make,
(20:19):
super intuitive. The way the website works made it extremely
easy for me to just take off the parts that
I didn't need at in the parts that I did
need without affecting all the other pieces that were already there,
and like I wanted that I didn't need to make
any kind of changes to I have been really really
happy with the look of the website that I was
able to make, how easy it was, how it really
(20:41):
felt like us uh and felt like something that we
were happy to have associated with our wedding without becoming
something that required me to do hours and hours of work.
It really was a matter of you know, the first
time around a couple hours sitting on my bed with
my laptop and then updating it the five or ten
minutes here and there. Really easy, awesome and intuitive. Some
(21:02):
great things about square space are that your sites look
professionally designed regardless of your personal skill level. You don't
need to know how to code. The tools are all
very intuitive and very easy to use. You get a
free domain if you sign up for a year, which
I did, uh, And you can start your free trial
today at square space dot com. When you decide to
(21:22):
sign up for square space, make sure to use the
offera code history to get ten percent off your first purchase.
So one more time, start your free trial today at
squarespace dot com. And when you decide to sign up,
make sure to use the opera code history for ten
percent off your first purchase. And now back to our story.
(21:43):
So today, in the United States, weddings are nearly synonymous
with excess. The not dot com, for example, regularly publishes
the results of surveys of its users, which suggests that
the average US wedding today costs thirty one two hundred
and thirteen dollars, with half of couples spending eighty six
dollars or more. And every time they do there is
(22:04):
a lot of press that you could really summarize as
thirty dollars. That's absurd. Weddings nowadays are atrocious. Also, these
numbers are kind of skewed in favor of the sorts
of people planning the types of weddings that the not
would be useful, right, right, Probably people who are are
going to be spending a little bit more so if
(22:25):
you did a survey through offbeat Bride would be probably
have very different numbers. Yet, yes, and like a practical wedding,
much smaller dollar amounts most likely. Um So. But anyway,
when when these numbers come out every year or or
as often as they come out, uh, usually the articles
written about them then go to the into the idea
(22:46):
that the reason for all this expense is the existence
of a wedding industry that charges couples more for weddings
than for other big events and basically pushes the idea
that the wedding needs to be a certain relatively expensive way. So, yes,
there really is a wedding industry. Is really made up
of a lot of smaller industries, and yes it is huge,
(23:07):
And yes, stuff costs more when it's for a wedding
rather than for some other event. And one more yes,
this collection of industries puts a lot of work into
standardizing the idea of wedding and marketing that idea two
couples and specifically to brides. Having been to a few
bridal expos oh boy, can I corroborate this? Yep? Uh? Well,
and having done things like shop for a wedding cake
(23:29):
and seeing how much more expensive a wedding cake is
per serving than any other cake is per serving, there's
definitely a wedding mark up in a lot of goods
and services. However, this is not a new thing. It
did not come about with like the big trend in
tiered wedding cakes in the nineteen eighties. The idea of
(23:50):
a wedding industry and a backlash around that industry's existence
really goes back one more time to the latter half
of the nineteenth century, once again around the same time
that Queen Victoria got married. We're not blaming Queen Victoria
for this in this case, it's kind of coincidental. Before
the eighteen forties, in Britain and the United States, there
really wasn't one standard thing that came to mind when
(24:11):
someone said wedding. A lot of people simply got married
in the parlor of their home, or perhaps in a
church or a chapel. People, especially people who were not wealthy,
were the nicest clothes that they already owned, and there
is usually a nice meal or maybe even a dance afterward.
The right about the same time that Victoria and Albert
got married, the idea of weddings started to become a
(24:32):
lot more standardized, and the standardization affected the weddings themselves
and the gifts for the couple. Basically, businesses started to
market things, particularly to brides, as being for weddings. Advertisements
positioned goods as being gifts for newlyweds. Etiquette manuals and
magazines reinforced what was expected at these weddings on the
(24:54):
part of both the couple and their guests, and people
started to pick up on the idea that there was
a particular their way to do a wedding as they
went to the weddings of their friends and loved ones,
even if they weren't reading all these etiquette manuals and
looking at all these advertisements, expectations around gift giving were
one aspect of this nineteenth century wedding standardization. By eighteen fifty,
(25:16):
upper class couples could expect the value of their wedding
gifts to total around twenty five thousand dollars. In the
US following the Civil War, a number of bride's diaries
detail they're getting between one hundred and two hundred gifts,
many of which were specifically four and about the bride.
I should note once against that we're basically talking about affluent,
(25:38):
mostly white couples who were writing about their gifts in
this case. Around this same time, silver makers also started
advertising silverware as sets that you could buy pieces of
to add up to the bride's full collection of play settings.
Companies expanded the number of patterns they offered and also
the number of types of utensils, basically with the hope
(25:59):
of selling more or silverware as wedding gifts. Advertisers also
took care to specify that silver became a keepsake and
an heirloom, much like what we've already discussed, which would
happen later on in the timeline with diamonds. Other types
of merchants later followed the example of silver makers, with
things like uh china and dinnerware and things like that
(26:21):
coming out in lots of patterns that you could register for.
These first efforts to market individual pieces of silverware settings
as gifts didn't have quite the level of organization that
you see today, Like now we have registries that ticked
down the number of forks that are still needed as
people purchased them. And there are numerous nineteenth century diary
entries from brides bemoaning their sudden possession of dozens of
(26:42):
coffee spoons and oyster forks. Yep, people were really just
buying up all those spoons and force. I would imagine
like the cheapest things in the settings often were the
ones most popular, and since there wasn't a registry that
kept track of who had bought what, people would wind
up with these like giant collections of spoons. So drops
(27:03):
in the price of silver and methods for silver plat
ng also made silver more accessible outside the upper class
in the late nineteenth century, which meant that silverware pieces
became common gifts among a bigger range of economic classes.
In eighteen sixty eight, in Harper's New Monthly magazine, was
this passage quote, there are few families among us so
poor as not to have a few ounces of silver plate.
(27:24):
And for Lauren indeed must be the bride who does
not receive upon her wedding day. Some articles made of
this beautiful medal. With all this focus on wedding gift
giving came an equally firm insistence among nineteenth century etiquette manuals.
The brides must handwrite a thank you note to each
person who gave her a gift. Thanks. Nineteenth century wedding manuals,
(27:45):
um magazines and etiquette manuals started solidifying other aspects of
weddings as well, documenting what brides should wear to a wedding,
how many brides means there should be, and who should
they should be, and uh that the bride and the
groom should arrive at the wedding venue separately, and on
and on all of the things that are very common today.
Etiquette manuals really standardized a lot of what was expected
(28:07):
at the wedding, down to the fact that the groom
must look at the bride intently as she comes down
the aisle, right, And I feel like this whole idea
of coming down the aisle with the groom looking at
the bride. You know, in the case of of opposite
sex couples, is so like, it's so ubiquitous that even
(28:27):
when people are having a wedding that in a lot
of ways is not really traditional, that is still a
part of it. Like there is still almost always a
processional of some sort with the bride approaching the groom,
Like that's just how it works now, which I've always
felt silly, which is why mine was very silly. You'll
see today a lot of videos of people breaking into
(28:48):
dance and whatever. I didn't want to do that, But
what I did do was how Santa give me away?
So everybody kind of chuckled, and it was not so solemn,
and it was fun and joyous and giggly. That's sweet.
The very idea that there would be a reception following
the wedding, not just a meal or advance or a
(29:10):
social but a reception seems to have come about during
this time to According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
first use of the word wedding reception and writing was
in a diary entry in eighteen seventy one. The US
resisted some of this commercial influence into weddings for at
least a little while, but by the turn of the
twentieth century, weddings were big business in the States as well,
(29:32):
with the price of weddings doubling between nineteen ten and
nineteen twenty. That trend reversed itself during the Great Depression,
but then it picked up full steam again after World
War Two. Now, as we've just alluded to a few
moments ago, these standards continue to be really culturally ingrained,
and they hold up and continue to be the way
people do things even as the types of couples getting
(29:54):
married has changed. Katrina Camport of the University of California,
San Francisco actually adied wedding photographs of same sex couple's
weddings as same sex weddings became more and more common,
and she found that more than two thirds of lesbian
couples tended to have one member of the couple dressed
as the bride and the other dressed as the groom,
(30:14):
while gay men tended to have both men dressed as grooms.
So this idea of what a bride looks like and
what a groom looks like continuing to be standard even
as the couple getting married is not so much what
has been like people's at the front of people's imagination
with the word wedding for a long time. It's a
(30:35):
fascinating industry. It is a fascinating industry. It's fascinating to
me how much of this comes off as well. This
is how it's always been, and it no, this is
how it's been mostly since the nineteenth century. I was
originally planning to research things like why we wear veils
and why there is a bouquet toss, and what I
(30:57):
found over and over was that all of the source
is would say the same thing, like a bridewear's a
veil to protect her from evil spirits, and a bride's
a bride has a multiple bridesmaid to protect her from
evil spirits. There's a lot of protecting from evil spirits,
but none of them are actually sourced back to a
primary source at all. But when I started trying to
(31:18):
get to a primary source on any of it instead,
this led me all down the path of victorians and
their weddings. They're now just the way that most people
do it well. And whenever I read all of those,
because there are a lot of like the evil spirits,
so many things are about evil spirits acting to all
of the wedding website. I pictured the one horrible wedding
(31:39):
that went awry because it was beset by evil spirits,
made everyone go, we gotta find ways toward these guys off. So,
like we said at the tame A show, like we
know there are so many different aspects to two weddings,
and so many different traditions and so many different pieces
of history that have led to things that people do
(32:00):
in weddings to day. But like this relatively narrow path
is the path the research took me down this time.
Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do.
This is actually a listener Facebook comment that I emailed
to myself so I wouldn't lose it um. And it
is from Charles and it is about our episode on
(32:22):
the two Paka Maru Rebellion. And Charles says, as a
retired scholar of Indian and Inca not a typo, that
is how it should be rendered, which is with a
k history, anthropology and linguistics and the Ketchua language for
over thirty years. I liked this largely accurate but not exact.
First of all, Ketchwan languages pre date the Inca Empire
(32:44):
based on its proto uh A Mara, which is still
spoken and I have also studied to a lesser degree.
Here's a bit of clarification. Quetchua, as the language is
commonly referred to, is not the name of the language,
although it has been adopted by most as such, mainly
by socio linguists that want easy mapping and statistics. It
(33:04):
is the name of the people people of the High Valley.
Their name for their language was and remains Runcini, which
is translated as man's speech, but socio linguistic transit blurred
this distinction. Quetchua as a language has evolved into many
distinct dialects that were similar in syntax but varied widely
by phonetic and phonological inventory. This was because the Andes
(33:26):
geologically created huge geographical separations. For example, and be Bora
Quechua from Ecuador, which has no glottal stops, is quite
distinct from Cusco or coach Obamba Quechua, where glottal stops
influence syntax, phonology, and final meaning. That is not inconceivable that,
given the broad geographical spread, that the rebellion had lacked
(33:47):
effective clear communication resulting in the final blood bath that
began on its periphery. They had no clear understanding of
each other. He then goes on to suggest some books
at the Inca Conquest is interesting to people, including the
concast Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming, And that
again is from Charles. Thank you so much, Charles. It
is always awesome to hear from people who have specialized
(34:09):
knowledge and a particular thing um that can shed further
light beyond what was available in the sources that were
available to us. Yes, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, where a
history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss
Industry dot tumbler dot com. Our instagram is missed in History.
(34:34):
If you would like to learn more about what we've
talked about the day, you can come to our parent
company website, which is how stuff works dot com and
put the word royal weddings in the search bar and
you will find an article called ten Wacky Pieces of
Royal Wedding Memorabilia. And this is about a whole other
odd thing that we didn't really get into, which is
selling souvenirs when royals get married. You can come to
(34:55):
our website, which is missed in History dot com. You'll
find an archive of every episode we've ever done and
show no it's for the episodes Holly and I have done,
and a lot of other cool stuff. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trecb will Sit and I'm Holly Fry. So usually
on our show you've been listening for a while, you
know this. We try to take a broad look at
(00:22):
history and encompass as much of the world as we can,
and we especially try to do this when we're talking
about the history of something like colors are knitting or
peanut butter, and even when we've talked about the something
being an American product, like spam, we've also tried to
look at how spam made its way into other cultures
and cuisines. So today's episode is really not that uh.
(00:45):
For about the last eighteen months, various folks have asked
us to talk about wedding history, either a complete history
of marriage, which is way too broad for a thirty
minutes show, or sort of a history of various wedding
traditions and where they come from. So I started trying
to research that one, and the research led me in
a little bit of a different direction, which is a
(01:06):
brief history of the so called white wedding. So the
term white wedding was first coined in the spring of
eighteen forty in the British monthly Metropolitan magazine, and at
the time a white wedding was just the wedding in
which the bride were a white dress, but since then
it's come to suggest some other particular rituals and kind
of trappings. So that's we're gonna talk about today. We
(01:28):
definitely know that they are all kinds of beautiful and
touching and fascinating wedding traditions from all over the world
and all over history, and even within the United States.
There are tons and tons of regional and cultural and
religious specifics. But what we're really talking about today is
this idea of the white wedding, particularly in Britain and
the United States, and some of the things that have
become most closely associated with it. First up the piece,
(01:51):
most listeners probably know the very basics of already white
wedding dresses are just about ubiquitous today because Queen Victoria
got married in one in eighteen forty. Before that, there
was a lot more variety and wedding dresses, including white ones,
and most people, particularly outside of the aristocracy, basically got
married in the best clothing that they owned. It was
(02:12):
often their church clothes or a new dress that they
intended to use for special events going forward from their wedding.
You did not get married in a white dress. Heck no,
I'm a spiller. No, I got married in a red
dress because I got married at Christmas and I'm ridiculous
and I spill things, so anything pale was going to
be a danger. So for people that thought it was
(02:34):
like a big cultural statement on my part, and I
was doing some Jezebel jam. I just spilled stuff and
I don't look great in white, So that was pretty
much the motivation. And you're actually not getting married in white.
I'm also not getting married in white. I'm getting married
in blue because I want to and because it's beautiful
(02:55):
on you. Oh, thank you. So a little about the
couple of Victor Area and Albert before we get to
their actual wedding and what she was wearing, because this
wedding is going to come up again. Victoria met her
future husband, Albert of Saxe cober Gota in eighteen thirty six,
when she was sixteen and not yet on the throne.
He had been invited to London for her seventeenth birthday celebration.
(03:18):
Albert and Victoria were cousins, and Albert had actually heard
when he was small that probably he ought to get
married to Victoria one day, so that was an idea
that was already in his head. And at this first meeting,
Victoria was immediately taken with him. She thought he was handsome,
and the two of them spent a lot of time
together during this visit. Victoria was terribly sad when Albert
(03:41):
left for Brussels that June, and she wrote his father
Leopold a letter saying quote, I must thank you, my
beloved uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have
contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert.
Allow me, then, my dearest uncle, to tell you how
delighted I am with him, and how much I like
him in every way. He possesses every quality that could
(04:02):
be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible,
so kind, and so good and so amiable to he
has besides the most pleasing and delightful exterior in appearance
you can possibly see. And from there she basically admonishes
her uncle to keep her cousin safe for her. She
liked him a She liked him heat. It's one of
(04:22):
the things that makes me love Victoria is just her
adoration of Albert. Uh, It's so touching and sweet to me. Yeah. So,
once she had ascended to the throne and decided she
was getting ready to get married, which she didn't do immediately,
she invited Albert and his brother Ernst to Windsor Castle
in October of eighteen thirty nine, essentially to choose between
(04:43):
the two of them for the sake of strengthening political ties.
And she was basically set on Albert to be her
husband the minute she saw him again, probably to be honest,
even before that. She proposed a few days later, and
then wrote in her diary, Oh to feel I was
and am love by such an angel as Albert was
too great delight to describe. He is perfection. Oh how
(05:06):
I love and adore him? I cannot say. Yeah, And
just in case anybody uh raised an eyebrow, I bet
most of our listeners would know. But she had to
propose to him, Yeah, people try to would not have
been cool for a non a man who was not
her equal to propose to her as queen. Sometimes people
(05:27):
like sort of describe that as as a feminist statement
in some way. No, she was the monarch. Yeah, it
just would have been completely inappropriate for him to to
ask her to marry him, right. That was That was
the protocol. That was how it went. Uh. And they
married on February tenth, eighteen forty, with Albert in a
British Field Marshal's uniform. And here's how Victoria described her
(05:51):
own wedding outfit in her diary quote, I wore a
white satin dress with a deep flounce of hunted and
lace and imitation of an old design. My jewels were
my Turkish diamond necklace and earrings, and Dear Albert's beautiful
sapphire brooch. She also had a wreath of orange blossoms
on her head, and the dress had a long train
which twelve train bearers carried, and these train bearers were
(06:12):
also in white, with wreaths of roses in their hair.
There are paintings of the wedding, or there are photos
of her in the dress later on, but in terms
of the wedding itself, most of what exists now is paintings.
It definitely looks like a capital W, capital D wedding dress, Like, yeah,
for sure, you can put it on a bride today,
(06:33):
it would be right at home. Yeah, No one would
be like, that doesn't look like a wedding dress. They
would be like, that looks like a very stylized wedding dress.
But it clearly reads as a wedding dress. And apart
from the fact that Victoria tended to be a trend
setter in terms of things that we now think of
as traditional, including, for example, Christmas trees, this wedding dress
was a big deal and it was a huge public spectacle.
(06:53):
The last time a reigning Queen of England had gotten
married was fifteen fifty four, so you can imagine how
much anticipation surrounded this wedding, and it was of course
a big deal for the couple too. They were apart
for much of their engagement because Albert had to settle
his affairs before he could move to London permanently. Victoria
certainly was not the first woman ever in history to
(07:15):
get married in a white dress. She was not even
the first royal woman to get married in a white dress,
but it quickly became the fashion among England's most affluent women,
and from there it started to spread out into the
rest of British society, and then onto the United States
and elsewhere within about a decade. This is what really
cracks me up. People were writing about white wedding dresses
(07:36):
as though they had always been the standard thing to wear.
In August of eighteen forty nine, when covering the Etiquette
of the Trousseau, H. Goadie's Ladies Book began with quote,
custom has decided from the earliest ages that white is
the most fitting hue. And at this point, Victoria's white
wedding dress was only nine years in the past. It
was definitely not back to the earliest ages. Yeah, there's
(07:59):
definitely um uh uh, some flowery pros around it that
gives it some fake history, and that will happen again
more times in this episode. Yeah. That same piece that
Tracy dis referenced also advocates white flowers for the bride,
preferably orange blossoms, which Queen Victoria had worn in her hair,
(08:19):
or white rosebuds and blast bouquets as an awkward fashion
meant to solve the problem of what to do with
your hands during the ceremony. Orange blossoms continue to be
a very popular wedding flower throughout the Victorian era. I
don't think they really are. I don't know about it
in Britain, but in the US when you look at
lists of most popular wedding flowers, like, you don't really
(08:40):
have orange blossoms up at the top anymore. No, you
can hear a little more about Victoria and Albert's wedding
as well as for other historical weddings in the past.
Episode five show Stopping Historical Weddings, which was hosted by
a pretty rare pairing of past hosts of Stuffy Miss
and History Class. It is Sarah and Candice, so it
(09:02):
is post Katie Predablina in the host arc of our show. Uh.
And after we have a brief sponsor break, we're gonna
talk about cake. Now a cake. Yes, cakes have been
(09:26):
part of wedding celebrations across many cultures, going all the
way back to antiquity, although to be clear, sometimes the
word cake has been a catch all kind of term
for all kinds of cakey, bready, biscuity kind of things,
so it didn't necessarily mean cake, uh like people think
of today. But today the stereotypical wedding cake is this
(09:49):
teared confection. It is often white. Sometimes there are pillars
between the tears, and there's usually a topper on top,
and we once again look to the Victorians for that pattern.
Do you have a topp around your cake? Well, yes
and no, uh we we are not having a tiered
(10:10):
wedding cake. We have a thing that will serve as
a topper, but it's probably going to be a table
decoration and not physically on the cake because the cakes
are being brought by our caterer and uh, we won't
necessarily have somebody on hand to touch up the frosting
or whatever, just just curious. We will, in the fact,
(10:34):
have four cakes. One of them, when you eat it
will turn your teeth and tongue and lips blue because
it is very, very blue in color. I can't wait.
We had a Star Wars action figures. I know a
couple of people who have done that. I'm not going
to spoil what what it is, but uh, it's not.
(10:55):
It's not out of place in the realm of a
world where people have Star Wars action figures as their topper.
But back to our story. In eighteenth century Britain, the
typical wedding cake was a plum cake. And when we
say plum, what that means is dried fruits, not just plums,
and that had ties to foods that had been around
since the medieval period. It was one low layer of
(11:18):
fruitcake covered in almond paste and topped with a stiff
white sugar icing. And this is the traditional cake served
at weddings in Britain for at least a century. Learning
this answered a question that had always confused me, which
is that we would be watching a movie or a
TV show or something that was set in in in
(11:39):
Britain and it had a wedding as a scene, and
somebody would say they didn't like wedding cake, and I
would always be like, what do you mean you don't
like wedding cake? It is cake at a wedding. How
I don't understand, And it's because, uh, like in Britain
wedding cake is a different thing than like birthday cake,
or at least it was that. Well, it's just so
(12:01):
you can still I don't actually know if if if
today most people use um like a plum cake, is
their wedding cake in Britain or not? You definitely there
are lots of recipes and stuff online if you're interested
in seeing what the ingredients are like. So Anyway, this
idea of a sort of low flat plum cake as
a wedding cake started changing after the French Revolution. With
(12:22):
this influx of French chefs and French foods into Britain
and towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially
in aristocratic families, food including the food that was served
at weddings, increasingly became a mark of status. Bigger, fancier foods,
ideally prepared by a French master chef, was really just
the thing to do, and French chefs started experimenting with
(12:43):
more elaborate cakes. Queen Victoria's cake was a lavishly decorated
plum cake. It was ten ft in diameter. It weighed
three hundred pounds. That's a lot of cake. It was
technically a one layer cake, although it's topper did have
a teared look, and decor rations on the cake included
a sculpture of Britannia blessing the couple, who were dressed
(13:05):
in Roman clothing and surrounded by children and animals. It
was also covered in the hard white sugar icing that,
thanks to its association with Victoria's wedding cake, you would
now recognize under the name of royal icing. The first
tiered wedding cake debut at London's Crystal Palace in eighteen
fifty one. We've had an episode about the Crystal Palace
(13:25):
in the Arcove. And by the time Victoria and Albert
Albert's children started to get married, the idea of wedding
cake in Britain was quite established as this multiple tiered
plum cake. When her oldest daughter, Princess Victoria married Frederick
Wilhelm of Prussia in eighteen fifty eight, that couple's cake
was a colossally tall and heavily adorned triple layer cake,
(13:45):
although only the bottom layer was actually cake. The upper
ones were really made of this icing and not meant
to be eaten less you loved eating plain royal icing.
I was just gonna say I would totally eat this. Uh.
At King George, the fifth wedding in that cake had
four tiers separated by columns. By the nineties, cake decorators
(14:08):
were also using piping to decorate cakes, and that was
a technique that had been around since the middle of
the century, but it really hadn't fallen into heavy use
until then. Wedding cake in Britain continued to be this
tiered fruit cake with royal icing until the nineteen eighties,
at which points softer icing and sugar flowers started to
become more popular than the really stiff royal icing had
(14:29):
been before, and the United States really followed Britain's trend
in terms of the basic shape of a wedding cake
with tears and sometimes columns. I think columns seem to
be kind of out of fashion now, but I know
when I was a child and people would talk about
weddings like columns between the tears. It's a really big thing.
In the eighties it was huge. Yeah, But you know,
(14:54):
in the United States, the cake itself has normally been cake,
not um cake like cake made of flour and sugar
and things, and not lots of dried fruit in there. Yeah.
And things are also loosening up a lot around wedding
cake designs. A lot of them are still the same
basic tiered shapes, but colors and decorations have really branched out.
(15:14):
I'm sure people have seen online those um pieces of
footage of cakes that have projections onto them so that
before you cut into it. Disney does them for some
of their weddings, and I've seen them at at other
events where there are things that are like animated dancing
around the cake before you cut into it. But that's
that's obviously not on the cake. It's projected. That's fun. Yeah,
(15:36):
But the idea of a groom's cake emerged in Britain
in the seventeenth century, but it eventually fell out of
favor there. It was basically smaller than the bride's cake,
also full of fruit, and it was cut up and
given to guests to take home as a symbol of
good luck. The groom's cake morphed into a cake that
was decorated according to the groom's tastes, often stereotypically masculine
(15:58):
hobbies in the United States. Eight, we're not having a
groom's cake because, as we said before, having four normal cakes,
not a wedding cake. Yeah, we didn't have a groom's
cake either, but part of that was a space issue.
We got married in a movie theater, like a little
arthouse cinema, and there just wasn't that much space to
lay out food, so we had to be pretty judicious
(16:19):
in our choices. Nice. Yeah, you want to talk about
wedding rings now, Yeah, we're gonna talk about wedding rings,
and these have really also been around like cakes since antiquity.
We know that wedding rings existed in ancient Grease and
and in Rome, and they may have evolved from the
practice of breaking a coin in half, with one half
of the coin going to each half of the couple.
(16:40):
There's been huge variation through the ages about how rings
have been worn, what they were made of, whether they
had stones and if so, what kind, and whether they
were part of the wedding ceremony at all. Some religions
wedding services have included exchanges of rings or giving a
ring to the bride from the groom, while others have
strictly forbidden that practice as being a mark of vanity.
(17:03):
So basically, throughout most of history, rings have been associated
with weddings and a lot of the world, but they
were not standardized and for a very long time. And
the same is actually true of engagement rings. So like
white wedding dresses, today they seem almost ubiquitous, but at
various points in history they have almost entirely disappeared. Often
(17:23):
rings have still been given as a token of affection,
but not necessarily as a formal sign of engagement. This
sort of uh, non standard all over the place, whatever
you want. Treatment of rings and engagement rings really started
to shift in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
following the following the discovery of diamond mines in South Africa.
(17:44):
That is when jewelry makers started advertising engagement rings as
a necessity, and that included an attempt to establish engagement
rings for men as a standard, but that didn't really
ever take off. In de Beers hired n W. A
er And as its advertising agency, and the agency began
positioning diamonds as rare, important family heirlooms. By nineteen forty three,
(18:08):
a clear majority of women in the US for being
given diamond engagement rings. In Night, copywriter Francis Garrity coined
the slogan a diamond is Forever that is still being
used today, basically cementing the idea that the diamond was
the only stone suitable for an engagement ring, and with
that came the idea that when a woman got married,
her wedding ring would be worn alongside her diamond engagement ring.
(18:31):
Also in the nineteen forties was a marketing push by
jewelers to get couples to buy two rings one for
the bride and one for the groom, and to have
a ceremony that included the exchange of both rings. This
gradually caught on both through deliberate efforts to educate people,
which were carried out by the jewelry companies, and through
people simply going to weddings where their friends and family
members exchanged rings with each other, rather than just the
(18:54):
groom giving the ring to the bride. By the nineteen fifties,
the double ring ceremony was pretty common across most denominations,
at least in the United States. I know when my
parents got married in the sixties, they had a double
ring ceremony. Oh, I just have no idea because I mean,
I guess they both were rings, but I never thought
about it with my parents. But so the point is
(19:16):
that the double ring ceremony and the diamond engagement ring
are really pretty recent inventions, but they're ones that have
been made to seem like this is a long and
lasting tradition, basically the same thing that happened with the
white dress. And even if they're not actually ubiquitous, business
and marketers talk about them as though this is the
standard and only way. The idea of standardizing things is
(19:38):
a big part of why the word wedding for a
lot of people conjures up so much very specific imagery.
And we're going to talk about how that standardization came
to be after another brief word from a spotzer. So.
I have recently made probably the last pre wedding update
(19:59):
to the website that I built on squarespace, the one,
the one where literally two weeks before the wedding, I
was like, oh, I should take off this part that
says save the date, and I should put in part
about important details that people actually need on the day.
There you go. I was super super easy changed to make,
(20:19):
super intuitive. The way the website works made it extremely
easy for me to just take off the parts that
I didn't need at in the parts that I did
need without affecting all the other pieces that were already there,
and like I wanted that I didn't need to make
any kind of changes to I have been really really
happy with the look of the website that I was
able to make, how easy it was, how it really
(20:41):
felt like us uh and felt like something that we
were happy to have associated with our wedding without becoming
something that required me to do hours and hours of work.
It really was a matter of you know, the first
time around a couple hours sitting on my bed with
my laptop and then updating it the five or ten
minutes here and there. Really easy, awesome and intuitive. Some
(21:02):
great things about square space are that your sites look
professionally designed regardless of your personal skill level. You don't
need to know how to code. The tools are all
very intuitive and very easy to use. You get a
free domain if you sign up for a year, which
I did, uh, And you can start your free trial
today at square space dot com. When you decide to
(21:22):
sign up for square space, make sure to use the
offera code history to get ten percent off your first purchase.
So one more time, start your free trial today at
squarespace dot com. And when you decide to sign up,
make sure to use the opera code history for ten
percent off your first purchase. And now back to our story.
(21:43):
So today, in the United States, weddings are nearly synonymous
with excess. The not dot com, for example, regularly publishes
the results of surveys of its users, which suggests that
the average US wedding today costs thirty one two hundred
and thirteen dollars, with half of couples spending eighty six
dollars or more. And every time they do there is
(22:04):
a lot of press that you could really summarize as
thirty dollars. That's absurd. Weddings nowadays are atrocious. Also, these
numbers are kind of skewed in favor of the sorts
of people planning the types of weddings that the not
would be useful, right, right, Probably people who are are
going to be spending a little bit more so if
(22:25):
you did a survey through offbeat Bride would be probably
have very different numbers. Yet, yes, and like a practical wedding,
much smaller dollar amounts most likely. Um So. But anyway,
when when these numbers come out every year or or
as often as they come out, uh, usually the articles
written about them then go to the into the idea
(22:46):
that the reason for all this expense is the existence
of a wedding industry that charges couples more for weddings
than for other big events and basically pushes the idea
that the wedding needs to be a certain relatively expensive way. So, yes,
there really is a wedding industry. Is really made up
of a lot of smaller industries, and yes it is huge,
(23:07):
And yes, stuff costs more when it's for a wedding
rather than for some other event. And one more yes,
this collection of industries puts a lot of work into
standardizing the idea of wedding and marketing that idea two
couples and specifically to brides. Having been to a few
bridal expos oh boy, can I corroborate this? Yep? Uh? Well,
and having done things like shop for a wedding cake
(23:29):
and seeing how much more expensive a wedding cake is
per serving than any other cake is per serving, there's
definitely a wedding mark up in a lot of goods
and services. However, this is not a new thing. It
did not come about with like the big trend in
tiered wedding cakes in the nineteen eighties. The idea of
(23:50):
a wedding industry and a backlash around that industry's existence
really goes back one more time to the latter half
of the nineteenth century, once again around the same time
that Queen Victoria got married. We're not blaming Queen Victoria
for this in this case, it's kind of coincidental. Before
the eighteen forties, in Britain and the United States, there
really wasn't one standard thing that came to mind when
(24:11):
someone said wedding. A lot of people simply got married
in the parlor of their home, or perhaps in a
church or a chapel. People, especially people who were not wealthy,
were the nicest clothes that they already owned, and there
is usually a nice meal or maybe even a dance afterward.
The right about the same time that Victoria and Albert
got married, the idea of weddings started to become a
(24:32):
lot more standardized, and the standardization affected the weddings themselves
and the gifts for the couple. Basically, businesses started to
market things, particularly to brides, as being for weddings. Advertisements
positioned goods as being gifts for newlyweds. Etiquette manuals and
magazines reinforced what was expected at these weddings on the
(24:54):
part of both the couple and their guests, and people
started to pick up on the idea that there was
a particular their way to do a wedding as they
went to the weddings of their friends and loved ones,
even if they weren't reading all these etiquette manuals and
looking at all these advertisements, expectations around gift giving were
one aspect of this nineteenth century wedding standardization. By eighteen fifty,
(25:16):
upper class couples could expect the value of their wedding
gifts to total around twenty five thousand dollars. In the
US following the Civil War, a number of bride's diaries
detail they're getting between one hundred and two hundred gifts,
many of which were specifically four and about the bride.
I should note once against that we're basically talking about affluent,
(25:38):
mostly white couples who were writing about their gifts in
this case. Around this same time, silver makers also started
advertising silverware as sets that you could buy pieces of
to add up to the bride's full collection of play settings.
Companies expanded the number of patterns they offered and also
the number of types of utensils, basically with the hope
(25:59):
of selling more or silverware as wedding gifts. Advertisers also
took care to specify that silver became a keepsake and
an heirloom, much like what we've already discussed, which would
happen later on in the timeline with diamonds. Other types
of merchants later followed the example of silver makers, with
things like uh china and dinnerware and things like that
(26:21):
coming out in lots of patterns that you could register for.
These first efforts to market individual pieces of silverware settings
as gifts didn't have quite the level of organization that
you see today, Like now we have registries that ticked
down the number of forks that are still needed as
people purchased them. And there are numerous nineteenth century diary
entries from brides bemoaning their sudden possession of dozens of
(26:42):
coffee spoons and oyster forks. Yep, people were really just
buying up all those spoons and force. I would imagine
like the cheapest things in the settings often were the
ones most popular, and since there wasn't a registry that
kept track of who had bought what, people would wind
up with these like giant collections of spoons. So drops
(27:03):
in the price of silver and methods for silver plat
ng also made silver more accessible outside the upper class
in the late nineteenth century, which meant that silverware pieces
became common gifts among a bigger range of economic classes.
In eighteen sixty eight, in Harper's New Monthly magazine, was
this passage quote, there are few families among us so
poor as not to have a few ounces of silver plate.
(27:24):
And for Lauren indeed must be the bride who does
not receive upon her wedding day. Some articles made of
this beautiful medal. With all this focus on wedding gift
giving came an equally firm insistence among nineteenth century etiquette manuals.
The brides must handwrite a thank you note to each
person who gave her a gift. Thanks. Nineteenth century wedding manuals,
(27:45):
um magazines and etiquette manuals started solidifying other aspects of
weddings as well, documenting what brides should wear to a wedding,
how many brides means there should be, and who should
they should be, and uh that the bride and the
groom should arrive at the wedding venue separately, and on
and on all of the things that are very common today.
Etiquette manuals really standardized a lot of what was expected
(28:07):
at the wedding, down to the fact that the groom
must look at the bride intently as she comes down
the aisle, right, And I feel like this whole idea
of coming down the aisle with the groom looking at
the bride. You know, in the case of of opposite
sex couples, is so like, it's so ubiquitous that even
(28:27):
when people are having a wedding that in a lot
of ways is not really traditional, that is still a
part of it. Like there is still almost always a
processional of some sort with the bride approaching the groom,
Like that's just how it works now, which I've always
felt silly, which is why mine was very silly. You'll
see today a lot of videos of people breaking into
(28:48):
dance and whatever. I didn't want to do that, But
what I did do was how Santa give me away?
So everybody kind of chuckled, and it was not so solemn,
and it was fun and joyous and giggly. That's sweet.
The very idea that there would be a reception following
the wedding, not just a meal or advance or a
(29:10):
social but a reception seems to have come about during
this time to According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
first use of the word wedding reception and writing was
in a diary entry in eighteen seventy one. The US
resisted some of this commercial influence into weddings for at
least a little while, but by the turn of the
twentieth century, weddings were big business in the States as well,
(29:32):
with the price of weddings doubling between nineteen ten and
nineteen twenty. That trend reversed itself during the Great Depression,
but then it picked up full steam again after World
War Two. Now, as we've just alluded to a few
moments ago, these standards continue to be really culturally ingrained,
and they hold up and continue to be the way
people do things even as the types of couples getting
(29:54):
married has changed. Katrina Camport of the University of California,
San Francisco actually adied wedding photographs of same sex couple's
weddings as same sex weddings became more and more common,
and she found that more than two thirds of lesbian
couples tended to have one member of the couple dressed
as the bride and the other dressed as the groom,
(30:14):
while gay men tended to have both men dressed as grooms.
So this idea of what a bride looks like and
what a groom looks like continuing to be standard even
as the couple getting married is not so much what
has been like people's at the front of people's imagination
with the word wedding for a long time. It's a
(30:35):
fascinating industry. It is a fascinating industry. It's fascinating to
me how much of this comes off as well. This
is how it's always been, and it no, this is
how it's been mostly since the nineteenth century. I was
originally planning to research things like why we wear veils
and why there is a bouquet toss, and what I
(30:57):
found over and over was that all of the source
is would say the same thing, like a bridewear's a
veil to protect her from evil spirits, and a bride's
a bride has a multiple bridesmaid to protect her from
evil spirits. There's a lot of protecting from evil spirits,
but none of them are actually sourced back to a
primary source at all. But when I started trying to
(31:18):
get to a primary source on any of it instead,
this led me all down the path of victorians and
their weddings. They're now just the way that most people
do it well. And whenever I read all of those,
because there are a lot of like the evil spirits,
so many things are about evil spirits acting to all
of the wedding website. I pictured the one horrible wedding
(31:39):
that went awry because it was beset by evil spirits,
made everyone go, we gotta find ways toward these guys off. So,
like we said at the tame A show, like we
know there are so many different aspects to two weddings,
and so many different traditions and so many different pieces
of history that have led to things that people do
(32:00):
in weddings to day. But like this relatively narrow path
is the path the research took me down this time.
Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do.
This is actually a listener Facebook comment that I emailed
to myself so I wouldn't lose it um. And it
is from Charles and it is about our episode on
(32:22):
the two Paka Maru Rebellion. And Charles says, as a
retired scholar of Indian and Inca not a typo, that
is how it should be rendered, which is with a
k history, anthropology and linguistics and the Ketchua language for
over thirty years. I liked this largely accurate but not exact.
First of all, Ketchwan languages pre date the Inca Empire
(32:44):
based on its proto uh A Mara, which is still
spoken and I have also studied to a lesser degree.
Here's a bit of clarification. Quetchua, as the language is
commonly referred to, is not the name of the language,
although it has been adopted by most as such, mainly
by socio linguists that want easy mapping and statistics. It
(33:04):
is the name of the people people of the High Valley.
Their name for their language was and remains Runcini, which
is translated as man's speech, but socio linguistic transit blurred
this distinction. Quetchua as a language has evolved into many
distinct dialects that were similar in syntax but varied widely
by phonetic and phonological inventory. This was because the Andes
(33:26):
geologically created huge geographical separations. For example, and be Bora
Quechua from Ecuador, which has no glottal stops, is quite
distinct from Cusco or coach Obamba Quechua, where glottal stops
influence syntax, phonology, and final meaning. That is not inconceivable that,
given the broad geographical spread, that the rebellion had lacked
(33:47):
effective clear communication resulting in the final blood bath that
began on its periphery. They had no clear understanding of
each other. He then goes on to suggest some books
at the Inca Conquest is interesting to people, including the
concast Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming, And that
again is from Charles. Thank you so much, Charles. It
is always awesome to hear from people who have specialized
(34:09):
knowledge and a particular thing um that can shed further
light beyond what was available in the sources that were
available to us. Yes, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, where a
history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss
Industry dot tumbler dot com. Our instagram is missed in History.
(34:34):
If you would like to learn more about what we've
talked about the day, you can come to our parent
company website, which is how stuff works dot com and
put the word royal weddings in the search bar and
you will find an article called ten Wacky Pieces of
Royal Wedding Memorabilia. And this is about a whole other
odd thing that we didn't really get into, which is
selling souvenirs when royals get married. You can come to
(34:55):
our website, which is missed in History dot com. You'll
find an archive of every episode we've ever done and
show no it's for the episodes Holly and I have done,
and a lot of other cool stuff. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
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