|
|
|
MARIAL CENTER COLLOQUIUM Vicki Howard (Assistant Professor of History, Hartwick College) The American Wedding Industry and the Invention of Tradition Wednesday, October 18, 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m Weddings today are a $70-billion business, supported and promoted by a cadre of entrepreneurs who invented traditions and transformed wedding culture. In Brides, Inc. American Weddings and the Business of Tradition, historian Vicki Howard explores the origins of the lavish American wedding, and shows how consumer capitalism shaped its practice, creating an elaborate new American wedding culture by the postwar era. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, a wedding industry took shape. Bridal magazine editors and etiquette writers, jewelers, department store window display artists, bridal consultants, fashion designers, and caterers invented new consumer rites and promoted higher standards of wedding consumption. In the process, businesses faced a fundamental dilemma: how to persuade consumers to accept new goods and services in connection with a ritual that was ostensibly "traditional" and non-commercial. The wedding industry ultimately overcame this contradiction, using both the idea of tradition and the idea of modernity to fit the formal white wedding into new social contexts. Claiming ties with "ancient customs" and various historical periods, it promoted new goods and services as timeless and unchanging. During World War II, the traditional white wedding became a matter of public policy when the War Production Board sanctioned wedding consumption. Jewelers and bridal gown manufacturers successfully sought exemptions from wartime restrictions, linking the diamond engagement ring, the double ring ceremony, and the formal white wedding gown with democracy and American prosperity. By the 1950s, the wedding industry made the formal white wedding tradition a part of a new cult of marriage and the modern "American Dream." Dr. Howard is assistant professor of history at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Previously, she was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden, and Hagley Museum and Library. She received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of interest include American social history, business history, and material culture.
DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER The MARIAL Center is located on the 4th floor of the main building of Emory's Briarcliff Campus, 1256 Briarcliff Road. There is ample parking close to the building. Alternatively, you may take the Emory shuttle (Route B). The Emory shuttle (Route B) provides transportation from the main campus to the MARIAL Center every 20 minutes (a 5-10 minute ride). For the shortest travel time, board the shuttle in front of the B. Jones Center or at the corner of Dowman and Fishburne (across from Glenn Memorial) at approximately 4, 24, and 44 minutes after each hour. A complete schedule and the route map are available on the web at http://www.epcs.emory.edu/AltTransp/route-a.htm Please tell the receptionist at the front window
that you are here for the
|