Exam 8: Dreaming of a White Wedding: Marriage, Family, and Heteronormativity

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Sociologists have advanced two possible explanations for "love match" as the norm: 1) it justifies and glorifies the confinement of women to the private realm of the home; and 2) it reflects young people's greater autonomy over marriage decisions, brought about by industrialization, where parental permission to marry (backed by their control over land) no longer mattered.
This ideal does not take into account some realities of marriage: 1) women's work outside the home enables them to have sex and children outside marriage; 2) gender inequality in marriage; 3) influence of class and privilege on marriage, the privileged have resources to form and maintain marriage; 4) intimate partner violence; and 5) culture of individualism, which makes marriage more difficult to maintain.

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The ideal of the white wedding disguises and justifies gender inequalities. By explicitly making a woman the center of attention, it disguises the likelihood that the marriage may not be gender-equal.
By giving a woman control over wedding consumption and emphasizing the importance of love in a woman's life, it normalizes gender inequalities at the wedding itself and in marriage. Unequal participation, but declared equality, in the work of wedding planning perpetuates the "myth of equality" between partners.
Thus, the white wedding may be seen as a backlash against women's strides toward greater gender equality-an assertion of traditional gender norms in a time of change.