As Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America Karen M.Dunak. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Abstract

As Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America Karen M. Dunak. New York: New York University Press, 2013.The cover of historian Karen Dunak's book, As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America, features enormous wedding cake, resplendent with layers of white frosting, being sliced by a pair of newlyweds. The faces of lucky couple are obscured, and, although we later learn that this towering treat was enjoyed by guests at 1966 wedding of President Johnson's daughter, Luci, Pat Nugent, bride and groom pictured here could be anyone. This is a theme that echoes throughout Dunak's narrative, wherein weddings of wealthy and politically well-connected appear alongside TV sitcom ceremonies, bridal magazine columns, and rich descriptions of ordinary people's special days. The result is a multi-faceted historical account of wedding in which personal is reflected through popular and vice versa. Dunak's diverse, interconnected narratives show how American wedding offers a universal promise of love and happiness while also providing participants with opportunity publically perform their values and aspirations.Unlike other recent wedding histories, such as Elizabeth Freeman's The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modem American Culture (2002) and Chrys Ingraham's White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (1999), which tum a critical eye towards conspicuous consumption, heteronormativity, and patriarchal overtones of affair, Dunak's account is entirely hopeful and un-cynical. The author takes as her starting point notion that the wedding industrial complex (Ingraham, 1999)- obsessive, ornate, Bridezilla-producing culture that proliferated in popular media at turn of twenty-first century- obscures multiple, meaningful ways in which participants have used weddings to challenge traditional expectations of men and women, masculinity and femininity, and marriage and commitment (6) throughout American history.Dunak is most compelling as she outlines changing value of wedding in aftermath of World War II. Soldiers returning home sought a return normalcy, which was embodied by wedding and its promise of domestic tranquility in suburbs. Yet tradition associated with white weddings of 1950s was not reflective of actual history but of a longed for connection an idealized past, one unmarred by economic hardship, family conflict, or war (27). …