ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes women across three marriage generations—those who first married in the years 1925-1944, 1945-1964, and 1965-1984—to see how their experiences differed, with occasional use of finer chronological distinctions. The chapter concerned with the first marriages of respondents. The culmination of dating and mating is, of course, the wedding itself. The chapter examines whether the nature of wedding activities and rituals has changed in recent times. As John Modell states the case in explaining the American preference for religious weddings, “the ceremony marks marriage as an institution worthy of communal celebration and communal oversight.” Under changed circumstances, a number of interesting innovations in wedding rituals occur. The only minor change of interest is that there was a slight increase from 3% to 8% in the proportion of grooms who were still in school in the post-World War II years, corresponding to the lower marriage ages and optimism about employment of the baby boom era.
