“No date, no invitations. No date, no caterer. A great wave of relief swept over me. What after all, besides true love, were the essentials of a wedding? Friends. Flowers. Music. A cake to be cut and shared. Because we had the first, the other things followed as naturally as the night the day. But we didn’t realize beforehand. It was another miracle of country living.” (VT Life, 1951)

 

In Wendy Kozol’s book Life’s America, the post-war decade of the 1950s was extremely important in fashioning images and ideas of family. More importantly, this era constructed ideas of heteronormative marriage and social traditions like diamond rings, expensive white gowns, and extravagant receptions. All of these material components conceived what we’ve come to know as the white wedding. In the book As Long as We Both Shall Love by Karen Dunak, Dunak argues that traditional white weddings became a symbol of the rich and elite.  However, as seen with Kozol’s images, the post-war decade positioned the white wedding as a symbol of a white, middle-class, suburban America.  Vermont Life historically depicted weddings as pastoral and simple, represented in the first decades of the magazine’s run, particularly during the 1950’s.  However, Vermont Life’s depiction of a simple weddings changed with the introduction of advertisements to the magazine.  This website illustrates how Vermont Life first constructed Vermont weddings as simple and idyllic, and that the magazine changed their depiction of weddings to improve their chances of capitalizing on the wedding industry while leaving out important narratives on civil unions. This project seeks to explore how Vermont Life constructs an image of the Vermont wedding and subsequently modifies it through the introduction of advertisements to the publication.  We will use short essay styled paragraphs describing how weddings were constructed in Vermont and compare this image to the larger canon of the U.S.’s white wedding. Also included, are two personal interviews talking about the queerness of Vermont and the wedding industry as a whole.  We seek to intertwine our critical analysis with personal narrative from the Vermont community.  Take a trip down the aisle with us!