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Summary: Read this before the walk down the altar
Review: This book blows the lid off of marriage. What is suppose to be the most important day in couples life has turn into a frenzy of consumer glutteny. I was astonshed at how diamonds an american symbol of love is a an oppresive force for the people who mine them. This book will make you cry.
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Summary: Review Quotes
Review: "Delicious. Chrys Ingraham is Martha Stewart's nightmare--finally! Her mission is to debunk, dethrone, and, of course, defrock that blushing bride and handsome groom. For anyone who's ever wondered what the fuss is all about, White Weddings is a must read." --Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook
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Summary: Praise for White Weddings
Review: "This book probably won't be on the must-read lists of most brides and grooms to be, but it is an interesting look at the institution of marriage. Or, rather the industry of marriage as the author emphasizes in her clear-eyed view of weddings. . . . Ingraham, an associate professor of sociology at Russell Sage College, tears away the veil of fantasy and takes a hard look at bridal magazines, religion, the garment industry, the media and just plain capitalism, and how they all figure into this tradition." -Los Angeles Times "Chrys Ingraham is alarmed. We've been brainwashed, she argues in her new book White Weddings. The sociology professor writes about how weddings have more to do these days with marketing and economics than with spirituality and reality." -Chicago Sun Times "By looking closely at one of our society's most popular, yet unexamined, cultural rituals, Ingraham advances an understanding of the impact of the social construction of heterosexuality as a dominant institution. Anyone seeking to understand gender and sexuality as they interface with race and class in the US and what happens to those who step out of line must read this informative study." -Charlotte Bunch, Executive Director, Center for Women's Global Leadership, Rutgers University "In this original and provocative book, Ingraham pierces the glossy surface of the wedding to reveal a logic of heterosexual domination. This is a pioneering text in the new field of critical Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America (Routledge)
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Summary: great book!
Review: an analysis of this sort was sorely needed. this book is factual in addition to being cute. i would highly recommend it to anyone.
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Summary: Finally!
Review: Chrys, I cannot tell you how happy I was to read this book. You've so eloquently vocalized what I've felt for years but have never been properly able to express: my distaste for the "white wedding mill", women's societally created lust for weddings, as well as points that I had never considered - especially the racial aspects. Your book has made me feel like I am not the only person (or woman, at least) who feels this way, and has helped me reinforce my long-held opinion that I will buck tradition and have NO WEDDING at all, in spite of my family's gasps of disbelief. I only wish it had been longer!
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Summary: This Book Makes Me Think Twice About Having a Big Wedding
Review: Chrys, if you are reading this, your book is excellent! It exposes how the wedding/industrial complex have a stake at maintaining racial/gender/class inequality by making upper-class white weddings as the norm. I wish you've expand the racial factor in this for it is about maintaining racial purity and white patriarchal supremacy. You've also done an excellent job in exposing those people in power, especially the right-wing republicans in Congress who shout "family values" on their rooftops and deny many people of individual liberties and rights to live their lives as they please. Racist groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, which asserts that the white race would fade away with racial and ethnic mixing and that gays are unnatural and evil force in American society. This book makes me think twice about having a big wedding or marriage period. I'm a black woman from Ohio.
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Summary: Ingraham's critic is too narrow
Review: I read this book while studying both contemporary North American and cross-cultural weddings and marriages. Ingrahms book describes the "white wedding" a white upperclass affair as discriminatory and exclusive. She focuses on the institution of marriage being perpetuated by old white folk and major corporations. Unfortunatley she does not expand into the universality of marriage. I do not recomend this book. It is narrow and inconclusive.
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Summary: Ingraham's critic is too narrow
Review: I read this book while studying both contemporary North American and cross-cultural weddings and marriages. Ingrahms book describes the "white wedding" a white upperclass affair as discriminatory and exclusive. She focuses on the institution of marriage being perpetuated by old white folk and major corporations. Unfortunatley she does not expand into the universality of marriage. I do not recomend this book. It is narrow and inconclusive.
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Summary: I'd rather chew aluminum foil.....
Review: I started out reading Chrys Ingraham's White Weddings with positive attitude. I am very interested with how the "white wedding came about". As she went on with the book there were a few problems that did not settle with me. Number one she often used the words wedding and marriage interchangeably. These words are two very different in definition and shouldn`t be used in place of one another. The second thing that I found very hard to handle with her book is that she often would make broad generalizations that would have no factually information to support the idea. Finally when you read the epilogue she says, "writing this book has been a wrenching experience. Without realizing how fully I've been sutured to dominate heterosexual culture, I have frequently found myself engaged in a variety of internal struggles. Tears would be streaming down my face as I empathized with the characters in a movie while, at the same time, I would be taking notes critiquing the heterosexual imaginary." It seems to me that she wrote this book as a statement of how she feels and her opinions. This is great if it is therapy for her but should not be taken as fact or the answer for other people. The one educational part of the book was the section about how white weddings are capitalized. Sweatshops are terrible and it is a horrible feeling to know that people work in awful conditions to make your wedding dress. This is however should not be the main reason to critizes white weddings, but a reason to make changes. This book was a start of a good idea but in the end turned into someone else's opinion and platform. After reading this book no one should feel bad about the choices they make for their own weddings just because they don't fit with what Chrys Ingraham's believes. A person should make decisions based on what feels right for them.
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Summary: The book White Weddings may not be pure
Review: I started out reading Chrys Ingraham's White Weddings with positive attitude. I am very interested with how the "white wedding came about". As she went on with the book there were a few problems that did not settle with me. Number one she often used the words wedding and marriage interchangeably. These words are two very different in definition and shouldn't be used in place of one another. The second thing that I found very hard to handle with her book is that she often would make broad generalizations that would have no factually information to support the idea. Finally when you read the epilogue she says, "writing this book has been a wrenching experience. Without realizing how fully I've been sutured to dominate heterosexual culture, I have frequently found myself engaged in a variety of internal struggles. Tears would be streaming down my face as I empathized with the characters in a movie while, at the same time, I would be taking notes critiquing the heterosexual imaginary." It seems to me that she wrote this book as a statement of how she feels and her opinions. This is great if it is therapy for her but should not be taken as fact or the answer for other people. The one educational part of the book was the section about how white weddings are capitalized. Sweatshops are terrible and it is a horrible feeling to know that people work in awful conditions to make your wedding dress. This is however should not be the main reason to critizes white weddings, but a reason to make changes. This book was a start of a good idea but in the end turned into someone else's opinion and platform. After reading this book no one should feel bad about the choices they make for their own weddings just because they don't fit with what Chrys Ingraham's believes. A person should make decisions based on what feels right for them.
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