This semester, I will be researching how wedding traditions reinforce heteronormativity and gender inequality. In this post, I will be sharing Tamara Sniezek’s article, Is It Our Day or the Bride’s Day? The Division of Wedding Labor and Its Meaning for Couples. The abstract is provided below:
Based on qualitative interviews with southern California heterosexual engaged
couples, I examine how wedding planning work is divided between the bride and
the groom and how couples meaningfully interpret the division of labor. I find that
couple’s wedding planning work disproportionately falls to women, especially that
labor that is invisible. Wedding work, in many respects, is another form of unpaid
and unappreciated women’s work, not that unlike housework. Yet, couples do not
understand wedding work as an unequal pursuit. Couples use an assortment of
interactional strategies to interpret wedding work as a joint and equal enterprise.
According to Sniezek (2005), the first sociological study of weddings was not published until 1999. She argues that this is partly because sociology is male-dominated and wedding planning has not traditionally been important to them. Overall, “a critical examination of sacred heterosexual and patriarchal practices have historically been resisted.” However, wedding planning is indeed important because it sets the stage for a couple’s interpretation of the future division of labor.
As she interviewed engaged couples, Sniezek (2005) found that women often reported that the wedding planning work was equal and a joint effort. However, she found that women performed an overwhelming majority of the legwork when they itemized each task that was being undertaken. When questioned about this, they rationalized the unequal division of labor by attributing it to “complimentary personality styles (the woman is better at it), the woman’s more flexible work schedule, a fairer division of labor than that of other couples they know, and a woman’s greater interest in weddings overall.” When the bride-to-be did admit frustration with taking on the majority of the work, she did not admit frustration with her fiancé, but reified the wedding industry and blamed it for forcing unneeded stress on brides.
Sniezek (2005) compares wedding work to other forms of housework and argues that it prepares women for their future traditional roles. Therefore, questioning the unfair division of labor in wedding planning may lead to a bride questioning these traditional roles and maybe even the couple’s compatibility. That would open a Pandora’s box of cognitive dissonance at a time when the couple’s harmony and compatibility is supposed to be celebrated.
Perhaps the most striking finding from this study was how “the couples used discourse or ‘a language of equality’ to construct a reality in which the division of wedding work was in fact equal and satisfactory.” They consistently emphasized and steered the focus of the interviews to the few tasks that they did complete together. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, we can see how the language surrounding women’s stereotypical roles masks gender inequalities in wedding work.
Reference:
Sniezek, Tamara. 2005. “Is It Our Day or the Bride’s Day? The Division of Wedding Labor and Its Meaning for Couples.” Qualitative Sociology 28(3):215–34.