How did your wedding day reflect your feminist beliefs?

[SkaterGrrrrl]

After reading lots of the awesome threads in here I've realised that many of us feminists are married. Marriage and weddings are often seen as not particularly feminist institutions, so just wondering how posters here incorporated feminist touches into their wedding day! Did you cross out the vow ?to obey? from your wedding ceremony? (There was an uproar when Princess Di did this). Did you ask a woman to make a speech at the reception?

I didn't obey, I kept my own name (although DH offered to change to mine) and I paid for half the weddiing

i'm getting married in october and i haven't thought about it feminist terms but it probably is very feminist.

i am not in white, no 'giving away', no hen do, no 'obeying', no bridesmaids, i will give a speech, no bouquet...

we're arriving together (by taxi) for a short registry office service with our parents and then going to a youth hostel we've booked for a whole weekend with lots of friends, children, families, including lunch and a ceilidh then evening bonfire and bbq.

we are exchanging rings.. and i will keep my name for work and to begin with though when i have children i may become Mrs DH but i'll decide about that later...

DP is having a 'stag do' which consists of camping and mountain biking with a few closest friends, but it's not a 'last night of freedom' and will not involve typical 'stag' behaviour it's just a bit of breathing space in the wilderness the weekend before the wedding.

I am not having a 'hen do' as most of my friends are male - i'm just going to visit friends while DP is camping.

Oh blimey, I just buried all my feminist sentiments and simpered prettily .

But they surfaced again pretty soon afterwards!

Until the dch were born we both worked ft & took it in turns to do the food shopping & cooking, & shared the cleaning. After I had dtws I became a SAHM. I found it incredibly difficult after working full time for 18 years, but now I enjoy working from home & doing stuff like making jam. But am still defo a feminist .

oh, yes and my parents are not footing the bill - they're contributing towards the honeymoon, DPs mum is contributing, we are paying most ourselves.

I am not married to my partner of 15 years (3 kids), largely because, I think, it didn't sit well with my feminist principles. So we just never bothered.

I wasn't given away - dh and I walked up the aisle together. we made the same vows - no obeying from either of us. we split the bill 3 ways - his family, my family, us.

and no name changing.though we did contemplate both changing our name to the first name we could find in common in our family trees. it turned out we both had grannies called Smith. so, given that we both had interesting unusual regional names we knocked that idea on the head.

I'm not sure why a white frock is anti-feminist. In Hindu weddings the bride traditionally wears red - is that anti-feminist too?

(had lovely cream dress at wedding)

But for some reason I do find the whole veil thing weird - it's like pretending the bride has been veiled and cloistered and never met the groom before (IMO).

My dad's dead so my mum walked me down the aisle which was lovely, and she and I both made speeches at the reception.

SkaterGrrl love the idea of giving the bouquet to longest-married woman there (I kept mine in selfish fashion).

PS I have never been to a wedding where the bride promises to obey - surely that's really unusual now?

We got married in exactly the way we wanted, when we wanted with no interference from anyone else and no money from anyone else.

In fact we didnt tell anyone until 6 months later.

There has been no namechanging and no joint bank accounts.

I got married in trousers! (I also had a top on, was not half-naked, that would have been a bit odd).

No walk down the aisle (if you could regard there being an aisle in a registry office) - in hindsight I would have asked my Mum to do it if I had wanted someone at all, but I was fine with it being me and dh in the room before everyone else came in.

No obey, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say that in their vows. No namechanging, although many of my friends have.

Oh, and no speeches at all. Dh wasn't/isn't well and again in hindsight, I could have made a speech but that wasn't really the point of the day. I did like my friend's speech (the bride) the following year when she toasted Bridget Jones - you could see 60% of the audience had no idea what she was going on about, but we liked it!

Minimalist civil ceremony 'I NotCitrus take MrNC to be my lawful wedded husband', he replied, and that was it.
No stag/hen dos

Commitment ceremony - MrNC and I walked in together and each said what we meant to each other and asked for the help of the audience in the future. And we had a best man each, as they seemed a lot more useful than bridesmaids.

No veil, and my dress was scarlet (I told my dad it was good enough for a billion Chinese and most of India...) I ended up with a bouquet that I shoved in a vase when I got down the pub and then gave it to the neighbours as we were going on honeymoon.

No rings (mostly because I'd only lose it, I admit), I kept my name, which was tricky when we got a few cheques for Mr+Mrs HisName.

We had a sten do rather than stag and hen, although that no particular feminist statement, just most of my friends were his friends and vice versa. In the end he was too unwell to go and I had terrible 'morning' sickness so it was a bit of a washout all round :)

I had a 'best woman' rather than maid-of-honour - again not hugely important as it wasn't a trad do. But we did exchange rings. No bouquet also.

I wouldn't say that many of these were overtly feminist features of our wedding, more to do with just keeping it small and simple. You could have a Diana wedding and still be a feminist.

I am having two bridesmaids, but that's because they're my family (best friend of 20 years and beloved SIL). They are people I choose to stand with me. It had never occurred to me that there was any other reading of the situation.

Which just goes to show, I suppose, that many modern day weddings can be read as fairly anti-trad if you know to look at the detail. I love reading the wedding stories on Offbeatbride for just this reason - people have so many interesting stories and such interesting motivations for making the choices they do.

chocolatemoose the white dress is supposed to signify virginity which is traditionally important (essential?) for the bride but not relevant for the groom.

i walked down the 'aisle' with dh.

no obey. very short wording, the shortest the registrar offered.

i took dh's surname. and we did deed polls straight after signing the register to change our names to have my maiden name as our middle name. so i have dh's name, and he has mine. passports etc all show this.

and no speeches.

Rosa, where have you been all my life the last few months?! I've never found any sane woman who got married in the Orthodox Church, I'd have loved to hear about it.

It really is very sexist, isn't it?!

Re-reading this thread, something I'm really pleased happened with us was that we didn't have a male/female split between his and my attendants - I hate the idea that the groom only has male friends as ushers and the bride only women as bridesmaids, it is so ridiculous.

I will bear witness though, Butterpie, that every single woman who has ever married, or married into, my family, has had speeches made for them. Not one of them has spoken at all - and two were married in the last 18 months. It gave me the creeps to watch adult women with jobs and houses, demurely listening to their dads and husbands making pompous speeches over their heads (and pompous they were, with much amusing joking about 'handing her over' and 'my daughter's expensive shopping habits are your responsibility now, ho ho!').

It really does still happen.

No veil, no obeying and I made one of the speeches.
Walked into the ceremony with DH.
Other than that, pretty trad really.

weirdly, i think the whole wedding thing is more like a piece of theatre rather than a statement about your life intentions... but it's interesting to ponder about making it a political statement.

anyway, we didn't. (make a political statement, that is.) it was entirely conventional and traditional, and wasn't really about us at all, other than the getting the bit of paper thing. military weddings are military weddings, really. mostly executed to a set format so that if he/ she gets KIA you get informed.

the only 'non-standard' military wedding i've been to (and i've been to a fair few), the bride wore fuschia and orange, and they were divorced within a couple of years.

but i have looooooooooong and lengthy thoughts about the contradictions between lived feminism and being a military spouse in any case.

'but i have looooooooooong and lengthy thoughts about the contradictions between lived feminism and being a military spouse in any case. '

That sounds interesting/scary in equal measure! Is it still very sexist then, despite women in the military?

Btw, I think you are making a political statement just by having a 'trad' wedding - it may feel quite passive, but the whole thing has been politicized (not to mention commmercialized) by now, hasn't itt?

We arranged the whole thing ourselves, arrived together and had total control of the guest list.

No white, no veil, no hairstylist, make-up artist or manicurist, no florist (my brother and sister did the bridesmaids' posies) and we made our own invitations using children's colouring pens.

But we worded the invitations as from my mother, just as a compliment to her, and she chose to be Mrs Dadsfirstname Dadssurname on the invitations in his memory.

Nobody gave me away but my brother escorted me in, and my uncle made a speech welcoming dh to the clan (and letting him know they were all proud of me) and I had a day off and said nothing (but I did sing, which is more important).

And it was absolutely perfect for us. Nobody's ever suggested that I sold out - but those who were there all knew both of us very well.

Hmm. Getting married gave me rights and protections as the SAHM of his children, so I consider it a feminist act.

Oh, and I carried a garlic blossom bouquet. Does that count?

Didn't obey.

Had male and female bridesmaids/bridesblokes

Made own speech.

Drank pints at reception.

Absolutely refused to have a top table with everyone gawping at the bride.