More About Wedding News
Bridal News in the Women’s Pages
As researcher Erika Engstrom noted in her work: “Published gossip in the form of wedding announcements thus provides a record of social life.”[i]And those announcements and accompanying stories have a long history. According to a book about the media and weddings: “The appeal of weddings as news finds its origins as far back as written news has existed. In addition to their newsworthiness, accounts of weddings of the politically important or of popular movie stars have included gossipy details of the most intricate and minute aspects.”[ii]In the 1940s, scholars looked to the weddings announcements of the New York Times to evaluate the role of high society and noted the role of women in women’s clubs and their wealth. They found, for example, that 65 percent of brides were members of the elite Junior League and that the education level of the bride was less important that the groom’s educational status.[iii]By the 1980s and 1990s, researchers used New York Times wedding announcements to determine the role of the women’s liberation movement and the commonality of women keeping their maiden names.[iv]In 1997, the New York Times published a collection of its recent wedding columns. The Times’ wedding reporter noted: “It became clear that while writing about weddings, I could cover any subject from first kisses to family values in the 1990s. It could be a combination of anthropology, gossip, fashion, psychology, home economics and dreams.”[v]
What has not been examined is the more subtle change about society that wedding news contained, especially at newspapers beyond the New York Times. Using a social history approach, this is an examination of wedding announcements at metropolitan newspapers – other than the New York Times – demonstrated changing attitudes about race and social class. It includes several newspapers in South Florida. The shift in coverage of weddings signaled a change in who was important enough to cover and in doing so, who had value in the pages of a newspaper.
Like many young women starting in journalism in the 1940s, Colleen “Koky” Dishon became the Society Editor of the Zanesville Times Recorder. After all, most women were restricted to the women’s pages of newspapers until the late 1960s and early 1970s. In her job, Dishon, who went on to become the first woman to have her name on the masthead of the Chicago Tribune, covered the traditional fare of births and brides. The editor Al Gonder showed her how to take a wedding at a local baseball diamond and write about it in a creative way (the groom was getting a “good catch”) so that it would be placed on the front page. She recalled of the time: “It wasn’t Hemingway, but that didn’t matter. The lesson was that there were stories in ordinary events and that readers care about the rituals of life.”[vi]One of Dishon’s later scoops while at the Chicago Daily News newspaper was getting into the exclusive Jay Rockefeller-Sharon Percy wedding.[vii] She got her reporter into the event by having an expert create a counterfeit invitation to the wedding.
[i] Erika Engstrom, The Bride Factory: Mass Media Portrayals of Women and Weddings (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 65.
[ii] Erika Engstrom, The Bride Factory: Mass Media Portrayals of Women and Weddings (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 78.
[iii] David L Hatch and Mary A. Hatch, “Criteria of Social Status as Derived from the Marriage Announcements in the New York Times, American Sociological Review, August 1947, 396-403.
[v] Lois Smith Brady, Vow: Weddings of the Nineties from the New York Times (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997), v.
[vi]Colleen Dishon, “Newspapers Were a Lot More Exciting Than College,” ASNE Bulletin, November 1992, 26.
[vii]“Pages for Women,” Time magazine, May 19, 1967.
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