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First, Geller seems too close to her subject, perhaps a bit too personally bitter about it. Maybe she should have left out the personal anecdotes--she comes off sounding like she is just mad because her married friends are drifting away from her, and because nobody is throwing her a spinsterhood shower and giving her loot. There's a good point here. Married folks are much better off if they hang on to their old friends and don't retreat into a cocoon of coupledom. And maybe we'd all be better off if our relatives helped us get started in our first "place of our own", whether we entered it as single or married people. It's just that she sounds so shrill on these points that it makes her polemic sound more like a personal whine than a political statement.
Second, and this didn't jump out at me at first, but was pointed out in a wonderful review on Salon.com, Geller doesn't interview any brides! She never asks any engaged or married people why they're taking this step, whether they feel "oppressed", etc. (In my own experience, most people who marry have already been living with their lover for years, and get married to please the parents. They already consider this person the most important in their lives; the ceremony is just an antiquated formality. This puts the lie to Geller's thesis that marriage artificially creates closeness between husband and wife.) Her lack of personal stories makes the whole thing ring rather hollow, in retrospect. When Betty Friedan wrote _The Feminine Mystique_, she interviewed many housewives and quoted them to show their discontent.
And so, without any personal testimony on the subject of marriage, Geller is left analyzing pop culture. She lambasts self-help "get-a-man" manuals, bridal magazines that recommend lavish and expensive nuptials, and the fascination with celebrity wives, who are always asserting that they're "traditional" wives and mothers despite the fact that they have full-time nannies and probably never even *see* their kids unless they have a photo shoot together. All of this stuff, I agree, is obnoxious as heck! But what Geller never challenges is the assumption that these things reflect the true feelings of the average woman. Most women I know, married or otherwise, think big weddings are just displays of wealth, that "celebrity wife" stories are sexist and annoying, and that dating manuals are the best way to ruin your relationship by analyzing it into oblivion. In _Backlash_, Susan Faludi exposed the "nesting" culture of the eighties as something cooked up by the media, not an actual trend among regular people. What if this marriage culture is the same way? Geller never finds out, since she doesn't talk to the brides themselves, whether women getting married really feel the way she thinks they do.
This book is a remarkable expose' of the marriage culture, but really doesn't say a darn thing about actual marriage. So go ahead and toss those bridal magazines, but don't let this book sway you too much about whether to tie the knot at all. That's up to you. Geller says it's not OK to be married, but we never do find out why.
More and more women (and men) that I know have found that the expectations (often from guests) as to what is a "proper" wedding have made formal wedding harder to have, impossible to enjoy. More and more have chosen small family affairs, or less showy ceremonies and receptions because the difference between spending 5 thousand on a wedding and using that money to put down on a house (you can still buy a house with a 5K downpayment in most of the country) is just too stark.
Again, the social history was interesting, but I do wish we could, as feminists, realize that just because we can (and always seem to) make sweeping generalizations, doesn't mean any of us speak for all women.