Pink Think by Lynn Peril

Author:Lynn Peril
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the past, such a scene was unlikely to have occurred. Prior to the seventies, couples who roomed together without benefit of matrimony were “likely to find themselves isolated from their community and [given] a wide berth socially,” as Why Are You Single? described it. Even as late as the early 1970s, the much-married Zsa Zsa Gabor was leery of shacking up: “To me, if you are a young girl and you find a boy ‘groovy’ and you go off and move into his ‘pad’ with him, you are definitely making a terribly bad mistake.”

Living at home up until the time of one’s marriage made gifts brought to the showers and the wedding itself an important source of appliances and kitchen tools. That’s where a wedding planner like To the Bride (1956) came in handy. Distributed by merchants who wanted brides-to-be to sign on at their gift registries, To the Bride was part cookbook and part hardbound advertisement for china, silverware, glassware, and stainless steel, all wrapped up in prose that is either cloying (“Soon you will reach that day for which you have planned and dreamed since you were a little girl . . . Your Wedding Day!!”), prone to exaggeration (“Undoubtedly the greatest invention since the discovery of electricity is the marvelous new Sunbeam Automatic Electric Controlled Heat Frypan”), or both. Filled with suggestions that the wedding was an excellent occasion for unbridled consumerism, the book included handy lists of name-brand appliances, bed linens, etc., for the bride to distribute to her friends and family. Couples who commenced cohabitation after the wedding ceremony actually needed these items to set up housekeeping for the first time, but I still wonder if brides who received utilitarian gifts were as thrilled about it as the one who appeared in a 1955 ad for the “Rid-Jid Knee Room Adjustable All-Steel Ironing Table,” holding an iron and surrounded by “seldom used luxury gifts” the rest of the copy assured us she didn’t want.

One of those luxury gifts was sterling silver flatware. If the manufacturers of sterling silver advertised heavily in teen magazines, they went into overdrive in publications like Bride’s and House Beautiful’s Guide for the Bride. Perhaps because no one really needed sterling flatware, its advertising scaled heights of emotionalism seldom seen outside that for products like mouthwash and acne medications. Owning your own silver was a “thrilling, heart-filling thing,” according to one 1947 ad. “Inferior quality, like false pride, will trip you up sooner or later,” editorialized Bride’s magazine. But the master of thrilling, heart-filling melodrama was International Sterling. “Aunt Beth, do you remember the day I told Tom I’d marry him?” began one 1947 ad, which featured a white-gowned bride grasping the hand of an attractive older woman: “Oh, I was in the stars about it. I guess I didn’t come down to earth till we had the family talk, and Mother and Dad told me they could swing the wedding, but not much in the way of ‘worldly goods.’

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