white wedding

white wedding (plural white weddings)

1. A traditional wedding ceremony, typically in a church, in which the bride wears a white wedding dress, symbolic of her virginity.
   • 1978, Marie P. Corbin, The Couple, page 71:

     More generally, the fact that a pregnant bride does not have a full white wedding serves to confirm the respectability and ‘virginity’ of those who do.

   • 1987, Jerry Palmer, The logic of the absurd: On film and television comedy, page 71:

     The concept of virginity is capable of arousing many associations - everything from white weddings to patriarchy – but Bob Hope's oneliner only activates one particular set, its chronological implications.

   • 1989, Julie Mitchell, Sunday Afternoons, page 77:

     Oh, yes, she'd be a virgin when she married – otherwise she couldn't have a proper white wedding.

   • 1989, Sandra K. Roades, Yesterday's Embers, page 152:

     Maybe she was a hypocrite, but she promoted the old-fashioned morality of virginity and white weddings to her daughter.

   • 2001, Thera Rasing, The Bush Burnt, the Stones Remain: Female Initiation Rites in Urban Zambia, Lit Verlag, →ISBN, page 218:

     In this chapter I examine whether this statement applies equally to new rituals that emerged in Africa in the course of the 20th century: (a) rituals surrounding church weddings or white weddings, and (b) kitchen parties. ‘White weddings’ are church blessings of marriages that take place immediately after the traditional wedding ceremony, and ‘church weddings’ are blessings of marriages some time (in some cases many years) after the traditional wedding.

   • 2013, Obvious Vengeyi, "‘The Bible equals Gona’: An Analysis of the Indigenous Pentecostal Churches of Zimbabwe's magical conception of the Bible", in Joachim Kügler & Masiiwa Ragies Gunda, From Text to Practice - The role of the Bible in daily living of African people today, in Bible in Africa Studies (BiAS) 4, University of Bamberg Press (2nd ed.), →ISBN, page 91.

     White weddings are also regarded as the only ‘Godly’ marriages.

   • 2015, Rebecca Probert, "From this Day Forward? Pre-Marital Cohabition and the Rite of Marriage from the 1960s to the Present Day", in Joanna K. Miles & Perveez Mody & Rebecca Probert, Marriage Rites and Rights, Bloomsbury (1st ed.), →ISBN.

     Similarly, Diana Leonard noted of her study of couples getting married in Swansea in the late 1960s that most wanted a ‘proper’ wedding—--ie a white wedding in church--—but that since seven brides were pregnant, and five men and four women had been married before, only seven out of the twenty were ‘eligible’ to marry in church (Leonard 1980: 206).

• shotgun wedding
• white marriage