As I prepared to marry in the late 1990s, my mother lamented her lack of decision-making power when she had married in the 1960s. “It's not fair,” she remarked; “when I got married the mothers made the decisions and now the daughters make the decisions.” In reading Karen Dunak's As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America, I came to understand my mother's sentiment as emblematic of a cultural shift in the meaning and celebration of American weddings. Like my mother, many brides in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s followed tradition and had a simple wedding under the direction of their mothers. Such weddings were celebrations of kin and community. Yet, as cultural ideologies about individualism and community began to shift, so did the way people married.

Dunak sets out to shine a light on changes in wedding practice during the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike previous works on American weddings that emphasize the uniformity of contemporary wedding practices, Dunak's focus is on what couples have done differently, how customs are modified, and what this tells us about social life, individuality, and the tension between private and public life. She notes the influence of the commercial wedding industry in “inventing” traditions and encouraging a wedding focussed more on indulging the bride and groom and their personal desires than on recognizing the unification of families. Yet Dunak also counters the notion that weddings have become increasingly empty exercises in excess. She looks closely at how brides and grooms worked to make their weddings meaningful and unique.

Each chapter is anchored in one or more well-known weddings, ranging from those of first daughters Luci Baines Johnson and Tricia Nixon to the first mass gay wedding service performed in 1987 in Washington, DC. Throughout the book Dunak provides compelling data. She uncovers countless fascinating historical documents, letters, and accounts from brides, brides-to-be, and their families which provide lush detail of the experiences of young couples in different generations. She includes passages from letters between engaged couples separated during war, as a means of documenting grooms' involvement in wedding planning and couples' desires to make their weddings special.

Dunak does an excellent job at illuminating microcosms of social life and highlighting specific subcultures whose wedding rituals differ from popular imagination. She shows that not everyone had a cookie-cutter white wedding. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, couples who might have eschewed the traditional wedding found ways to incorporate elements of it while simultaneously making it meaningful to them and representative of the way they lived their lives. For example, in chapter 3, Dunak describes the emergence of hippie weddings. Despite cultural stereotypes of these weddings as barefoot brides and grooms who rejected the “establishment,” these couples crafted deeply spiritual vows which demonstrated great respect for the idea of conscious commitment and the importance of a couples' unique marital bond and the joyous celebration of that. In chapter 4, Dunak shows how gay weddings blend modern and traditional wedding rites and helped increase tolerance and awareness about gay relationships. Dunak thus also does well explaining why these events are important not just among those subcultures but also for what they tell us about the shifts in society that occurred in order for such weddings to happen in the first place.

Although Dunak has clearly engaged in rigorous research and uncovered and compiled fascinating historical documents, diaries, and letters, her work would have been stronger had she provided some discussion of her methodology and data. Dunak notes that the white wedding remained dominant even as hippie weddings eclipsed them in media coverage. Readers are left to wonder about the population she considered and how demographic variations such as region, race, social class, and age impact wedding choices. Whose weddings were central and whose were missing in this book? Are the feelings of the couples included here representative of postwar American couples more broadly? Similarly, more attention to class differences throughout the book would have provided greater context for shifts from public to private celebrations. Of course, authors and scholars must always choose frames of study and Dunak's careful and detailed discussion of weddings in modern American history is an important contribution to cultural understandings not only of marriage and ritual, but also of social and political change. She shows how couples not only made the personal political, but how the political is personal.