Family issues and their social impact

Ingraham (1999) argues that the wedding industry uses icons such as celebrities, princesses, fairytales, toys, and romantic images such as flowers and the color white to promote a false gendered, class, and ethnic-oriented aspect of wedding as a 'happily after' affair.

She draws on various instances to make her claim.

There is the princess Diana wedding where the columnists talk about a 'glass carriage' referring to Cinderella's story even though there was none. The columnists are disappointed when Charles does not look into her face. Most egregious of all is the father literally placing Dian's hand into that of the prince implying that he is transferring possession. And then the vows. The idea of prince and princess may be a fairytale construction with no basis in reality, yet the image continues and is passed down in the shape of fairy tales, books, and toys such as Barbie with advertisers pushing for the child to experience the wedding drama (in the shape of clothes) and, in adults subscriptions, with similes to 'innocence', 'love', and 'childhood'.

Inevitably, the princess is white and invariably the image portrays a happily after scene with the innocent girl/bride / princess becoming pregnant, having a child, and all living happily ever after in love. Predictably, it is the woman who becomes domesticated, rather than the male, at cost to the female's vocational role. And the ring -- note -- is always consistently on the woman's finger rather than on the man's. Flowers, too, are evident in every wedding / bridal image as well as the color pink.

Barbie, sportswoman thoguh she may be, is always in e conventional style. Expected to mature into wife and homemaker and reproduce cloned children instead of living without marriage, or remaining single becoming a manager of corporate leader. Rather, Barbie always carries her trademark pink and even has bride dresses that girls can slip into. The New York Times columns on weddings serves as social logical image of this fashion by advertising the weddings of the rich and up-and-coming with the woman generally accepting the man's name, with her often relocating to the man's region of choice, and with vows signifying 'the impossible conditions of 'obedience, love, and faith' that serve as commitment to preserve the status of a particular order and class.

These are some of the arguments that Ingraham deploys to illustrate the gender, race, and ethnic nuances of wedding advertisement and the wedding industry.

According to Furstenberg (2003), the problem regarding teenage childbearing is misplaced. Instead of seeking ways to limit it, one should ask why it is problematic. Shattering many of the myths of teen childbearing -- showing, for instance, that many of the mothers do go on to become productive members of society (sometimes on a footing with 'regular mother), and that these mothers ultimately acted better for themselves than had they married the person who would have, likely, ruined their lives, as well as that there is little statistical numerical difference between the numbers of white and black premarital birth, and that teenage birth was always common but only became problematic when it occurred outside marriage (starting off first with the Blacks and then progressing to Whites) - Furstenberg shows that disapproval is relegated solely to America's evangelical Christian minority views. In this way, the entire issue of pre-martial teen motherhood it serves as social construction fueled by a nation's ideology, and that in basis there should be hardly any problem whatsoever. The problem, Furstenberg asserts, is not that teens are having children -- teens always did -- but that this is happening outside wedlock and this contravenes with the Evangelical (not Puritan (as popularly thought) mindset of contemporary America.