Thoughts on Etsy's "Hobo Wedding"

It seems like this couple: http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2011/handmade-weddings-depression-era-hobo/ have the internet up in arms after over their cultural appropriation of depression era poverty as their wedding theme.  

Kenwood House: Dream Venue



This reminds me of something that happened when I was planning my own wedding.

 Hampstead Heath is a beautiful big park in London, which I just adore. At the top of the park is Kenwood House, an old manor house which is now run as museum and restaurant.  Kenwood House is licensed to perform marriages and I loved the idea of having my wedding there. I could picture myself coming out of this big white building, family and friends around me and looking out over rolling parkland at all the families picnicking and the kids running around. I just thought it would be perfect.  

Hiring a manor house does not come cheap but I was encouraged to see that they also do a reception package in the kitchen, which is a good sized room, and can be decorated in something called “shabby chic”: which seems to involve a lot of meadowy flowers in mismatched vintage milk jugs and oldie worldie style table cloths and doiles and so on.  


The Old Kitchen
Pleasant but visibly "Below Stairs"
 
 I checked the prices on the kitchen wedding and predictably it was still way out of our budget so I put the idea aside, set myself down to organise something more realistic and thought no more about it.
No more that is, until my Mum mentioned that she’d seen the package advertised with the slogan “Have your wedding below stairs.”  She was genuinely freaked out by the idea and literally could'nt imagine why anyone would find the idea attractive. Her exact word were: “My whole life is about trying to get away from life “below stairs!” I never want to go back.”
I should point out here that my Mum is from the post war baby boomer generation and benefited from the social mobility of that period. She has never worked as a servant and, given the times she grew up in, it would have been deeply surprising thing if she had.  


Her own mother however (my grandmother), was “in service” from the age of 12 and clearly, the experience has cast a long enough shadow that the idea of celebrating anything “below stairs” still carries with it a sense of horror and shame. Even for the next generation. Even 70 years later. And yet this response had not, for a second occured to me.


In case you were wondering: this is how it turned out in the end!

What’s interesting to me here is the difference made by that one additional generation, that can transmute a grossly insensitive act of cultural appropriation into a perfectly acceptable wedding theme. An object of aspiration even.  You really have to laugh at capitalism sometimes.  They would have had me break the bank to buy a sanitised pastiche of my own family history.  



Instead of which, we had a quaint registry office ceremony and pub reception, encorporating all the authentic customs of the 21st century white working class. It was just just so cute. I can't wait to see a knock off version at 4 times the equivelent price in 70 years time.  













Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My first blooding in the Terf Wars

When I moved to Glasgow 12 years ago, I joined two groups which were to have a profound effect on my political outlook. And set me on a course that culminated recently in 6 solid months of stress,  my first intimate experience of a political split and my first proper blooding in the Terf wars.   The first was a very small, trans inclusive feminist group. It was in this group that I coined the ridiculous  phrase "are now or have been a woman" in an attempt to find a form of words which would allow us to  keep a very nice young woman who identified as non binary and kick out two sexist blokes who err… also identified as non binary.  If you know anything about contemporary trans politics you will instantly see that this tack was offensive  to all parties but, hey, my heart was in the right place. I was trying to be inclusive.  The two non binary blokes…..I later talked to a member of the group about them in private. She felt that at least one of them was simply "trolling&qu
Read more

Watching Mumsnet, Watching Britains Largest Family

I have a love hate relationship with Mumsnet. It’s always fascinating to me as the epicentre of a particular kind of engaged, intensive form of mothering with a particular focus on education. On Mumsnet I have seen posters ask “Doesn’t everyone teach their kids to read before they start school? Surely that just part of good parenting.”   I’ve seen long threads on the subject of what exactly constitutes “social capital” and how they can be sure to impart it. (Trips to the opera were mentioned.). I’ve seen debates on various types of secondary schools conducted from the starting point that everyone’s child would easily get into grammar school. No doubt because of the work already invested in “talking and reading to them when they were little” It’s a part of a particular kind of parenting which originates in the middle class. The basic strategy being to have fewer children and to invest more heavily in them in the hopes that they can become high earners and replicate the privi
Read more

School Choices

We chose our house, 7 years ago, partly on the areas potential for class struggle. Because we are that  ridiculous and left wing. Part of what informed that decision was my husbands involvement in a campaign to save a number of  primary schools across the city, in which residents of the scheme had been particularly militant.  The school was lost but, almost as a consolation prize, the building was repurposed as a  community centre which now hosts a youth club, gym, free computers, welfare rights advice and a  food bank. It has become central to the life and survival of the community. We moved in and we were not wrong to do so. We're all very happy here. Plus the residents  association has recently affiliated to Living Rent. Five years later, of course, I had to register the eldest child at school and noticed, as if for the first time, that there wasn't one to send him to. I had become the only middle class mother in the world to deliberately move to an area be
Read more