To Love and to Cherish: Brides Remembered

Paying tribute to marital Americana, Lipsett ( Remember Me: Women & Their Friendship Quilts ) surveys our indigenous rites of courtship and marriage. Several customs are surprising (shotgun weddings were commonplace during Revolutionary times) and others hilarious: to preserve decorum while hastening romance, during the early 19th century ``Connecticut Valley young lovers spoke to one another from opposite ends of the fireplace through a courting stick, a long hollow tube with mouth and earpieces.'' Among the poorer people in northeastern states, young women of the same era were under much pressure to ``bundle,'' or keep supposedly chaste company with a suitor on a bed or couch while well wrapped against the winter cold. Victorian strictures may have encouraged the art of flirtation to flower, especially in the ``twenty-two different motions'' young ladies learned to execute with their handkerchiefs, but frontier women more often had to rough it where manners and wedding matters were concerned. Writing with conversational enthusiasm, and distributing photographs generously throughout, Lipsett offers a light and entertaining account of things domestic. (Nov.)