Hey! Yesterday I went to a wedding and I totally forgot about the bouquet toss tradition. I found it very uncomfortable because it felt like a way to expose the single women in front of anyone, like when slaves were exposed so that the buyer could see their strengths and weaknesses and decide whether to buy them or not. I’ve been reading some comments on reddit and I’m not the only one who sees this tradition like this. I can’t find a good article about its origins and meaning. Can anyone recommend something good related to this topic? Thanks!!!
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It appears to be a Victorian issue where the idea was to insert a note into the bouquet and toss it over a hedge row to a woman you’re courting. Not my area of study but it is elaborated on in the article somewhat. It’s a good jumping off point and definitely has zero to do with slavery.
As an aside, it doesn’t even look or reminisce of a slave market…I’m not sure why this was even something you considered?
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/80/article/640663/summary
From what I can tell the original concept was that parts of the bride’s wedding dress were considered lucky, so dresses would be torn up as tokens of good luck. There are allegedly quite a lot of historic traditions surrounding other bits of wedding attire, eg stocking throwing, but its really hard to get reliable sources on those.
This medieval tradition evolved into throwing the garter as a symbolic representation of the couple’s luck, which then further evolved during the Victorian period into the modern day bouquet toss.
A fair bit of variation exists even now – take for instance to whom the item is thrown to. Some cultures have the toss done to "single" people, others "unmarried" ones, there are variations on this where the item is thrown to a ‘designated’ person, such as maid of honour / bridesmaid. Many modern cultures retain one of either the garter throwing (typically by the Groom to the assembled single/unmarried men) and/or the bouquet toss (typically by the Bride to single/unmarried women).
I can’t see significance evidence for any relation to slavery or exposing single woman as you’ve requested, though there are certainly lots of strange elements around the historical role of these traditions – for instance theres notions around purity / consumation of weddings and traditions involving that, which are very unusual by modern standards.
https://www.brittenweddings.com/pages/what-is-the-tradition-behind-the-wedding-garter
Friedman, Albert B., and Richard H. Osberg. "Gawain’s Girdle as Traditional Symbol." The Journal of American Folklore 90.357 (1977)