The American Journal of Sociology

We speak of the "institution" of marriage. We also use marriage instead of wedding, nuptials, or matrimony. The result is confusion. A wedding or even nuptials occur as a ceremony or festival, on a day, and as the commencement of wedlock or matrimony. Wedlock may be an institution, but a wedding is not. A wedding lacks the duration or recurrence which belongs to an institution. It does not provide for an enduring necessity. It has no apparatus for the repeated use of the same couple. The status of women was generally sad and pathetic in savage life but we may accept it as an established fact that that was not because she was physically inferior to man but that it was due to inferiority in the…