“The Bride Did Not Make the Slightest Objection to Being Kissed”: Tom Thumb Weddings and Marriage Promotion through Child’s Play

In 1863, Barnum circus performer Charles Sherwood Stratton—more popularly known by his stage name, General Tom Thumb—made headlines when he married Lavinia Warren, also a little person who performed in Barnum’s company. In the years that followed, communities across the nation began putting on their own “Tom Thumb Weddings,” or simulated marriage ceremonies performed entirely by juveniles. Between the 1900s and 1930s, these pageants took place in thousands of communities across the United States, with children as young as two years old playing the roles of bride and groom and exchanging vows before gushing adult audiences. This ritual served as a public entertainment and a fundraising opportunity for local religious and charitable organizations. It also provided community leaders with a chance to teach middle-class children about the significance of marriage and family. In an era of perceived “marriage crisis”—characterized by great anxiety over rising divorce rates, the decline in procreation among affluent white couples, and the dissolution of strict gender roles—Tom Thumb Weddings served as a subtle form of marriage education and indoctrination. These youth pageants encouraged early enthusiasm for marriage and procreation, particularly among white middle-class children who, in the eyes of eugenicists, held the potential to halt the nation’s descent into “race suicide” if given the proper training. My presentation thus explores the wild popularity of the Tom Thumb Wedding as a celebration of traditional marital ideals in a modernizing nation. It considers the ways in which the organizers of these youth spectacles used pageantry and performance as tools for imparting conservative family values and a veneration for the institution of marriage upon children, thus seeking to build reverence for the nuclear family amid Progressive Era claims that it was on the brink of collapse.