Summer Denver Debutante Ball at the University of Denver

Hello, last Saturday I documented the 2008 Summer Debutante Ball at the University of Denver. Click here to see a slideshow. Deb Ball.
A local photo studio Bettinger Photography does all the formal pictures of the girls and their families. Bettinger.
Owner of the studio, Dan Bettinger, has hired me three years in a row to photograph a story line of the day working as a photojournalist. Its like photographing a wedding with lots of brides.
Cheers, Kent Meireis
How the Tradition Started
The idea that a young girl of marriageable age should be presented to society in order to find a husband of suitable means and similar social standing started in England. The landed aristocracy was quite small and physically dispersed on the island. In an agrarian society where wealth and power depended on land, the lords and ladies of England married within a very small circle in order to preserve their holdings and ultimately their social and political influence. One of the principal attractions of their daughters was the often large dowries that came with them. This attracted the bold and the unprincipled at a time when the tradition of arranged marriages was ending.
The need to protect and augment landholdings by widening the field of eligible suitors geographically while narrowing it socially gave birth to the tradition of the debutante ball. Over the centuries English society came to be increasingly centered on the court of the kings and queens of England. At certain times of the year, the court sat in London. During this time, the aristocracy came in from their country homes and opened their city houses and the social season commenced. It was hoped by the end of the season, a girl would have found a suitable husband. The tradition of presenting daughters to the King and Queen lives on in today’s debutante balls in the curtsies the debutants make to mark the beginning of the event.
After the industrial revolution, the foundations of English wealth began to shift from land to money. Impoverished aristocrats became increasingly anxious to make marital alliances with wealthy entrepreneurs. The middle class daughters of industrialists and merchants could be presented if they could find a sponsor from among the aristocracy. From this time emerged some of the more unfortunate traditions of snobbery, social climbing, and frustrated marriages that continue to hurt feelings and color the reputation of debutant balls to this day.
The original presentation of young women to society started in the United States in 1748 in Philadelphia. Denver came to game fairly late staging its first ball in 1955. By then time the traditional sources of wealth were shifting yet again away from growing, mining, or making things towards providing professional services. Women of a certain social status no longer got married at 18 (or pregnant at 19) and started looking to college as the best place to find husbands of means and social standing.
At the dawn of a new century as we see another shift in the economic basis of wealth, the debutant ball has lost much of its original purpose for men. Women don’t have dowries; they don’t need to depend on a man for economic survival. Today divorce rather than marriage marks the great transition in personal fortunes and the debutants of 2006 do not to expect to marry until long after graduate school when they have established successful careers as doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists. Where a debutante ball was once a great place for men to pick up women, this is no longer the case. The debutant ball lives on now as a celebration of fertility and an expression of the stability of a social order. We follow the tradition today, as we do so much else in contemporary society, because it makes women happy.