Amanda Buettner

The Diamond Engagement Ring

Amanda Buettner

Despite opposition from her mother declaring that she was too young to marry, in 1904 Eleanor Roosevelt received a 3.4 carat diamond ring from her secret fiancé, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Of this she said, “I am longing to have my birthday present from you for good, and yet I love it so I know I shall find it hard to keep from wearing it! You could not have found a ring I would have liked better, even if you were not you! ”[i] Roosevelt seems to enjoy the ring as a token of love, but also gushes about the gift’s exquisiteness, perhaps regardless of the source. Her reaction should be understood in the moment of their engagement; a consumerist America where the middle to upper class (as Eleanor Roosevelt’s family was) enjoyed the new luxurious brought about by industry and the wealth that flowed from business. Yet her diamond engagement ring was not standard by any means amongst American women at the time. Popularity yes, but not a given for brides to be. So how did the diamond ring move into the masses from the upper echelon of American society?

Scholars have argued the success of the diamond engagement ring in the mid-century is due to De Beers campaign of 1946, primed by advertising efforts starting in the late 1930s to increase the popularity of diamonds among Americans.[ii] Others such as Margaret Brining argued the nationwide trend of abolishing breach of contract laws for engagement around 1935 was the driving force behind the rising popularity of these expensive rings.[iii] She proposed that the change of law allowed for the average man to have a safety net when giving a fiancé a diamond ring, since there was now a possibility of return if the engagement was broken. Both arguments fail to account for the larger cultural forces at play, predating either trend. 

I propose the rise of the diamond engagement ring in the late 1930s and onward resulted from three factors. First, necessary to the diamond ring’s popularity was the establishment of sentimentalized goods as manifestations of middle class aspiration in the second half of the 19th century. Second, this ideology was revived and expanded during the post-Depression, post-WWII period when marriage rates began to rise and material wealth and access to consumption allowed for expansion of the market for the engagement ring. Third, using Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, I propose the trend of the female body as adorned in order to show family/the husband’s status in contrast to the trend of “simple modernity” in men’s fashion is key to understanding how the diamond engagement ring played out as a highly gendered and classed symbol of love in companionate marriage.[iv] Historian Vicki Howard argues that the double wedding ring trend of the 1950s, meaning rings for both husband and wife, was not just a success of the jewelry business advertising, but was informed by deeper social impulses around gender, the family, and class. “The wedding industry was only able to transform mid-twentieth century practices when the goods and their accompanying rituals, something shaped … by contemporary gender ideologies.”[v] By using this framework of ritual and gender, the engagement ring can be understood as an expression of an invented tradition that was able to attain its status by leveraging gender and class ideologies that defined marriages in the early and mid-20th century. The marketing efforts of the De Beers Company are a vital part of the story, but without American society being primed by the cultural forces of companionate marriage and sentimentalized goods, the economic upturn post-Depression, and the historical treatment of the ornamentalized female body, the campaign would have been dead on arrival.

Early Engagement Rings and Companionate Marriage

The tradition of the engagement ring or wedding ring was not unfamiliar to early Americans, but it was not widespread. The tradition would have been more popular amongst the upper classes who could afford to buy jewelry of precious metal or jewels. If they were worn, the wedding ring or the engagement ring would only be worn by the woman. The mid to late 1900s saw a rise in the popularity and advertising of engagement rings. Jewelers and other ring sellers used newspaper ads to encourage American men into getting their betrothed an engagement ring. The earlier ads from around the 1870s boasted about the beautiful gold that was available to purchase, but as early as 1882 ads for diamond engagement rings could be seen, likely helped by new South African diamond mines.[vi] Yet it wasn’t only the emerging consumer culture that allowed the diamond engagement ring to become mainstream in American society, but also shifting ideas about what marriage should be. 

The 19th century introduced a sentiment of tenderness into marriage. While realistically out of reach for most couples, sentimentality stayed as a component of an ideal marriage.[vii] From the 1880s to the 1930s, an ideal marriage was increasingly reimagined as “companionate”. An affectionate, close-knit, and fulfilling relationship was expected between couples. Further compounding this ideal was the introduction of heterosexuality and homosexuality into the cultural mainstream. As psychologists and other experts emphasized the importance of the heterosexual couple, same-sex friendships were devalued or looked upon as suspicious. This trend gave greater importance to the rituals and items of weddings and marriages, they started to be associated with the sentimentality of this tradition. 

Class and Consumption

Despite this shift to companionate marriage, class and status remained a large force in pre-wedding, wedding, and marriage rituals and aspirations. Engagement rings themselves were remained more common amongst the wealthy.[vii] Weddings and pre-wedding events became more commercialized during the mid-1800s, with elaborate weddings of the upper and aspirational middle classes involving more gifts, goods, and money than ever before.[ix] Scholar Barbara Penner argues this was facilitated by “a new sentimental attachment to goods among the middle to upper classes.” Advertisers, including jewelers, capitalized on increased demand and worked to stimulate more desire for bridal gifts and rings. The intersection of class and gender in this ritual speaks to the role of a wife in a marriage during this period. the emphasis on the woman “must be seen as a reflection of the wife’s greater social, legal, and economic stake in marriage.”[x] Even though the goods were said to be given in the spirit of love and family, the expensive nature of these gifts illustrates an impulse to assign the ornamental to the female, denoting her new status as wife. The goods, and also the engagement ring, associated display of status with the wife and the female body in these newly forming families. 

Middle to upper class consumers and businesses infused the language of sentimentality into purchasable items, allowing for greater consumption and shielding of critiques of materialism (though critiques of commercial wedding cultures were common)[xi] Eleanor Roosevelt’s ring was gifted during this upswing of engagement rings, which fit the styles of the upper class. The diamond solitaire engagement ring was heavily advertised, now more so than the simple gold band. Unfortunately for De Beers, the luck would not last. Between 1919 and 1938 the number of diamonds sold in America declined by 50 percent.[xii] The critiques of old social codes, the economic downturn of the late 20s and subsequent depression in the 1930s and dating culture disincentivized the purchase of expensive diamond rings for brides-to-be. However, the tradition of engagement rings didn’t fully disappear from the public consciousness as shown in figure 3.

Gender, Ritual, and the Diamond Ring

 The popularity of the diamond engagement ring shares similarities with the popularity of the white wedding dress. Both rose to fame with the help of the upper-class trend setters; Queen Victoria of England notably had a superbly famous white wedding dress and serpent engagement ring. As Veblen noted in his writings on conspicuous consumption, the practice of displaying status fell into the female partner in a family. As men’s fashion began more streamlined and simple suits were the height of modernity, womenswear continued to be a place of adornment. The traditional of engagement rings being a gift from the man to the women embodied the gendered structure of marriage in American society. The ring was a sign of the man’s status and money, and a symbol of love.[xiii] The engagement ring follows the trend of women wearing the symbols of status as the ring would show off the degree of wealth the future husband had. The failure of the male engagement ring in the 1920s and 1980s revealed how closely the popularity of the engagement ring was tied to the association of the female body with this multi-faceted symbol. The inability to separate femininity from the engagement ring illustrates how conspicuous consumption during the early 20th century remained a burden of the wife to display. In the 1920s, when there wasn’t much growth in the female engagement ring sector, advertisers attempted to invent another tradition of the “male engagement ring”.[ii] This effort tried to work with the models that had been successful in popularizing the female engagement ring, but the success of the female ring worked to the detriment of the male ring. The engagement ring was already seen by the public as a feminized item, and an attempt to reintroduce masculine jewelry into marriage would have to conform with gender ideology of the time. The 1920s male engagement ring evidently failed to do so, and another effort was not made until the 1950s when double wedding bands became popular.[iii]

  Further compounding this ideology was the encouragement of diamond ring purchase by the De Beers advertising efforts starting in 1938, as well as the abolishment of breach of promise laws in the 1930s. Even before the famous 1948 “A Diamond is Forever campaign”, De Beers and advertising company N.W. Ayer started imbedding diamond engagement rings in popular culture by having Hollywood actresses and movies feature proposal scenes and diamond engagement rings to get the American public back on board with the ring.[iv] A steady rise in the number of imported diamonds from 1935 to 1946 speaks to the once again rising popularity of the diamond ring, but important to note is that marriage rates were also on the rise from the late 1930s onward.[v] Improving material condition of American households started to reverse the steep drop in marriages that had occurred during the Great Depression, likely starting to increase the demand for engagement rings. As the idea of companionate marriage and heterosexual coupling were the dominant ideas of relationships in American society, the engagement ring was infused with these values by consumers and businesses.[vi] This idealized form of marriage laid the groundwork for the abolishment of breach of promise statues, which held that men were financially liable in the case of a broken engagement. By following cultural trends treating marriage as an endeavor of love, the law started introducing no-fault principles into broken engagement, using assuring whoever gave the engagement ring (the man) would be able to recover it in the case the marriage did not take place. 

The ring’s status as a combination symbol of love, wealth, and gender norms was enhanced by war and post-war associations of the American family as a patriotic, heterosexual, and fulfilling unit.[vii] The failure of campaigns for the male engagement rings in the 1980s further demonstrate how sentimentalized goods could only be leveraged if the gender ideologies in marriage allowed fashion items to be used in such ways. 

[i] “From the Museum.” National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed May 4, 2023. https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2011/10/11/from-the-museum-23/.

[ii] Edward Jay Epstein, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 144.

[iii] Margaret Brinig, “Rings and Promises,” The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6, no. 1 (1990), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jleo.a036986, 205.

[iv] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (Düsseldorf: Verl. Wirtschaft und Finanzen, 1899), 74.

[v] Vicki Howard, “A ‘Real Man's Ring’: Gender and the Invention of Tradition,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (January 2003): pp. 837-856, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2003.0098, 837.

[vi] Epstein, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds, 130.

[vii] Brooke Blower, "Marriage," History 303: Sex, Love, Family  (class lecture, Boston University, Boston, MA, March 30, 2023).

[viii] Anne G. Ward, Rings Through the Ages (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1981), 145.

[ix] Barbara Penner, “‘A Vision of Love and Luxury,’” Winterthur Portfolio 39, no. 1 (2004): pp. 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1086/431007, 2.

[x] Ibid, 4.

[xi] Ibid, 8.

[xii] Epstein, 132.

[xiii] Howard, A ‘Real Man's Ring’, 3.

[xiv] Ibid, 4.

[xv] Ibid, 7.

[xvi] J. Courtney Sullivan, “How Diamonds Became Forever,” The New York Times, May 3, 2013.

[xvii] Brinig, “Rings and Promises,” 207.

[xviii] Rebecca Tushnet, “Rules of Engagement,” The Yale Law Journal 107, no. 8 (1998): p. 2583, https://doi.org/10.2307/797351. 

[xiv] Ibid, 2585. 

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