Diamonds are Forever - Commitment
I'm posting a 14-part series of mini-essays on diamonds (but really about the economic point of view). Here's part 9.
Commitment
At least in the United States, engagement rings are a relatively recent invention.
Before 1935, it was not customary for a man to offer a woman an engagement ring as a promise of his intention to wed.
That all changed when Indiana became the first state to strike down the so-called “breach of promise” action.
We might dispute the justice of such a law, but let’s focus on the economics instead. In short, the law had granted women the right to sue men for monetary damages when the latter broke off an engagement.
For women, at the time, a broken engagement could spell disaster. Their opportunities in labor markets were highly constrained and men were hesitant to marry women who’d been promised to someone else. Marriage was therefore critical to a woman’s earthly comfort. The breach of promise law gave women confidence that a man’s offer to marry was likely a serious one—he faced a lawsuit if he developed cold feet.
With this legal rug yanked from beneath her feet, a woman sought other means to establish the credibility of a man’s promise to marry. People don’t come with their character type tattooed on their forehead. And Hobbes once observed that “nothing is more easily broken than a man’s word.” How could a woman sort the boyish chaff from the masculine wheat?
Margaret Brinig offers a compelling answer. Diamond engagement rings filled the commitment vacuum left by the disappearing breach of promise laws. Men began offering diamond rings to women as a sort of performance bond. If a man broke his promise to wed, he would also forfeit the costly investment he’d made in a ring. In the event of a non-committal suitor, women could sell their ring into secondary jewelry markets, earning, as it were, monetary damages.
More importantly, women knew that saying yes to a man who didn’t offer a ring was risky business.